How to install Safari on Apple TV

One of the great absences of the new Apple TV is without a doubt Safari. The web browser of iOS and OS X is one of the applications that should be in the opinion of many on the desktop of the new Apple TV, but it seems that at the moment Apple does not consider it appropriate, In fact it is not that it has not included Safari, but It does not accept any type of application that includes a web browser, or applications that allow opening web links. But nothing can resist hackers and They have already gotten Safari to work on the new Apple TV and they explain us how to do it. We give you all the details below.

Eliminate incompatibility

The Apple TV is ready to use a web browser, but Apple has it disabled and so it can be seen in Xcode. The first thing we must do is eliminate this incompatibility, for which we have to modify a couple of lines of the file «availability.h» This file can be found within «Xcode.app», for which you must right click on that file and click on «Show package contents». We navigate to the following route:

"Contents / Developer / Platforms / AppleTVOS.platform / Developer / SDKs / AppleTVOS.sdk / usr / include"

Within that path we open the file «availability.h» with Xcode and look for the following lines:

#define __TVOS_UNAVAILABLE __OS_AVAILABILITY (tvos, unavailable)
#define __TVOS_PROHIBITED __OS_AVAILABILITY (tvos, unavailable)

And we replace them with the following lines:

#define __TVOS_UNAVAILABLE_NOTQUITE __OS_AVAILABILITY (tvos, unavailable)
#define __TVOS_PROHIBITED_NOTQUITE __OS_AVAILABILITY (tvos, unavailable)

We save the file and we can now build our application in Xcode.

Building the Safari app for Apple TV

We should use the GitHub project from this link. The process is the same as that of the application «provenance» that we explain in this article and in the following video:

Once we have installed the application on our Apple TV we can use it to visit our favorite web pages.

Navigating with the Siri Remote

The browser is somewhat rudimentary but it allows you to navigate our web pages without problems. Using the trackpad of the control we can scroll and move through the web page. These are the instructions for operating the Siri Remote with this web browser.

• Press the trackpad to toggle between scroll mode and cursor mode
• Slide your finger on the trackpad to scroll or move the cursor
• Press Menu to go back
• Press Play to enter the address to navigate to

Ideally, Apple would add Safari to your Apple TV and allow us to use Siri to go to our favorite pages or to dictate the page we want to go to instead of having to use the tvOS keyboard. But for now it is an alternative that can serve many of the owners of an Apple TV.