Roku has announced the biggest change to its home screen in more than ten years – a complete rethink of the screen you see every time you turn on the telly.
The familiar grid of app icons is being pushed aside in favour of personalised recommendations, smarter shortcuts, and a more content-led design.
It’s a big moment for a company that has built its whole reputation on keeping things simple.
But before UK readers get too excited (or too worried), there’s an important catch: this is launching in the United States first. Roku says other countries will follow “in the coming months,” so there’s no firm UK date yet.
Still, it’s a significant enough change that it’s worth looking at now, because when it does reach our side of the pond, it’ll be the most noticeable difference to the Roku experience in years.
A Quick Roku Reminder
Roku is the number one TV streaming platform in the US, Canada and Mexico, but it’s less of a household name here in the UK, so a quick recap is in order.
Roku makes streaming devices – small sticks that plug into your TV’s HDMI port and give you access to apps like Netflix, Disney+, BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Prime Video and hundreds more. They’re an alternative to Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks (which are far better known in the UK) and Google’s streaming devices.
In the UK, Roku currently sells three streaming sticks: the entry-level Streaming Stick (HD) at £29.99, the Streaming Stick Plus (4K) at £39.99, and the older Streaming Stick 4K with Dolby Vision at £49.99.
The company also has its operating system built into TVs from brands like Hisense, JVC, TCL and Sharp, and it’s just announced its first UK smart projectors too.
The Roku Streaming Stick Plus is, in fact, our pick for the best streaming device in the UK for 2026 – largely because it’s fast, cheap, and refreshingly simple to use.
And that word – simple – is the key to understanding why this week’s news matters so much.
The One Thing Roku Has Always Done Well
For years, the thing that set Roku apart was its home screen. You’d turn on the TV and see a clean grid of app tiles – Netflix here, iPlayer there – and that was it.
No banners, no rows of recommendations shouting for your attention, no content being pushed at you. Just your apps, ready to go.
It’s an approach I’ve praised many times. While Fire TV and Google TV filled their screens with suggestions, sponsored content and Prime Video promotions, Roku stayed clean and predictable.
It passed what I like to call the “grandparents test” – anyone could pick up the remote and find what they wanted.
But that simplicity came with a downside. Some felt Roku was being left behind, with rival platforms offering smart recommendations, most-used app shortcuts and slicker content discovery.
Roku’s screen, by comparison, was starting to look a little stale. It was great for ease of use – but was it doing enough to help you actually find something to watch?
Roku tried to address this back in 2023, when it added a “What To Watch” hub with personalised recommendations, a Continue Watching row and a Save List.
It was a sensible idea, but it lived on a separate screen you had to navigate to – and my honest guess is that very few people ever bothered.
If you have to go into a special section that doesn’t even support all the services you use, you might as well just open the apps you already watch and let them recommend something instead.
So What’s Actually Changing?
The new home screen is Roku’s attempt to fix that – by bringing the recommendations to you, right on the main screen, rather than hiding them away.
The grid of apps doesn’t vanish entirely, but it moves much further down the page. In its place, the top of the screen is now given over to content and shortcuts. Here’s what’s new:
Quick Access is a panel near the top that automatically surfaces the apps you use most. The idea is that your go-to apps are waiting for you the moment you switch on, without any scrolling.
It’s powered by what Roku calls AI (yes, I know you’re tired of hearing the term), and it adapts to your habits over time – though you can also pin or remove apps manually if you’d rather keep control.
Top Picks for You is an expanded, content-first row of recommendations right at the top of the screen. Roku says no two people will see the same mix – it’s based on what you watch, what’s trending, and what’s big at the moment.
You can use the star button on your remote to approve or reject individual suggestions.
For You is a dedicated destination built around your interests, with personalised picks, your Continue Watching list and your Save List all in one place.
And here’s the part UK readers will also recognise: “For You” is simply the rebranded version of the old “What To Watch” hub. So the screen that barely anyone visited has been given a new name and pulled to the front.
Destinations are curated hubs organised by genre and mood – comedy, movies, sports, and so on – sitting alongside other sections like Subscriptions, which gathers films and shows from across the services you actually pay for.
The Subscriptions page now lets you manually choose which services to include, rather than Roku trying (and sometimes failing) to detect them automatically.
