I’ve tagged this post with Roku and Android Mobile, though I suspect the experience is the same on other apps.
When you have a TV show that has a ton of seasons and for which episodes are not sequential/related (e.g. Looney Tunes and other cartoons, Forensic Files, etc.), you often want to be able to see all of the episodes in one view without needing to navigate all of the season folders individually. Collections come in very handy for this on the web UI and Windows desktop app. However, on these other devices, when you navigate into the collection, you only see a generic thumbnail and season/episode number; no episode-specific thumbnail or title (or other metadata). At a minimum, the episode-specific thumbnail and title should be shown so that you know what each item is.
This doesn’t address your issue with the Collections view on these devices, but you can set a series’ view to hide seasons in its advanced settings. Maybe this will help until the Collections view is a little more palatable…
When configured this way, viewing the series will just list all episodes instead of the season picker. I tested and, at least on iOS, this displays the episode thumbnail, episode number, episode name, air date, and a snippet of the description. I’m not able to test on Roku or Android at the moment though.
Of course, the downside to this is that you have to pick one or the other (show or hide seasons) on the server; it cannot, to my knowledge, be changed dynamically on a client.
This works well on Android mobile as both on my phone and tablet, all episodes are listed in a single vertical list.
However, on Roku this is not the case. Whereas a collection typically displays a grid view of the episodes on the TV, when seasons are hidden in the show view, only a single horizontal row is displayed with all episodes. That’s a navigation nightmare for a show that has hundreds of episodes. So I guess this exposes another issue that should be addressed in the Roku experience.
