Max, formerly HBO Max

Max rolled out a couple of days ago. It was a fairly smooth change from HBO Max to just plain Max, but it wasn't completely seamless.

First, when I fired up the Roku to check it out, I saw the HBO Max app still on the device. "Okay," I said to myself, "the app needs to update."

Roku checks for updates every day (or more likely, every night), and I figured the last check was before the change was official. So, I checked for updates. There were none.

So, I launched the HBO Max app to see what would happen. What happened was the app called itself "Max" when the app launched, although the icon on the Roku menu still said "HBO Max."

I had to log in, as it had forgotten my password. Or, maybe it never had it. This may have been more than a cosmetic change, but a full change of the app itself. Whatever reason, I had to log in. So, I logged in. My profiles were still there once I logged in, but the avatars for the profiles were missing. It was easy enough to add a new one.

All my content was there. Everything was smooth sailing once I logged in. I rebooted the Roku and the login remained, allowing me to simply launch the app (still saying "HBO Max") and watch TV.

When I closed the app a second time, the Max icon was there. The cosmetic portion of the update finally happened.

Now, a month ago, I had subscribed to HBO Max as part of my rotation of apps. I'll subscribe to one app a month, then when that 30-day subscription is done, I'll subscribe to something else. My HBO Max 30-day subscription ends today, so I only had a couple of days to check out the app unless I wanted to extend the subscription. I don't want to do that, so I caught up on Rick & Morty and a couple of other things, and simply used the Max app.

It works as I expected, after the initial hiccup of losing my login and avatars, Max is what I thought it would be. My Streaming Life loses Max today, and it'll be a few months before I subscribe again. For now, though, it's working well.