I appreciate your article, having worked on porting our iPhone app to Apple TV. Video recording, remote pairing to simulator, etc all sound useful. I'd like to respond in more detail, but will take some time to go thru your points with care & attention.

Overall it's nice to have the same tools and codebase for both platforms, just adapting the app for notably different use cases.

Our case was the other way around, Apple TV first, and we are currently working on the iOS app. We have a previous iOS app, but it only knows about alerts. A full dashboard monitoring app was on our roadmap, further down the line, but with the release of the Apple TV (and having the luck of being selected for a developer kit) we decided to tackle the tvOS version first.

This decision was made easier due to the fact that both platforms can run the same code, so most of the API interaction and view rendering code will be reused. It was mostly a greenfield project, because even though we leveraged the knowledge from our alerts iOS app, we took the opportunity of writing everything in Swift, which functional expressiveness makes it slightly more useful when it comes to dealing with APIs.

How do you feel about discoverability in the app store?

Discoverability is terrible. For this specific app, it doesn't matter as much, since the majority of our users will already know our service, so we can tell them how to look for the app (which is in itself bad UX). For potential new users, they need to learn about the app somehow, so we need to make an extra marketing effort.

For apps not tied to an existing web property (I'm planning to do some games on my own, for example), you need an effective marketing channel, even if it's just word of mouth. No one is going to just come up with some search terms and find your app.

Great post and tips, thanks for sharing them with us.