Features, settings & updates

[NewsView]

Longtime ROKU user here, writing from the US. I first reported in May that my Home Screen contents were being mostly erased across all devices in my home (one ROKU tv, the other three are ROKU Ultras from 3-4800-series). 

Here on the community forums it was suggested someone might be using the remote app to mess with my Home Screen because new content like Disney and Spotify would be added but my custom content would largely disappear. I reset my ROKU password multiple times and also even changed my router security and home network passwords.

On 7/9 there was an update and now my four ROKU devices have lost about 70 percent of the tiles on the Home Screen. Since the original incident, I have not been able to retrieve any of my purchased screensavers and content. (Here on the website, if I visit that purchase history it results in an error. It cannot be retrieved apart from confirming the purchase dates. I have no way to get it back!)

I am asking a moderator to step in and escalate this issue because the key combinations and resets DO NOT account for why every ROKU in my house ends up losing the same content and having other content added. 

Please note that there are other support posts about Home Screen tiles disappearing (grayed out or turned into empty boxes). This is NOT what I am reporting. The content is not hidden. It's gone. When this happens, even my zip code drops out from the ROKU settings. When I download my channels, I have to login all over again to everything that was deleted. By the time I rearrange the tiles on my Home Screen on all four TVs, it easily takes an hour. I then get about 1-3 weeks only for the problem to happen again. (It's happened about four times since May.)

I could understand one ROKU acting up and requiring a factory reset but all of them? 

Apart from the automatic update that was downloaded on 7/9 when this latest event occurred, I had recently changed wallpapers. (Could just be a coincidence though.)

In closing, this is getting OLD. I am tired of the "solution" consisting only of how to press the key combination on the remote to trigger a restart (which does absolutely NOTHING).

Help!

[atc98092]

I'm not in any way saying you're not having an issue. But if there were some sort of issue within the Roku OS causing this it would be appearing extremely often. I have close to a dozen different Roku devices on my account, and have seen no such behavior.

The issue with the remote app is that it doesn't require knowing your user password to change your device. It simply has to be connected to the same network, regardless of your knowledge of them being connected. You can disable remote access to your Roku in the Settings menu (Settings/System/Advanced system settings/Control by mobile apps), which should block someone from messing with your Roku using the remote app. 

[makaiguy]

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@atc98092 wrote:

You can disable remote access to your Roku in the Settings menu (Settings/System/Advanced system settings/Control by mobile apps), which should block someone from messing with your Roku using the remote app. 

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I've tested this and have found disabling Control by mobile apps prevented a  Non-Roku 3rd party alternate control app I use once in a while from connecting, but the official Roku remote app still got through.

It's been a while since I tested this though.

[NewsView]

@moderator 

UPDATE: I have been plagued by this "glitch" since May. (Issue report tracker sent over PM.)

I got tired of having to re-do my Home Screen every other week so now my access to paid content, whether it was screensavers, wallpapers or channel subscriptions, with few exceptions, is gone. (A secondary problem concerns the website itself. My purchase history is listed but unavailable for download due to a longstanding page load problem which generates the following https://my.roku.com/500

I began using ROKU with the ROKU 3 — more than a decade ago. I never encountered anything like this until late May. At the suggestion of someone in a Community Forum discussion who suggested I may have been hacked, I have changed passwords on the ROKU website (multiple times), redone my network security, etc.

Four months after reporting this issue, I am having a third issue that has impacted my ability to respond to support messages. It is nearly impossible to READ private messages in Firefox for Mac (latest version) because the page footer for the ROKU site floats up over the Inbox so that I only have three lines of text and endless scrollbars. As a result, I would like to know if there is an alternate means for support to communicate with me?

[NewsView]

Apologies for the belated reply. I got tired of resetting my Home Screen, individually across four ROKU devices, and just dealt with having chunks of my content (including paid-for apps!) missing over the summer. Recently I decided to revisit this topic to see if there was a solution.

Thanks, Dan, for the "mobile device control" tip. Apparently even though all of my ROKUs are hard-wired the default on the "Control by mobile apps" menu is "permissive". What was ROKU thinking? (I disabled it.)

@makaiguy mentioned that in past experience 3rd party mobile app control was blocked when network access is disabled — but not the ROKU app control. No one in my household uses the ROKU app control or any third party app to control our ROKU devices (physical remote only). Potentially could a neighbor's use of an app have this impact? (And if it's not too much trouble, would you mind testing out whether the ROKU mobile control app still gets through when this is set to "disabled"?)

Although I am happy to have disabled the mobile app access in the Advanced Settings menu, I am not convinced that everything I have described is accounted for by this scenario. The ROKU forgets my zip code. It also "forgot" my paid-for screensavers and wallpapers. I can view purchase history after logging into my account on the website but I can't download it to my ROKUs without a persistent page error. The following error has occurred in every browser I have ever used to try to access my ROKU purchases through my account, therefore I am prevented from restoring over a decade of purchases:

The website experienced an unexpected problem. There was an unexpected error in the website. The current page will not load. Close and re-open your browser, navigate back to the website, and try repeating your last actions. If the problem persists, please contact our support team.

Of course there is no straightforward way to report this to the support team that I know of. (The page error doesn't come with an error code or a link to support. 😫)

Overall my impression is that something has been corrupted on the back end (ROKU side) — but as I said in a separate reply to the Community Forums moderator the website doesn't render properly (on a Mac) so private messaging isn't cutting it as a sole means of accessing support.

Request to the mod: If anybody from ROKU can escalate this ticket on my behalf I'd appreciate it as I am truly stuck and can't come up with anything else I can do on my end to troubleshoot.

[makaiguy]

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@NewsView wrote:

@makaiguy mentioned that in past experience 3rd party mobile app control was blocked when network access is disabled — but not the ROKU app control. No one in my household uses the ROKU app control or any third party app to control our ROKU devices (physical remote only). Potentially could a neighbor's use of an app have this impact? (And if it's not too much trouble, would you mind testing out whether the ROKU mobile control app still gets through when this is set to "disabled"?)

Retested on my oldest Roku (Streaming Stick 3600) and newest (Ultra 4800) with Settings > System > Advanced system settings > Control by mobile apps set to Disabled on both of them.

• The official Roku remote app still found, connected, and controlled the Rokus.
• The RoSpikes Roku Remote app on my phone locates the Rokus on the network and allows them to be selected, but Roku does not respond to any commands from the app.

Edited to add:

When Control by mobile apps is enabled, on both systems the RoSpikes Roku Remote accesses and controls both Rokus normally.