Apple TV app adds separate Watchlist in iOS 18.1 beta

Apple appears to be working on a significant change on how users can organize their watch queue in the Apple TV app. In iOS 18.1 the long-standing Up Next queue has been renamed to ‘Continue Watching’, and a new separate Watchlist section can be found on the Home tab.

The Watchlist only includes TV shows and movies that the user has explicitly added to watch later. This responsibility was previously handled by Up Next, which also mixed in items that the user was currently in the midst of watching.

In its current beta state, the new feature does not seem to be fully implemented. For one, while Up Next has been renamed to Continue Watching, its functionality is the same as previous versions. It contains the same items, including recently added items that are now also found in the Watchlist.

You can imagine that this may change in future betas. Similarly, the Watchlist is currently found only on the Home tab and requires scrolling several screenfuls worth of distance downwards. When the feature is finished, we would expect it be located in a more prominent position (and perhaps also linked from the Library tab).

Assuming these changes happen before it ships to the public, it would help simplify the way the TV app works, bringing it closer to the behavior of every other popular streaming service app, which cleanly delineate the list of content the user has added to watch in the future, and the list of content currently in progress of being watched by the user.

The old Apple TV app concept of Up Next — using a single list that combined watch queue and currently watching content items — was quite confusing for users coming to the TV app for the first time.