There are literally dozens of defects with the Dish Anywhere PC application, the most major of which I have documented textually below. The following is a link to the original document sent to Dish support complete with screenshots
As a former software developer, I understand the challenges of creating a user friendly application. Though some issues cannot be completely resolved due to the technical obstacles involved, most, if not all, can be mitigated. Below is a list of the overt major defects in the Dish Anywhere Windows application. Note: these problems are evident on 4 different PC’s located in two different households.
- After logging in, sometimes the guide and DVR recordings never load. When they do load, it always take a long time - a minute or more. The Android Dish Anywhere application on my tablet or phone does not have this problem.
- Sometimes when selecting a recording to view, the Dish Anywhere Player (DAP) fails to launch. I can usually work around this by killing the Dish Anywhere Windows processes through Task Manager and selecting the recording again.
- Sometimes when selecting a recording to view, the player launches, but instead of playing the DVR recording, it plays live TV. Again, the workaround is to kill the DAP process and trying to play the recording again.
- When in the middle of viewing a stream, occasionally the stream will stop and display a message to the effect of “insufficient bandwidth to play the stream”. I can see that all my other devices are connected to the same network and none of them are streaming content. Immediately after this message I can go to one or more internet speed test web sites and verify that there is no issue with internet bandwidth. The inaccuracy of the DAP error message is further verifiable by immediately connecting to the same stream on the Android tablet and seeing that it streams properly.
- When in the middle of viewing a stream, occasionally the stream will stop and display a message to the effect of “Cannot connect to your DVR” or “your DVR is offline”. The fallacy of these messages is demonstrated by immediately playing the same stream on the Android tablet. Also, the recommendation to reset your DVR is not helpful when viewing in any location other than the house in which the DVR is located. Note the green indicator next to receiver named “Living Room 1”
- When browsing the recordings on he DVR, the icons on some programs indicate there are multiple recordings. Clicking on the icon, it should take you to the screen which shows a list of the recordings, and it sometimes does show the list, but often is displays a message to the effect of “there are no recordings to view”. The tablet or phone has never exhibited this problem.
- When in the screen showing the list of multiple recordings, there are “buttons” (actually clickable regions) that allow you to Watch or Delete the recording. Clicking on Delete does not give any visual indication that you are attempting to delete that recording. The recording remains in the list and when exiting from this screen and returning back to the list, the recording you are trying to delete is still in the list. The Android app gives you an “Delete recording?” confirmation dialog when tapping on Delete. If you tap on OK, you get another dialog informing you the recording has been deleted, and the recording is removed from the list.
- The DAP has a “button” to put it in full screen mode, however the stream only goes to about 70% of full screen. The entire stream is surrounded by a sizable black border after the User Interface (UI) controls disappear. I can list numerous Windows and Web-based applications that will truly go to full screen and will re-display the UI controls superimposed over the viewing area when the cursor is moved. This is the expected behavior and actually is the behavior of the Android app. It is frustrating to view HD content in the approximate size of an SD broadcast.
- When attempting to watch an On Demand show, the UI prompts us to download the Required plugin Dish Anywhere Video Player: Clicking Windows Download sometimes does nothing at all, but sometimes opens the DAP with the following prompt, and never are we able to watch the On Demand show. Note that the list of available On Demand episodes shown above is not in order, a minor issue, but still misleading.
- Often when streaming, audio emits a “pop” and the screen goes black for a few seconds or longer, and usually resumes the stream, having skipped the portion when it went black. Sometimes the screen never returns from the black state. We have to close the player and resume the stream. The Android app never exhibits this behavior. It does display an indicator that is in a buffering state, but no program content is lost.
- The lack of support for MIcrosoft's flagship standards-based browser - Edge - is also puzzling. Microsoft has poured a lot of resources to make their browser fast and secure. It is the only browser that is supplied with Windows 10, so why is it not supported?
A noted published expert on software design and development - Joel Spolsky - wrote the following in one of his articles:
UI is important because it affects the feelings, the emotions, and the mood of your users. If the UI is wrong and the user feels like they can't control your software, they literally won't be happy and they'll blame it on your software. If the UI is smart and things work the way the user expected them to work, they will be cheerful as they manage to accomplish small goals. ….
To make people happy, you have to let them feel like they are in control of their environment. To do this, you need to correctly interpret their actions. The interface needs to behave in the way they are expecting it to behave.
Thus, the cardinal axiom of all user interface design:
A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.
We literally have spent hours dealing with these issues - discovering and executing workarounds, killing processes, restarting browsers, logging out and back in, clearing caches etc. only to sometimes succeed at viewing the programs we wish to view. Authoring and documenting these issues also took hours.
Watching television should not be this much work. The whole reason we switched from Comcast to Dish was the ability to watch and manage our DVR remotely, which we were assured repeatedly by the sales department that this was true. We were clear that we travelled frequently, and that this feature is important to us. To be perfectly frank, the Dish Anywhere application is without a doubt the worst Windows app I’ve ever used, and I began using Windows beginning with version 2. I know there are complexities involved with the development of a Web-to-desktop application, but other companies have figured it out. We also subscribe to Sling TV, and while their implementation is only currently is supported on Google Chrome, the viewing experience is infinitely superior to Dish Anywhere. Apologies for the sarcasm, but more appropriate names for the Windows Dish Anywhere app could be “Dish Anywhere but not Anytime“, or a shorter version, “Dish Anywhere Sometimes”. I know these problems could be remedied if there were sufficient incentive to do so. Here’s a suggestion - perhaps you could require every member of the application development team to use this application exclusively for all their television viewing needs for one month. I expect they would create a new, usable version available very quickly.
We are regretting our decision to commit to 2-year term. I can state with great certainty that if/when Comcast restores the ability to remotely manage and view the DVR in their Xfinity Stream app, I will immediately switch back to them.
