Having recently bought an Apple TV 4th generation for development purposes, I thought it might be useful for other developers who wish to dabble with the system to know what cables are needed to deploy your apps from XCode to the actual device.
Notably the Apple TV (4th Gen) doesn’t actually come with the cable needed to connect from your machine to the device; it does come with a cable, but this is only for charging the remote.
Instead, you will need a USB male to male cable (I think it was USB 3.0, but don’t quote me on that); in addition you will need a “USB-C to USB-A convertor” cable. You can purchase this from Apple.
As with all other XCode projects; in order to deploy you will need to get a deployment provisioning profile via the Apple development website.
My first thought was that it wasn’t going to work; Apple is quite harsh on deploying apps onto devices that are not Apple-branded cables; but was pleasantly surprised to see it working.
So in short; you will need:
- 1x USB to USB (male to male) cable
- 1x USB-C to USB-A converter cable
I hope this helps.