Search also adapts depending on where you are – sports suggestions in the Sports area, free content in the Free section, and so on.
Your Daily Scoop is a real-time row inside the For You destination that highlights whatever’s culturally “of the moment” – a big premiere, a celebrity birthday, or a viral talking point. Each gets its own Topic Card that opens into a mini-collection of related shows and films.
A collapsed menu tidies the left-hand sidebar away until you need it, with a quick click bringing back access to Destinations, Inputs, Search and Settings.
Shortcuts, meanwhile, keep everyday features like Continue Watching, Sleep Timer and Save List within easy reach.
And for fans of Roku’s cult-favourite screensaver, there’s a new Roku City tile that drops you into an interactive version of the animated cityscape, complete with daily trivia and a retro game called Roku City Dash.
Underpinning much of this is what Roku describes as its “intelligence models” – the system picks from what it says are billions of possible home screen combinations to build the right one for each viewer every time the TV goes on.
Roku also points to its own research suggesting 82% of streamers would love it if the show they wanted was waiting on the home screen when they turned on the TV.
The update started rolling out across all Roku TVs and streaming devices in the US on May 27, arriving automatically. The UK and other countries will have to wait.
My First Thoughts
I should be upfront: I haven’t used this yet. I’ve seen the images and a demonstration video, but not the real thing on my own devices – so these are early impressions rather than a verdict, and there’s no UK version to test anyway.
That said, this is a big and interesting move – and one that carries real risk for Roku. The simplicity of that app grid wasn’t a bug, it was the whole point.
It’s a large part of why the Streaming Stick Plus won our best UK streaming device award this year, alongside its value for money. So messing with it is not a decision to take lightly.
What Roku seems to be attempting here is to walk a very thin line. The 2023 What To Watch hub asked you to go and find the recommendations.
The new home screen puts them in front of you instead – but tries to keep the changes subtle enough that you don’t feel buried under clutter the way you can on Fire TV or Google TV.
On paper, that’s exactly the right balance: your most-used apps waiting at the top, sensible recommendations, and your full app list still there if you want it.
It’s a great idea – if it works. And that’s the bit we can’t judge yet.
Because there are plenty of ways it could go wrong. What if Quick Access keeps shuffling your apps around, so the one you want is suddenly three clicks away or has jumped to a different spot?
What if the “personalised” recommendations are personalised to your partner or your kids – remember, Roku still doesn’t have separate user profiles – so everything becomes a muddle of true crime, toddler cartoons and football?
And what if those recommendation rows eventually become a home for sponsored placements – in other words, adverts – in the way Fire TV’s screen so often does?
That last worry is worth examining, because the business side of this is hard to ignore. Bloomberg reported that the redesign sets Roku up for more advertising opportunities, and Roku’s own CEO, Anthony Wood, told investors back in February that the new screen “will increase monetisation over time, whether that’s getting viewers to sign up for subscriptions or watch more ad-supported content.”
For now, though, Roku insists the recommendation tiles themselves aren’t for sale. Speaking to Fast Company, Roku’s VP of product, Preston Smalley, said none of the new home screen tiles are sponsored – companies can’t buy their way into them – although the existing display ads on the right-hand side and the bottom of the sidebar do remain.
Whether that holds true over time is something we’ll be watching closely.
Smalley also framed the whole project in reassuringly Roku-ish terms. “We wanted to craft a home screen that was more helpful, and I hope even occasionally delightful, while staying true to that simplicity that led people to choose Roku in the first place,” he said.
On the decision to move away from the grid, he added: “One of the things we found is that not very many people actually customised those app screens. They’d end up scrolling all the way to the bottom of this long list. So what we wanted to do was actually pull that all together in a way that made sense for you.”
There’s also a nod to the purists. Buried in the Settings menu is an option to switch off the recommendation rows and Quick Access panel and make the app tiles larger again – effectively restoring the old-style home screen.
That escape hatch is encouraging, and the fact Roku has thought about it at all suggests the company knows it’s tinkering with something its fans hold dear.
For now, though, it all comes down to the implementation – and we simply can’t know how well it works until we’ve lived with it. And here in the UK, we’ll be waiting a while longer than our American cousins to find out.
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Amazon has also just updated the look of it’s interface it is far more streamlined than before. I would say it is closer to Apple TV in layout than anything.