Max rebrand killed the ‘HBO Max’ button on some Android TV remotes

Ben Schoon | May 24 2023 - 7:00 am PT

Yesterday saw the arrival of Warner-Bros Discovery’s rebrand of HBO Max to Max, which also saw a new app for some odd reason. But as a result of the rebrand, the HBO Max shortcut button on some Android TV remotes has hilariously broken.

It’s very common for the remotes with streaming devices to include shortcuts to a selection of services, which on Android TV and Google TV generally includes Netflix and YouTube. But, for some devices, HBO Max took up one of those slots. One notable example of that was Walmart’s 2021 Android TV streaming box and dongle, which have since been replaced by a new Google TV box that has a Paramount+ shortcut instead.

With the rebrand to Max, the old HBO Max app was thrown by the wayside, with an in-app pop-up showing up for Android TV and Google TV, as pictured below.

While swapping out the app isn’t a huge deal for most folks – at worst it might mean juggling limited storage – it resulted in that HBO Max shortcut on remotes to break. That’s because the button is mapped specifically to open the HBO Max app, so a replacement leaves that inoperable. The broken button was noted by some Android TV users on Reddit following the forced update.

In all reality, this is probably a very temporary issue, as the money paid for these button placements is strong motivation to issue a quick fix.