Apple / entertainment / HULU: STREAM TV SHOWS & MOVIES
REVIEW
Hulu's iPhone app is a holding pattern waiting for the Disney+ merger.
The catalogue is still the best mix of next-day network TV and prestige originals on any streamer, but the app itself has barely moved while Disney prepares to fold it into a single unified player.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Hulu: Stream TV shows & movies
HULU, LLC
OUR SCORE
7.4
APPLE
★ 4.6
PRICE
Free
Hulu has spent the last two years quietly preparing to disappear. Disney bought out Comcast’s remaining stake in 2023, took full control, and announced that Hulu’s library would eventually live inside the Disney+ app under a single unified player. That work is still rolling out in the US, and the iPhone app you open today feels like a tenant who knows the lease is up — clean enough, lights on, no one painting the walls.
What keeps it open is the catalogue. The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, Shōgun, The Handmaid’s Tale, plus next-day catch-up from ABC, NBC, Fox, and the entire FX library is a roster no other general-purpose streamer can match. The trouble is everything around the catalogue — search, recommendations, profile management, the Live TV pricing tangle — has been frozen in place while engineering effort goes into the merger.
Hulu has spent the last two years quietly preparing to disappear into Disney+, and the iPhone app feels like a tenant who knows the lease is up.
FEATURES
The app does what every Disney-owned streamer now does — a home shelf, a search tab, a downloads tab, a profile switcher up top. AirPlay and Chromecast work. Downloads for offline viewing are gated to the ad-free tier. Picture-in-picture survives a swipe-up, which is more than half of Hulu's competitors can claim. Continue Watching syncs across iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and the web, usually within a minute.
The Hulu + Live TV tier turns the same app into a cable-replacement player with a programme guide, cloud DVR, and live channel surfing. The guide is dense but legible on an iPhone, which is something almost nobody else manages — YouTube TV's guide is built for a TV screen first. Brand-bundling with Disney+ and ESPN+ surfaces inside the app via cross-promotion, but each service still lives behind its own login until the merge completes.
Originals get their own row near the top of home: The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, The Handmaid's Tale, Shōgun, and the slow drip of FX-on-Hulu day-and-date premieres. Next-day broadcast catch-up from ABC, NBC, and Fox is still the part of the catalogue that nothing else has.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The library is the reason this app exists, and on that front it is still the most editorially interesting general-purpose streamer in the US. The Bear and Shōgun are the kind of shows that win the year. Next-day network TV is a genuine moat — if you actually watch network broadcast, no other service comes close.
Playback is reliable. The video player handles 1080p over LTE without the bitrate-yo-yo Netflix is famous for, and the iPad layout uses the extra width sensibly rather than just stretching the iPhone view.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The app has barely changed in three years and it shows. Search is still a single shelf of poster art instead of a real filter — try finding only the films, only the FX shows, only the things expiring this month, and you'll end up scrolling. The recommendation rows reset themselves whenever the home tab rebuilds, which it does often. There is no per-profile parental gate worth the name once a kid knows the PIN flow.
The Disney+ merger announced for the US rollout is the elephant in the menu. Subscribers have been told for over a year that the two apps will eventually become one, and in the meantime the Hulu app is in maintenance mode while Disney+ gets every new player feature first. Live TV's regional sports situation remains the most confusing part of any streaming subscription in America.
CONCLUSION
Subscribe for The Bear, Shōgun, and the next-day network catch-up — that's still a real reason to keep this app on the home screen. If you're a Live TV customer, the value depends entirely on whether your local sports RSN is included this month, which is not a sentence anyone should have to type about a TV subscription. Watch for the Disney+ unified app to land in the US over the next year; when it does, this review stops applying.