8bitsten No support for Unity, Godot, or other engines besides Brightscript and Scenegraph, iirc.
Very underpowered hardware compared to other platforms like mobile, quest, etc.
Low discoverability because I don't see them promote games in the store, ever.
No controller standard.
Games, nope. Worth making anything else? I wouldn't say so, either.
No HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, or WebView. You can't embed web pages or use modern web UI.
Apps are written in BrightScript with SceneGraph, which is rigid and lacks dynamic layout flexibility. Every UI element must be statically defined.
Apps cannot fetch data in the background or run multiple threads. All data loading is sequential and only happens while the app is active.
Roku devices have low RAM and CPU power. Rendering multiple feeds with live updates or images will cause lag, crashes, or freezing.
Roku OS does not support persistent widgets or services. You can’t run anything outside the active app context.
Roku’s monetization favors video apps.
There is no built-in support for RSS, JSON, or calendar feeds. Developers must manually build parsers and UI for every type of feed they want to display.
Layouts are built with Roku’s proprietary XML-based system and are very limited
No real-time rendering of dynamic web content or widgets
Looks like Roku is made from the ground up not to be useful besides video. This is very obviously mostly because they don't want openness to impact revenue streams, but my opinion is that in the long term, it's shortsighted and impacts valuable features and functionality that could elevate Roku above their competition and generate more than enough revenue to cover the investment in development.
And pardon the lack of formatting, it seems after this huge refresh, this site still can't handle copy-pasted text and gives me an HTML error that's not worth my time troubleshooting. It shouldn't happen, period.
