The iTunes Movies and TV Shows Apps Finally Vanish in tvOS 26.4
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Last week, Apple began sending out emails to iTunes users notifying them that the legacy Apple TV “Wish Lists” are going away, and it seems Apple won’t be wasting any time removing them from its set-top box.
For years, the Apple TV has featured a duo of apps for viewing, purchasing, and renting video content from the iTunes Store. The iTunes Movies and iTunes TV Shows apps not only predate Apple’s modern TV app, but have actually been around since the days when Apple’s set-top box ran a proprietary and relatively closed operating system. They survived the transition into tvOS with the fourth-generation Apple TV in 2015 — the box now known as the ”Apple TV HD” — and have remained immovable ever since.
For years, these two apps offered a way to not only buy and rent content, but also save items you might want to pick up later into lists: a “Wish List” for Movies, and a “Favorites” list for TV Shows. These lists were useful, but they were also somewhat odd as they could only be accessed from the Apple TV apps; the iTunes apps on the Mac, PC, iPhone, and iPad had their own “Wish List” that didn’t sync to the Apple TV.
A little over two years ago, Apple essentially killed off those two apps in tvOS 17.2, but it didn’t actually remove them. Instead, it left the icons behind solely as placeholders on the tvOS Home Screen to point users to the Store in the Apple TV app.
However, that initial removal also came with some collateral damage: users lost access to the items saved in their Wish List and Favorites. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Apple’s software engineers may have forgotten about these features, but thankfully the data was still intact on Apple’s servers, and tvOS 17.3 was able to put it all back for those users who still wanted to get at their data.
Nevertheless, it’s far to say the iTunes Movies and iTunes TV Shows apps have been living on borrowed time. Many expected they’d disappear by the time tvOS 18 came along in the fall of 2024, but they remained as a nostalgic reminder of the early days of the Apple TV, with no option but to squirrel them away in a folder if you didn’t want to see them.
They were also still there when tvOS 26 came along last fall. Apple added a new option in the settings to hide them, but still offered no way to actually remove them.
It was a fair compromise, as users who had no use for these apps could make them go away while still ensuring that those with data in their wish lists wouldn’t have the rug pulled out from under them (again). Still, we had to wonder how long Apple would let that situation last, and when it began emailing out PDFs of people’s wish lists last week, we knew the end was nigh.
That time has come already in this week’s betas of tvOS 26.4, which is now conspicuously missing the two legacy apps, and it’s a safe bet they won’t be coming back.
If you had a lot of content in your wish list you may want to delay updating to the tvOS 26.4 beta and ensure that you take a note of everything in there before the final release comes out in a few weeks. Even if you’ve received a PDF from Apple, we’d recommend comparing it against your actual Wish List and Favorites to ensure everything’s there, as we’ve seen several reports online of missing items, particularly from those with rather large collections. Further, some folks, including myself, have yet to receive anything at all from Apple, so I’d recommend being proactive and make a list of content manually sooner rather than later.
