Samsung TV / videos / ALSHABAKA
REVIEW
Alshabaka is a quiet bet on the Arabic-TV long tail.
A small Tizen app aimed at Arabic-speaking households that the big streaming brands keep treating as an afterthought. The pitch is regional fit, not feature breadth.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 9, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Alshabaka
IRAQI MEDIA NETWORK
OUR SCORE
6.2
SAMSUNG TV
★ —
PRICE
Free
The Tizen store has a long tail of small, regional TV apps that almost nobody outside their target audience ever sees, and Alshabaka — الشبكة, “the network” — sits squarely in that tail. It is not Shahid, it is not OSN+, it is not one of the big pan-Arab streamers with billboards in Riyadh and Dubai. It is the kind of app a household installs because the larger services do not carry the channels, dialect, or programming bracket they actually want on the living-room TV.
That makes it hard to judge against the usual yardsticks. The interesting question is not whether Alshabaka beats Netflix at production polish — it does not, and it is not trying to. The interesting question is whether it earns its slot on the Tizen home row for the viewer it is built for: someone who wants Arabic-language content on a Samsung TV without sideloading, without an IPTV box, and without paying for a tier of Shahid they will not use.
On that narrower test, niche regional apps live or die on three things: which channels and on-demand titles they actually carry, how stable the stream is on a mid-range Tizen set, and whether the remote-driven UX respects the fact that nobody is enjoying typing Arabic with a D-pad. Alshabaka’s job is to clear those bars cleanly enough that the household stops opening the Samsung app store to look for an alternative.
Alshabaka is the kind of app that exists because Shahid and Netflix's Arabic catalogues only get you so far on a living-room TV.
FEATURES
Alshabaka is a Tizen-native TV app rather than a wrapped phone experience, which already puts it ahead of the regional apps that ship a touch UI and call it done. The core flow is the genre standard: a top-level row of live channels, a second row of on-demand or catch-up content, and a remote-friendly grid that you can navigate without taking your hand off the D-pad.
Beyond that, the catalogue and the channel list are the product. Apps in this slot typically lean on a mix of free-to-air Arabic news, religious programming, regional entertainment, and a smaller bench of on-demand series — exactly the brackets the global streamers under-serve. How deep Alshabaka goes on each bracket is the variable that decides whether it is a daily-driver app or a once-a-week one.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The honest win for an app like this is existing at all. Building a Tizen app, getting it through Samsung's certification, and keeping streams alive across the patchwork of Arabic content rights is non-trivial work, and the alternative for most households is a sketchy IPTV subscription with worse uptime and zero accountability. Alshabaka is the legitimate, on-store option in a category that is mostly grey-market, and that alone is worth something.
It also fits the platform. A Tizen-native build means the remote works, the app launches from the home row, and viewers do not have to learn a second navigation model — the bar that a surprising number of regional streaming apps still fail to clear.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The risk with any niche regional TV app is that the catalogue is the whole product, and catalogues drift. Channel deals lapse, on-demand libraries thin out, and an app that felt essential in one quarter feels skippable two quarters later. Alshabaka has not been around long enough to prove it can hold a stable lineup, and that is the single biggest thing a prospective viewer should kick the tyres on before committing.
Production polish is the other honest caveat. Apps in this bracket rarely match the typography, motion, and image quality of the global streamers, and viewers coming from Netflix or Shahid will notice. None of that is disqualifying for a regional app — but it is worth knowing going in.
CONCLUSION
Install Alshabaka if you are an Arabic-speaking household on a Samsung TV and the bigger streamers are not covering the channels you actually watch. Skip it if Shahid or OSN+ already does the job — there is no reason to add a second, smaller app to the home row out of curiosity. Worth a look on the Tizen store; worth a deeper look in six months once the catalogue has had time to settle.