free-my-tv

Free My TV swaps the ad-stuffed Google TV home screen for a clean one: your streaming apps on a shelf, hourly trending picks from apps you already have, weather, and a look that darkens at sunset. No sponsored rows, no autoplay promos. It's MIT licensed and free. LG and Samsung TVs get the same design as an app beside the stock home screen.

Setup is a real project. You turn on developer mode and USB debugging, then build the APK yourself with a JDK and the Android SDK (there's no prebuilt Google TV download), or let Claude Code do the building and installing for you. Trending picks need a free TMDB key. Nothing is uninstalled: the stock launcher and promo apps are switched off, and one button brings them back. Solo or a household, it's free per TV. For China-market sets that ship without Google TV, look at Aerial.

The catch: the switch runs through the TV's own debugging port, so debugging stays on and the app holds shell-level control of your TV. The project is days old, run by one maintainer, and the home screen shows Binance crypto prices unless you turn them off.