In the past 2 weeks (really in fact a little bit more than 2 weeks), IWGuide did suffer from an issue where many of the 20 countries+ supported disappear. In fact when the issue happened, only the USA’s catalog from Netflix was available and slowly new countries were added back.
Below is a screenshot from IWGuide settings screen, showing the list of countries currently supported within the application.
So what did happen? Netflix apparently has changed in some way the information available about each title they have for different countries, and the back end system that is constantly checking for updates broke.
The back end system has been updated but it is more challenging now to support all the previous countries, and as of today October 13th, 2017, the system supports 16 countries. Some of the new countries available are not the same as the previous ones, so we will be updating our application IWGuide to reflect that.
Keep in mind that this is a difficult challenge since Netflix decided a couple years ago to stop supporting third party developer, and actively try to shutdown many of the existing applications that promoted their service. To be honest, Netflix in the past were OK with third party to have in the application name the word ‘Netflix’; initially our application’s name was “IWGuide for Netflix” and it was authorized/approved. When they decided to stop supporting third party, their lawyers reached out to Apple, Google and asked them to take any highly visible applications that used the word Netflix in their title. When it happened, IWGuide was one of the leading application in Apple App Store or Google Play Store, but since then the app visibility dropped by a huge factor.
If you would like a particular country added back, please reach out by sending an email, but we can’t guarantee it will be added in a timely manner.
As usual if you are using the application on regular basis, consider posting a review in the App Store for iOS or the Google Play Store for Android.
Of course stay up to date by checking IWGuide’s Blog where we do post on regular basis Netflix related news.