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Free My TV replaces the ad-filled Google TV home screen, 2,928 stars
Free My TV is a 2 MB open-source home-screen replacement for Google TV, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen televisions, which reached 2,928 GitHub stars within three days of its first commit.
Image: GitHub
Why it mattersAnyone whose television starts up on a page of sponsored thumbnails now has a one-button way to put a clean grid of their own apps in its place, with the maker's own instructions and a one-tap undo.
The home screen a smart television starts up on is usually a page of sponsored thumbnails for shows the owner did not ask for. An open-source project called Free My TV, created on 19 October by a developer who goes by simbasjungles, replaces it with a plain grid of the apps a person actually uses. The repository is at 2,928 stars and 371 forks on GitHub this morning, so it reached that many in three days. It is MIT licensed and the app is 2 MB.
The project builds a plain Android launcher the TV accepts as its home screen. The grid is a user-chosen shelf of installed apps. Above it, Free My TV shows weather, trending titles from The Movie Database refreshed every hour, and an optional cryptocurrency price line. The theme switches between a light and a dark palette at sunrise and sunset for the user's city. The screensaver is a full-screen photo with a clock laid over it.
What it runs on, and how to install it
The project supports Google TV and Android TV from Android 9 onwards (TCL, Sony, Hisense, Philips, Xiaomi, Vestel, KTC, Chromecast with Google TV and Google TV Streamer), LG webOS from version 3 onwards, and Samsung Tizen on 2017 models and newer. Google TV takes the APK over ADB after the user turns on developer mode by tapping the Android TV OS build number seven times. LG uses LG Developer Mode and needs Python 3. Samsung uses the TizenBrew installer and needs the Tizen Developer Mode turned on. The README gives a ten-minute setup for someone who has installed Android SDK tools before.
The README names Claude Code or Codex as the easier path: tell the coding assistant the television's IP address and the user's city, and the assistant installs the Android build tools, runs the build script and sends the APK to the TV. The build script itself calls aapt2, javac, d8, zipalign and apksigner directly, without Gradle, which is why the APK is 2 MB.
The undo and the numbers
The README names a single setting called "Original" under Home Screen that restores the factory home screen and screensaver, with the project's own line that everything returns "exactly as it was". That is the sentence that lets a cautious user try the launcher without worrying about a television that will not boot.
Three performance figures are stated on a 98-inch TCL Google TV running Android 14. The launcher draws at 60 frames per second, so each frame fits in 16.6 milliseconds. Memory sits at 96 MB against 242 MB for the stock launcher, which the README writes as a 60 percent cut. The figures are the author's own measurements, in the author's own README.
The project needs a free API key from The Movie Database for the trending row to load. Watchmode is an optional second key that opens a title in the correct streaming app rather than a general search. Neither key is a payment, and the launcher works without them, just with the trending row empty.
The home screen on a smart television is one of the few pieces of software a person uses every day and cannot change. The owner of the device had no way to put their own apps in front of the recommended ones. 2,928 stars in three days says a lot of people were waiting for a launcher that does.
Source
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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