Roku is rolling out Roku Labs, a new program that gives Roku TV owners early access to experimental, in-development apps built by the company's own engineering team. The idea is simple: let real viewers test unfinished features and send feedback before anything ships wide.
You would find Roku Labs through a dedicated tile on the Roku Home Screen. From there, you can open an experimental app, use it as normal, and send feedback that Roku says helps decide what graduates to full release and what gets pulled.
Roku City Dash is the first app to graduate out of Roku Labs. The arcade-style game, set in Roku's familiar screensaver world, has already left testing and become available to every Roku TV owner. Four more apps remain in the program: Roku Stocks, a portfolio tracker; Roku Weather, an on-screen forecast tool; Backdrops Studio, for building custom screensaver artwork; and Roku Immerse, an ambient screensaver mode. Roku's own listing of the program covers all five projects and says the lineup will keep shifting as some apps graduate and others get cut.
Brian Pinkerton, Roku's senior vice president of advanced development, framed the effort as a two-way channel rather than a one-off beta test. "Our best breakthroughs have never happened in a vacuum; they start with Roku engineers building and the people watching," he said, adding that community testing "ensures every feature that comes to our platform solves a real pain point, brings genuine delight, and reinforces our commitment to streaming."
Roku Labs arrived alongside a wider platform update. A redesigned Roku Home Screen is expanding to Brazil and Mexico in the coming months, bundled Premium Subscription packages are rolling out in the U.S. and Mexico, and Roku Voice is picking up new on-screen abilities, including spoken weather lookups. Separately, Roku said its Roku LT OS, the lightweight software that runs its remotes and smart-home gear, is now open source, and pointed to a San Jose State University racing team already building an electric race car around it.
What's less clear is how quickly features move through Roku Labs, whether it stays a small side door or becomes a bigger part of how Roku ships new software, and how many of the current five apps actually make it to general release.
