Yesterday, Disney+ was unveiled to the world and around our office, at least, it was absolutely the center of interest. For many, just logging into Disney+ and realizing the sheer volume of great content that sits before you is reason enough to be buzzing just a bit. With new shows like The Mandalorian and existing classics like Toy Story, you can’t look at the vast collection on offer from Disney and not be both nostalgic and excited by it.
As we were testing the service using a Chromebook yesterday, a few glaring and problematic issues arose. Mainly, the app wouldn’t resize to fit the larger screens on Chromebooks. Though this issue doesn’t affect 100% of all users, it definitely affects those were needing to download content for a time where a reliable internet connection just wouldn’t be feasible.
In most cases for Chromebook users, I’d fully recommend just using the web player. For those cases where you need to snag a few shows or movies to watch apart from internet connectivity, however, the Android app is 100% the way to go on a Chromebook. But, with the screen resizing issues I was experiencing yesterday, that was basically a useless proposition.
As it turns out, there is a way to get the Disney+ Android app to behave just fine and, in some instances, it is doing so out of the box. I just tested it on a couple different Chromebooks this morning and, upon first launch, the screen issue persisted on one and was non-existent on the other. Thanks to a reader comment, however, I was informed that fully closing the app and reopening it helped. I tried this on the still-problematic Chromebook and still had the issue persist, but it was due to a second factor.
For most users, a simple close and re-open should solve the issue. For me, it turned out the extended display I was hooked up to was causing problems. When I closed and re-opened the app on the Chromebook’s internal display, the issue persisted. When I opened it on my extended display, the interface scaled up just fine. Removing the extended monitor and re-opening the app got things up and running just fine. Likely, this is all just a bug related to screen size detection and is further aggravated with extended displays, so the whole thing should be cleaned up with a swift update in no time.
For now, if you need to leverage the Android app versus the web player, a close and re-open should get the kinks ironed out and have you ready to watch and/or download all the content you want from Disney’s streaming service. Just know that if you are doing so connected to an extended display, you might need to also toy with which display you are opening up the app on as well. I’d be shocked if this isn’t cleaned up in an update to the app in the very near future.
