No. The player renders a list your subscription supplies and plays the streams that line already carries, so switching apps never adds a channel or a title. What the app decides is how that content is presented and how gracefully it copes with volume: the layout of the guide, whether recordings are possible, how fast a channel switch resolves, and whether the interface survives a 54,000+ channel catalog. Reading the popular threads, most of the heat goes to interface taste, and most of the practical difference is memory handling. That is why two people can rate the same app oppositely: they are running different sized channel lists on different sized sticks.

Player apps hold the entire visible channel list in memory. Above roughly 18,000 visible channels they start to slow, drop frames on the guide, or crash outright on a stick with limited RAM. This is why hiding unused country and category groups is a real repair rather than housekeeping advice: a 54,000+ channel line trimmed to the few thousand you watch loads faster and stays up longer. The second recurring cause is a version change. Player updates ship regressions, and a setup that was steady for months can turn unreliable the week an update lands. If instability starts the day the app updated, treat that as the suspect before you blame your connection.

1. 1Hide unused groups until the visible list is a few thousand
2. 2Note the app version on the day trouble starts
3. 3A 2 GB stick tolerates a longer list than a 1 GB one

Two settings earn their reputation. Setting the buffer to none stops the app from queuing seconds it will only discard on a live feed, and pointing the device at a public DNS resolver removes a slow lookup from every channel change. Before touching either, run the cheapest diagnostic available: switch away from the stuck channel and straight back. If it plays, the session stalled and bandwidth was never the cause, so no bitrate setting will help. A live stream arrives as roughly six-second segments, which is why a pause longer than the buffer becomes a visible freeze rather than a soft dip in quality.

They rarely say which faults sit outside the app entirely. If one channel fails, that is a single source. If a whole group fails while the rest plays, the problem is server-side and no setting on your stick touches it. If everything stalls at the same hour each night, you are looking at either your connection at peak or oversold capacity on the provider side, and the second one is not yours to repair. That is the argument for asking any service what uptime it publishes: 99.99% is about 53 minutes across a year, while a service that publishes nothing is asking you to guess.