CleanYourTV

Smart TV home screens are built for advertisers, not viewers.

Stock Google TV and OEM launchers have turned modern living room displays into sluggish billboards: video ads autoplay in the background, rows of sponsored streaming apps take over the viewport, and switching to a basic antenna channel like Rai 1 or Canale 5 requires digging through five nested submenus. On budget hardware with 1.5 GB of RAM, the system crawls under background telemetry and recommendation daemons.

Speed, daily utility, and zero clutter.

Ambient Home & Live Ticker

A calm home screen displaying local live weather for Torino, an asynchronous live sports ticker (Serie A, Juventus, Torino, and Italian ATP tennis), and a reactive backdrop that adapts its ambient glow to the currently selected app.

Direct DVB-T2 Channel Tuning

A dedicated row of 10 national Italian channel shortcuts (Rai 1, Rai 2, Rai 3, Rete 4, Canale 5, Italia 1, La7, TV8, Nove, 20). Selecting any channel bypasses OEM menus and tunes the hardware tuner instantly.

Real-World Photographic Screensaver

No synthetic or AI graphics: 25 authentic high-res landscape photographs across Italy (Torino, Dolomites, Val d'Orcia, Positano, Capri). Features smooth 1.4s cross-fades, Ken Burns slow zoom, anti-burn-in clock drift, and instant remote wake-up.

Five engineering decisions behind the launcher.

• Bypassing OEM menus via direct Tuner Intents. Rather than relying on generic TV inputs, I reverse-engineered the MediaTek TV center broadcast receiver (TurnkeyUiMainActivity) and bound each channel shortcut directly to hardware broadcast URIs, eliminating input lag.
• Strict RAM budgeting on 1.5 GB hardware. Embedded TV processors cannot survive memory leaks. By enforcing Bitmap.Config.RGB_565, streaming assets directly into single reusable buffers, and recycling bitmaps on each slide transition, the image pipeline stays under 4 MB of heap.
• Safe ADB debloating architecture. Built an automated TCP-over-ADB debloat script that stripped aggressive OEM analytics, ad services, and background recommendation sync without breaking critical DVB-T2 tuner drivers, audio DSP, or HDMI-CEC controls.
• Non-blocking asynchronous data feeds. Weather readings (Open-Meteo) and live match scores are polled on a background thread pool with intelligent caching, guaranteeing that D-pad remote navigation stays locked at a smooth 60 fps.
• Anti-burn-in drift and instant remote wake. To protect the panel during prolonged display of the screensaver, the digital clock and weather badge subtly drift every 45 seconds. Any keypress instantly restores the Home launcher without backstack stalls.

Designing for the 10-foot experience.

Interacting with a television through a directional remote control is fundamentally different from a mouse or touchscreen: focus must be unmistakable, animations must be snappy rather than gratuitous, and every millisecond of key response latency directly impacts whether the product feels like high-end consumer hardware or cheap electronics.

Universal remote profiles and open source.

Packaging the launcher codebase into a modular open-source template for European Android TV models, with configurable DVB-T2 channel presets and custom remote key mappings.