Google TV’s redesigned Freeplay app has returned

Ben Schoon | Apr 25 2025 - 7:30 am PT

After a false start last year, Google TV has rolled out its redesigned and vastly superior Freeplay app to all devices.

In September 2024, Google TV rolled out a new Freeplay app to all devices with some major upgrades. A guide within the app itself brought the ability to move between channels more quickly by category, as well as adding “Favorite” channels. That made it far easier to use than the original app that just allowed for moving between channels one by one.

But just as quickly as it arrived, the new app disappeared.

We spotted that the Freeplay app had been rolled back on everything except the Google TV Streamer in late October, and Google then confirmed that the new app had been disabled on all other Google TV devices due to a crashing issue of some sort.

Advertisement - scroll for more content

In the past few weeks, the redesigned app has quietly returned to non-Streamer devices. We’ve confirmed that the new app is now available on other devices, including the Chromecast with Google TV (4K) and two separate Hisense TVs that we tested. We’re not sure exactly when the new design returned, but it went largely unnoticed.