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I turned my streaming stick into a dumb app launcher, and that's all it should be
(www.xda-developers.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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I can assure you there's a whole lot of telemetry and tracking in those. It's not "and nothing else."
Apple is the least awful about data privacy. Owning your hardware and stack is still better for privacy.
*edit: others have bored this is still using Google hardware with only a custom launcher, not a unique firmware or os environment for data sovereignty. That Sudha, and the lettuce still remains that we need more open hardware vendors, or legislation that let's us unlock our own purchased devices to modify further. *
But the article is about using a GOOGLE TV stick……
It’s not about “owning your stack”.
Right, this isn't accommodating that, but I still contend that needs to be the goal.
I dint own this device or an AppleTV, while I've owned both in the past.
Yes but isn’t this article just about installing a custom launcher on a Google device? Presumably this does not solve data harvesting by Google, which would make this solution, while effective for app launching, probably worse than using an Apple TV device.