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Do you know an open source TV app for Android TV so Google cannot push its shit? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) by muhyb@programming.dev to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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I basically gave up on finding a custom ROM for this TV so I'm looking for alternative TV apps to at least change the default app. Do you know if there is an app like this exist? It should work with satellite, I'm not looking for IPTV or streaming services, just something that supports plain satellite TV.

Edit: Currently experimenting with KODI, no luck yet though. If you also have suggestions regarding to it, I'm all ears.

Edit 2: KODI (and so Jellyfin, Plex etc.) needs a backend server for Live TV so add-ons alone won't work. According to KODI Wiki, currently there are no backends that work on Android. I also tried Google's older app called Live Channels but Google doesn't let you to run it because it's old ~~more useful~~.

Edit 3: I at least blocked ~~all~~ many of those ad streaming domains on pi-hole. Here is the regex I added to my blacklist. Maybe it will be useful for another poor soul who bought TCL TV.

There are also some cloudfront domains however they use hash, so it's not possible to block the future hashes by now and they will appear again.

Edit 4: After some hiatus, I have one more update to add here. I decided to go uninstalling apps via adb, since it's always possible to factory reset. However it didn't go as planned at first.

After enabling developer options on TV, I connected to it with adb connect 192.168.X.XX. You'll need android-platform-tools package on your PC to do this (it basically provides adb and fasboot). Anyway, after connected to it, I deleted apps with adb shell pm uninstall --user 0 app.name.here. I went medieval at first and deleted everything that has TCL in it. And that broke everything. I couldn't even factory reset. Apparently TCL swapped some system apps with theirs. After some adrenaline, I realized that I can create another user, so that would bring all the apps I deleted.

I created user via adb with:

adb shell

pm create-user "NewUser"

and switched to that user via

am switch-user userID. To see users command pm list users. In my case the user ID was 10. After this, I was able to factory reset.

These are the apps I deleted to remove bloatware:

com.netflix.ninja
com.tcl.tv.tclhome_passive
com.tcl.dashboard
com.tcl.partnercustomizer
com.tcl.t_solo
au.com.stan.and
tv.wuaki.apptv
com.tcl.suspension
com.amazon.amazonvideo.livingroom
com.tcl.ui_mediaCenter
com.tcl.MultiScreenInteraction_TV
com.tcl.hotelmenu
com.tcl.guard
com.tcl.channelplus
com.tcl.miracast
com.tcl.inputmethod.international
com.tcl.waterfall.overseas
com.tcl.ttvs
com.tcl.useragreement
com.tcl.keyhelp

And these are the one I didn't delete:

com.tcl.initsetup
com.tcl.factory.view
com.tcl.system.server
com.tvos
com.tcl.providers.config
com.tcl.autopair
com.tcl.android.webview

Since there is no Google account login this time, I had to install some apps via adb as well.

I did it with this command: adb install app_name.apk

I installed Projectivity Launcher for a better default launcher experience.

I also played with Shizuku and Canta and it's great to be able to use those too.

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[-] refalo@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago

By satellite do you mean like a dish physically plugged in with a cable? I wasn't aware of any "app" used for that on any TV... I just switch the input with the remote to like HDMI/component/RF/etc. and the normal android tv interface goes away completely.

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago

Exactly. The DVB-S tuner is included in the TV. There is indeed input switch that includes HDMI 1,2,3 and AV and yet they made the TV input only accessible through an app.

[-] irotsoma 2 points 2 weeks ago

Sounds like this might be specific to your brand of TV. I have a Sony and there's a bunch of Sony junk on there that I disabled a long time ago. But my TV app doesn't have any ads in it yet. I'm guessing your manufacturer added ads to their TV app and made a deal with Google to use them as the ad provider. Unfortunately, those apps are relatively proprietary since they are supposed to be primarily just a simple UI for the tuners and so mostly hardware specific. Not saying there aren't replacements, but likely that would require someone to reverse engineer some of of the hardware firmware's APIs rather than web APIs that most apps interface with and aren't guaranteed to be the same across models. Those are only available if you own an actual TV, so it's less likely to exist.

Anyway, my point is that your searching probably needs to focus on the TV rather than the Android/Google TV platform as a whole. Look on forums devoted to the TV brand. You may have more luck.

The other alternative might be to block the ads on your router, but that may or may not work or cause some unintended inconveniences. For example I have Google's DNS blocked and my wifi constantly drops and reconnects even when I only want to watch locally hosted content because the TV thinks it's offline and needs to fix the connection.

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago

I actually checked XDA but there seems to be no ROMs currently. Maybe it's possible to unlock the bootloader, I saw an OEM unlocking option while wandering developer options. But without a ROM it's useless. Maybe someone will make a ROM but no idea.