Sky Go has spent the last few years as the app everyone had but nobody talked about. It did the job, more or less, but while Sky poured its energy into Sky Glass, Sky Stream and the slick Sky OS that runs them, the companion app you actually take out of the house barely changed.
Aside from the odd addition, like the virtual Sky Q remote it gained way back in 2023, it has largely stood still.
This week that finally changes. Sky has launched a completely new version of Sky Go for Sky Glass and Sky Stream customers, rebuilt to look and feel like Sky OS.
For the first time it properly talks to your box at home: your Watchlist and Continue Watching sync between app and telly, you can set recordings from your phone while you’re out, download shows for a flight, stream in full HD, and even watch live UK channels through a TV guide that does what the Freeview mobile app never tried to do.
It’s not flawless. There are a few day-one bugs, the advert rules shift depending on the channel, and one notable gap stops the syncing being quite as clever as it first sounds.
But after years of being left alone, this is easily the most meaningful upgrade Sky Go has had in a very long time.
A New App – But Only For Some
First, an important bit of housekeeping. This new version is Sky Go (Glass/Stream). If you’re a Sky Glass or Sky Stream customer, you download it fresh from the App Store or Google Play.
If you’re still on Sky Q, you carry on with the existing Sky Go (Q/+) app, which keeps doing what it always did – live and on-demand TV, films and sport across your devices, plus remote recording.
Sky Q Multiscreen customers can also still download recordings straight from their box to watch away from home.
So this is very much a Glass and Stream story, and it fits the pattern we keep seeing from Sky. New features land on the newer platforms first, and Sky Q, on its way out, gets left to one side.
What’s New In Sky Go
The headline idea is that the new app borrows the look and feel of Sky OS, the system that powers Sky Glass and Sky Stream.
The upshot is that moving from your telly to your phone or tablet finally feels like the same product, rather than two distant cousins.
A simple new navigation bar puts Home, the TV Guide, My Library, Sport and Search within easy reach.
From the home screen you can dig into the Best of Sky, Movies, TV shows, Sport and Kids.
The most useful additions:
Continue Watching – start something in the living room and pick it up on your phone when you head out, then switch back to the big screen later.
My Library – your saved shows, films and sport, recently watched titles and downloads, all in one place.
Set “recording” remotely – remember something while you’re out, hit record on your phone, and it’s waiting on your Glass or Stream box when you get home. That works for live sport too (This part is a bit confusing – it seems Sky have mixed the cloud recording bit which is available for some titles, and the add to watchlist button which we know from the TV – though there there are now TWO options for most titles – Add to watchlist AND Record).
Full HD streaming – up to 1080p on compatible devices and connections.
New show and movie pages – programme information, cast and crew, Rotten Tomatoes scores, recommendations, and a handy new parents’ guide on kids’ films.
There’s a dedicated Sport section too, bringing together what’s live now, what’s coming up and anything you’ve saved, with the option to search by sport and follow your Premier League team.
It ties into a Sky Sports line-up of more than 1,500 football matches this season, every Formula 1 race weekend, international cricket Tests and every shot from the golf Majors.
Sky Go remains included at no extra cost with a Sky TV subscription, and Sky Mobile customers can stream without eating into their data (a fair usage policy applies). Sky says a laptop version is coming soon.
Carli Kerr, MD of Sky TV and NOW, said the new version is designed to bring “more of the experience they enjoy on the big screen to their devices, so it’s easier to pick up a show, follow the match or set something to record wherever they are.”
The Bit That Was Always Missing: Proper Syncing
For the first time, there’s a proper connection between your Sky Glass or Sky Stream account at home and the Sky Go app in your pocket. Your Watchlist and your Continue Watching list now sync between them.
Add a show to your Watchlist on the app and it turns up on your Glass or Stream at home. It even respects the Watchlist Profiles that Glass and Stream use, so everyone in the house keeps their own list.
And where a show or channel supports it, you can mark things to Record to Sky’s cloud recording straight from the app.
This all sounds obvious, and honestly it should have been there years ago. But its absence was exactly what made Sky Go feel like an afterthought, so having it work properly genuinely changes how the app fits into your day.
Downloads, Travel And The 48-Hour Catch
You can also download content to watch offline, which is ideal for a flight, or to keep watching while you’re travelling abroad.
There’s one catch worth flagging. If you’re outside the UK and you start playing a downloaded title, you’ve then got 48 hours to finish it.
That’s fine for a week in the sun, less so if you were hoping to hoard a boxset for a month away.
Live TV On Your Phone, Done Right (Mostly)
The Live TV Guide turned out to be a real surprise. Watching live telly on your phone through it is genuinely easy, and it’s close to everything the Freeview (or Freely) app, frustratingly, is not.
You get many, though not all, of the channels you would find on Glass and Stream at home. The ITV family is here, along with the Channel 4 and Channel 5 channels you get on the big screen. (ITV itself is, of course, in the process of being bought by Sky.)
The glaring gap is the BBC. Its channels aren’t here, with the BBC seemingly unwilling to play along, so you’d still need BBC iPlayer for anything from the corporation.
Adverts, And The Odd Early Bug
How adverts work here is worth spelling out, because it isn’t the same everywhere. On Sky’s own content, you can skip the ads, but only if you pay for the Ad Skipping add-on, exactly as on Glass and Stream.
On Channel 4, Channel 5 and UKTV on-demand, there are adverts and you can’t skip or fast forward them, even with the add-on.
And ITV on-demand carries no advertising at all at the moment, though of course that could change.
There are also a few gremlins to iron out. It’s slick and easy to use overall, but this is clearly a day-one release. One video stream went completely blank on me while the sound carried on playing, and the on-screen play controls got stuck at one point and flat-out refused to disappear.
None of this is a dealbreaker, and it’s the sort of thing that usually gets patched quickly. But it’s worth knowing before you lean on the app for something you really don’t want to miss.
The One Thing That Still Isn’t Joined Up
Here’s the catch that stops the syncing being quite as magic as it first appears.
Sky Glass and Sky Stream aren’t just Sky apps. They’re built to be aggregators, pulling in Netflix, HBO Max, Apple TV and more, letting you search across them and add their shows to your Watchlist and Continue Watching in one place.
None of that carries over to Sky Go. The Netflix show sitting in your Sky Stream Watchlist simply won’t appear in the app.
Only titles from the supported brands – Sky, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, U, TNT Sports and a handful of others – show up here.
So your Watchlist isn’t really fully synced. It’s Sky’s own universe that syncs, not the whole aggregated pile you see on the big screen.
That’s worth keeping in mind before you assume everything on your telly will follow you out the door.
There is something quietly interesting in that supported list, though. A single app serving up Sky’s own shows alongside content from ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, U and TNT Sports is a line-up no other app currently gives you in one place.
It’s a small echo of the “British telly under one roof” idea the BBC is chasing by trying to fold Channel 4 into iPlayer, except the BBC itself is the one big name sitting this one out, so iPlayer stays on your home screen.
Which brings me to what struck me most. I’m not really one for watching live TV on the go, but over the years more people have asked me about a proper Freeview or Freely-style mobile app than almost anything else, so there’s clearly an appetite for it.
Well, here it more or less is: a slick way to watch live UK channels and a big pile of on-demand content from your phone. The irony is that it hasn’t come from Everyone TV, the people behind Freely, but from Sky.
You do have to be a Sky subscriber, of course. But even with that catch, this is a big step forward, and close to the app a lot of people have quietly been wishing for.
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