Touchscreen support for Nintendo’s Wii U has been surprisingly removed from the Netflix app in a recent update. While yes, there probably aren’t many users using the popular streaming services on Nintendo’s console – it’s still a kinda weird feature to drop.
The feature change was first reported by a Resetera user who is one of the few who still use the Wii U to stream from Netflix.
‘Just confirmed with one of their customer support people that this was actually intentional and isn’t coming back. They cited some sort of “issue” it was causing, but I’m not particularly convinced they didn’t just decide they didn’t want to put effort into supporting it anymore (they did just make minor changes to the UI which I suspect correspond to when touch support was dropped). This is incredibly annoying, because it means I can’t just sort of reach over and poke the screen to stop it from skipping the credits or scrub through the timeline with the touch screen anymore.
I have to say I’m very disappointed with Netflix lately. First they won’t make a Switch app and now they’re killing off the (already diminished compared to launch) touch screen functionality in their Wii U app.’
I guess this is probably the first step into phasing out Wii U support in favour of a Switch launch? Who knows.