• The Roku app has been updated on Android and iOS
• The interface has been overhauled, and there’s a new design for the remote control
• 12 new channels have been added for free, including BBC Drama and BBC Adventures

Roku owners are getting some nifty upgrades for absolutely nothing: a refreshed mobile app with much-improved remote control functionality and a dozen new channels.

Let’s start with the new Android and iOS apps for Roku TVs and players, which, as Cord Cutters reports, include a major upgrade in terms of the remote. Instead of the buttons that you previously had to tap, there’s now a virtual touchpad that you can swipe in any direction to navigate the menus.

So, rather than tap-tap-tapping to shift the selection cursor to the right, you can just swipe the cursor across, a much more natural way of navigation, which isn’t so stressful on the fingers. A further embellishment is haptic feedback that delivers subtle vibrations while swiping, adding to the natural feel of touchscreens that support this.

If you don’t like the sound of the new way of working, then you can simply switch off the swipe control scheme and revert to tapping the directional arrows.

Alongside that, the interface of the Roku mobile app has been given a makeover, including a more streamlined home screen and quick shortcuts to access recently viewed channels. A networking tweak should also mean faster pairing over Wi-Fi networks.

The refreshed app is currently rolling out for Android and iOS, so you should have it soon.

A dozen new free channels

As for the 12 new channels added to the Roku experience, these freebies were also picked up by Cord Cutters.

They are as follows:

• Channel 343: Heartland Classic
• Channel 369: BBC Drama
• Channel 498: PBS Travel
• Channel 499: PBS Nature
• Channel 547: Acorn TV Mysteries
• Channel 555: Grownday Network
• Channel 730: BBC Adventures
• Channel 731: Braxton Family Adventures
• Channel 732: Bridezillas
• Channel 931: Teleports Ahora
• Channel 952: Homeful en Español
• Channel 989: Cucando Los Ángeles

As you can see, those channels include a couple from the BBC, and as the name suggests, BBC Drama will show a bunch of critically acclaimed drama series.

There’s also BBC Adventures, which features exploration and survival stories, and it’s worth noting that Acorn TV Mysteries carries British (as well as international) crime shows.

Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).