Android TV applies background process limits by design to save memory and battery life system-wide, and on some manufacturer builds a battery-saver mode suspends an app's background tasks noticeably more aggressively than stock Android TV normally does out of the box. The guide's refresh task very often runs in the background separately from live playback itself, so it can get suspended entirely while the app, and the channel you're actively watching right now, keeps working completely fine at the same time without any visible issue. Go into Android TV's app settings menu, find the IPTV app specifically in that list, and exclude it from battery optimization to stop this exact problem from recurring in the future.

This is a channel ID mismatch, sometimes referred to as a tvg-id mismatch in more technical guides. Your stream list and your guide data source can label the exact same channel with completely different internal IDs behind the scenes, so the app can't reliably line up program information for every single entry even though the channel names look entirely identical on screen to you. Some apps let you manually remap or resync channel IDs directly within their own guide settings menu; check carefully for that specific option before assuming the underlying guide data itself is missing or corrupted somewhere.

Yes, particularly on lower-powered Android TV hardware with limited RAM available. The app holds channel and guide data together in memory continuously while running, and very large line-ups, approaching roughly 18,000 visible channels, start to genuinely strain devices with limited memory capacity, showing up specifically as a slow-loading or stuttering guide screen, even while individual channels themselves play back without any issue at all. Hiding unused channel groups reduces what actually has to load into memory all at once, and this often speeds the guide back up noticeably without requiring any other change to your setup.

Post-update regressions are a distinct, recurring cause worth checking specifically, not some rare edge case you can safely ignore. Either an app update on its own or a full Android TV system update can change how guide data actually gets requested or cached internally, breaking a guide that loaded perfectly fine just the day before with no other changes made anywhere. If the timing of the break lines up closely with a recent update, check carefully for a follow-up patch addressing it, and try clearing the app's cache to force a completely fresh guide pull before assuming anything more serious is actually wrong here.