Streaming Is Broken. One Developer Just Fixed It (And It’s Free)

You’ve spent 15 minutes scrolling through Netflix, switched to Disney+ to find that movie, then opened Prime Video to check if it’s there instead. Now you’re back on Netflix, can’t remember what you were watching, and somehow you’re three episodes deep into a show you don’t even like. Sound familiar? The streaming industry has optimized for everything except the user experience.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature—of the business model. Every platform wants you locked in its walled garden, scrolling its own catalog, ignoring its competitors. The result is a fragmentation nightmare that’s made “what to watch” the most stressful question of the evening. But one developer, Tim Wehrle, decided to do something about it. He built Wianu, a native macOS app that brings all your streaming services into one place. And he did it because he was tired—just like you.

“I got tired of opening Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, etc., separately just to continue watching something,” Tim wrote in his Show HN post. His solution is a personal project, not a startup. It’s a simple app that lets you save your services, maintain a unified Continue Watching list, and even import your Letterboxd watchlist. No business model. No venture capital. Just one person scratching an itch that millions of us share. This isn’t a startup. It’s one person scratching an itch that millions of us share.

Here’s the irony: the streaming wars are costing companies billions, yet the user experience has regressed to the pre-cable era. We used to flip through a single TV guide. Now we flip through a dozen apps, each with its own algorithm, its own ads, and its own thinly disguised desperation to keep you from leaving. Streaming platforms are designed to trap you, not to serve you. Wianu doesn’t try to trap you. It doesn’t sell your data. It doesn’t push a recommendation engine. It just shows you what you were watching, across all your services, in one place. That’s it. That’s the revolution.

Of course, the purists will say: “Why not just use a Fire TV Stick or a Roku?” Because those devices are still tied to their own ecosystems. They optimize for their own storefronts, not for your convenience. The real innovation here isn’t tech—it’s philosophy. Wianu proves that the best solution to platform fragmentation is a personal project with no agenda. Tim didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t wait for a corporation to solve the problem. He built the thing he needed, and then he shared it. That’s the original spirit of the internet—the one we’ve been slowly losing to walled gardens and subscription fatigue.

So what does this mean for the future of streaming? Either the big players will finally start cooperating (ha), or more developers will build their own aggregators. The trend is already clear: the golden age of streaming is becoming the fragmented age of micro-monopolies, and the only way out is to build bridges—not more walls. Wianu is a small bridge. But it’s a direction. And if you’re on a Mac and tired of the streaming chaos, you can download it for free, right now. Or you can keep scrolling. The choice is yours—but at least now you know there’s a better way.

I’ll be watching the comments. Tim is listening, too. Sometimes the most powerful innovation is just someone saying, “I’m tired of this, too.”