[mcelliott]

Hi,

This might be a silly question, but is there a fundamental reason why Kodi for Apple TV can't be approved by Apple? Plex is on there, and links to a back-end for scraped metadata.

I'm guessing it has something to do with the unofficial plugins, but wouldn't it be possible to provide a version that will only work with the official Kodi repository? I'm sure most users (certainly the ones the team is most interested in) would only use entirely legal plugins anyway.

It's such a shame that there is a need for the jailbreak. I personally have no intention of jailbreaking my new ATV4, as I suspect this would affect my ability to install other apps or update the software. I'd personally rather just have the one device for everything, including Kodi, but an AppleTV and a Raspberry Pi is not a bad combination.

Best wishes all.

Mark

[Koying]

Addons as a whole is a no-go for Apple if I get it right.

[popcornmix]

The App store doesn't allow downloadable (and so potentially unreviewed) code in apps.
Downloadable add-ons, written in python are a big part of Kodi and are not allowed.

Removing support for add-ons is the only option, and is what MrMC does to get it into the App store.
The Kodi team doesn't agree with crippling Kodi's functionality for an App store, so there won't ever be an official iOS Kodi.

Technically you don't need to jailbreak the ATV4. If you build and sign Kodi yourself you can run it on your own device.
It is a faff, but details are here.

[MrMC]

Little correction on the details.

Internal python addons would be possible, there is nothing that prevents running python for internal usage. Several apps do this already with python and other scripting languages. The MrMC fork could have gotten python in for internal usage but we decided to scrap and refactor user addons using javascript. Work in progress as we say.

External (user loaded) addons based on python would never pass App review, but external addons based on javascript are explicitly permitted as user downloaded code.

In fact, Javascript is the only language permitted. For an extreme example, with an TVML based app, the entire app gets loaded as javascript from an external (non-apple) server. With a TVML app, one could change the entire look/feel/capabilities at any time, without having an Apple review.

The reason Javascript is permitted is the Apple Javascript virtual machine is a strong sandbox.