CleanYourTV: Custom TV Launcher and Themes

Overview

This project replaces the stock Google TV home screen on my TCL 43S450G, which was slow and full of ads, with my own build of the open source cleanyourtv launcher. I debloated the TV, then extended the launcher with a Continue watching row and five home screen themes I designed myself. They’re switched from a Themes button on the TV, with no computer needed. The point was to come up with my own designs and own the software my TV runs.

What I Built

• I debloated the TV with ADB, disabling 27 packages including the stock launcher, voice assistant and Chromecast. Every change can be reversed: nothing was uninstalled and the TV isn’t rooted.
• I added a Continue watching row that reads Android TV’s Watch Next and filters out stale, finished, duplicate and watchlist entries. Posters decode off the main thread into a cache, because Jellyfin’s image provider is slow.
• I added five themes, each with its own layout, motion and type:
  • Feature: a cinema banner with film-strip progress.
  • Minutes: a timeline of time left, shortest first.
  • Horizon: a sky that follows the clock through dawn, day, dusk and night.
  • Centre Line: a centred layout where stars come out in the evening.
  • Lamp: a dim, warm room lit by a glow that follows focus.
• I added a Themes picker in the top bar and made the TCL remote’s Netflix, YouTube, Prime, Input and Settings buttons work in the new launcher.
• I added an opt-in Netflix poster fetch limited to https on Netflix’s image server, with no redirects followed and every picture cached on the TV.

How It Works

• The launcher runs as the TV’s Home screen. Picking a theme saves it to the launcher’s preferences and rebuilds Home in that layout. Each theme is a set of config keys plus its own Java views for backgrounds, glows and progress.
• Behind the scenes, the Continue watching row queries Watch Next through READ_TV_LISTINGS. Time-of-day themes drive their colours from the clock, and each theme’s focus effects follow the launcher’s existing spring-animated focus highlight rather than tracking focus again.
• The launcher is plain Java on Android TV, installed over ADB, and I built it with Claude Code. The APK is 724 KB, over upstream’s 576 KB limit, almost entirely because of the cut-down theme fonts. I made that trade on purpose.

Technical Highlights

• Five on-TV themes built with an AI agent: I went from HTML mock-ups to five working themes on real hardware in about a week, which shows how easy this kind of project has become with current models.
• Designed for real TV constraints: The themes run on a 2 GB Google TV and work with the real remote, with costs measured at every step: off-thread posters, an image fetch restricted to one host, and an APK size measured at each milestone.
• Listed in the upstream showcase: My fork was accepted into the original cleanyourtv repository’s Showcase of projects built on it.