The remote thinks it is a mouse

We got Make Enemies onto Fire TV. Amazon Appstore listing. Capacitor flavor. Live TV surface. The room still starts on a big screen and the phones still snitch.

Then we watched people play it from a couch.

On a laptop, the host client is a browser tab. Hover works. Click targets can be small. Focus follows the pointer like a dog. We wrote a lot of UI under that assumption without saying the assumption out loud.

Fire TV is not that tab.

The D-pad is not a mouse. It is a discrete jump between focusable nodes. Anything that only announces itself on hover never announces itself at all. A button that looked fine under a trackpad vanishes into the wallpaper when the only input is four arrows and a center click.

We found this the unromantic way. Living room. Dim lights. Someone pointing the remote at the wrong third of the screen because our hit targets were desktop-sized and our focus ring was polite to the point of invisibility.

The WebView lied in small ways.

APIs that work on Chrome desktop return something adjacent on the Fire TV shell. Fullscreen helpers shrug. Keyboard events arrive shaped like remote keys and leave our handlers looking for letters that never come. A layout that clamped to viewport height on a laptop suddenly had to share the room with system chrome and overscan margins we had treated as optional folklore.

Safe Zones stopped being a checkbox. Text that hugged the edge on a monitor got clipped on a panel that overscans by default. We pulled critical host copy inward until it survived a cheap hotel TV.

Android TV took the bundled-client path. Fire TV opens the live surface. Same codebase, different packaging rules, same human ten feet away who cannot pinch-zoom the joke.

Pointer cursor CSS does nothing useful when there is no pointer. :hover styles become costume. Focus-visible is the whole conversation. If the ring is thin, the room argues about which card is selected while the host line keeps talking.

We had already learned that Roku would not take a /tv page. That scar is written. This one is quieter. Fire TV accepted the shared client. The platform said yes. The couch said: prove it.

So we chased focus order like it was a quest log. Bigger targets. A focus ring you can see from the kitchen. Host copy that does not depend on a tooltip. Remote Back behavior that does not eject the whole room because someone meant to leave a menu. Volume rocker events we accidentally treated as gameplay.

Wifi tantrums still happen. The TV stays on the wall. The phones wander between rooms. The Durable Object keeps the authority. The scar is not that sync failed. The scar is that a “browser” client on a television keeps borrowing desktop manners until a living room punishes them.

None of that ships as a press release. It ships as fewer people asking why the TV will not click.

Make Enemies still begins on a television. Players still join from phones. The large screen still keeps everyone looking at the same terrible decision.

The remote still thinks it is a mouse.

We keep teaching it otherwise, one focusable node at a time.