About 2 months ago my AppleTV 4K started refusing to update to the latest tvOS. I receive notice that there is a new version, but after a couple of minutes, there is an error message saying, in effect, “no soup for you”.
The first few times this occurred, I ignored it, figuring it to be some issue at Apple’s end and the device works as it should otherwise. But weeks (months?) later, I still get this error. I’ve tried restarting a few times, I tried enrolling in the Apple Beta Software program, is there anything else I can try?
It may be a pain, but you can try factory resetting and set up as new. I just replaced an old Apple TV HD with a 4K yesterday and I had it all set up in less than 30 minutes, including setting up HomeKit, logging in to all of my apps, checking to make sure settings were right, etc. I do use the feature that keeps all of my Apple TVs in sync, which includes which apps are installed, where they are placed on the home screen, etc.
Interesting thought, though I use the Offload function. I checked anyway to see if I should Offload or delete any other apps, and found one app was stuck updating because it was no longer available in the App store. I deleted it, and found 4 others similarly stuck mid-update. I deleted them all, and tried to update the OS again. It seems to be working, at least I haven’t gotten that error message yet after 15 minutes (the old error would always show up after about 90 seconds). Fingers crossed…
Yeah, I’ve been avoiding the nuclear option; presumedly, I’d have to log in with all the app channels again, yadda yadda, and that sounds like a pain. I do have a couple of older AppleTVs somewhere, but they haven’t been connected for a few years now.
If I have to do a factory reset, I reluctantly will, but am hopeful it was just a “stuck” update as I described above.
I seem to recall similar reports a while ago where the problem was on the network side of things, but I can’t track them down at the moment. Perhaps try rebooting your modem and/or router. You might also check to see if you have any Macs running with “Content Caching” enabled and temporarily turning it off. I’m sorry I don’t have more concrete advice.
If you only have one Apple TV, yes. But if you have two or more on your LAN (and logged in to the same Apple ID), then they sync with each other. So you should be able to wipe one and let it set itself up based on the content of the other - including your login credentials for the apps.
I know that my two ATV 4K’s sync this way. When I provide login credentials on one, the other gets it soon afterward without my having to do anything special. My old Gen3 ATV doesn’t sync with it, but that’s not surprising, since it doesn’t do very much at all these days. (It’s mostly only good for being an AirPlay target for streaming content from my phone.)
That never happens for me. I have the one home screen feature turned on so that apps are installed and get arranged the same way between Apple TVs on the same iCloud account, but, as I said, I just set up another one the other day and I had to log in to all of my apps (and ESPN, Hulu, and Disney+ share a login but all still needed to be logged in separately.) And for some reason ESPN keeps getting logged out over time on all of my Apple TVs at times and I need to reauthenticate often enough, even when it’s fine on another Apple TV.
That’s frustrating. I only did this once, but when I bought my second ATV, during the setup process (I think after I used my phone to log it in to my Apple ID), it asked if I wanted to sync its home screen from my other Apple TV. And I remember being surprised when it didn’t start asking me for passwords.
Maybe that’s because I have iCloud Keychain enabled.
Update: after removing a few “stuck” updating apps, and downloading a new App channel just to see if that worked (it did), I tried updating the OS again. After a few hours, nothing happened. I then switched off the “Beta” toggle, and was able to download the current 17.x standard update successfully.
However, when I tried today to update to the AppleSeed Beta for tvOS 18, the same pattern happened- i.e. nothing useful.
Oh well, at least I updated to the current public release.
