TV Launcher

An Apple TV–style home screen for Android TV and Google TV

Native Kotlin + Jetpack Compose. Smooth even on low-end TVs.

About

A port of webos-launcher, a tvOS-style launcher for LG webOS TVs, to Android TV. The idea and design come from there; the code is new. It is a native app rather than a web page, with no WebView.

It was built for a budget TV (4× Cortex-A55, Mali-470 GPU, 1.3 GB RAM) and runs at about 60 fps on it.

Features

• Apple TV–style top shelf: a blurred backdrop of the focused app and its large title, with a greeting, the date and a clock above it.
• Weather under the clock: current temperature and city. The city is detected by IP or picked by name in settings. Celsius by default, Fahrenheit in settings, or turn it off.
• tvOS-style grid: wide rounded tiles, five per row. The focused tile grows, casts a shadow and catches a light sweep.
• Three sections:
  • Apps: all TV apps with their own banners. For apps without a banner, the icon is drawn over colors sampled from its edges.
  • Sources: live TV and HDMI/AV inputs, one click to switch.
  • More: home screen settings, system settings, the stock launcher.
• Tile menu (hold OK): move, hide from the home screen, app info.
• Home screen settings: show or hide any tile, weather on/off, city and units, reset to alphabetical order.
• Back and Home return to the top of the screen.
• English and Russian: the interface follows the TV's system language.
• Inter Display font, the closest open alternative to SF Pro.

Install

Requires Android TV / Google TV 8.0 or newer.

Option 1: Downloader (no computer)

1. Install Downloader (by AFTVnews) from Google Play.
2. Allow it to install apps: Settings → Apps → Special app access → Install unknown apps → Downloader.
3. Enter this URL in Downloader:

   https://github.com/margantcovka/androidtv-launcher/releases/latest/download/tv-launcher.apk
   

4. Install. The app shows up as Launcher.

Option 2: ADB from a computer

Enable developer options on the TV (Settings → About, press Build 7 times), then turn on network debugging in Developer options. Download tv-launcher.apk and run:

adb connect <TV IP>:5555
adb install tv-launcher.apk
adb shell cmd package compile -m speed -f io.github.margantcovka.tvlauncher

The last command is optional, but on weak TVs it makes animations noticeably smoother because the app is compiled ahead of time instead of by the JIT while animating.

Make it the home screen

On most TVs the stock Google launcher takes priority on the Home button, so picking a default launcher has no effect. A one-time ADB fix:

adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.tvlauncher
adb shell cmd package set-home-activity io.github.margantcovka.tvlauncher/.MainActivity

On Google TV the stock launcher is com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx; use that in the first command.

To undo:

adb shell pm enable com.google.android.tvlauncher

Without a computer: open the More → Stock Home Screen tile. It opens the stock launcher's page in Settings, which has an Enable button.

Note

Disabling the system launcher is a standard Android feature: nothing is removed, and one command brings it back. Still, you do this at your own risk.

Privacy

The launcher only goes online for the weather. Unless you pick a city yourself, your approximate location comes from your IP address via ipapi.co (or ipwho.is as a fallback) and is cached for a day. IP location is often your provider's city, so you can pick yours in More → Home Screen → City. The forecast comes from Open-Meteo, or MET Norway if Open-Meteo is down; city search uses the Open-Meteo geocoder. No accounts, no analytics. Turn the weather off and nothing is sent.

Build from source

Requires JDK 21 and the Android SDK (set sdk.dir in local.properties).

./gradlew assembleRelease   # app/build/outputs/apk/release/app-release.apk

tools/install.sh builds the release APK, installs it on the TV, compiles it ahead of time and launches it: SERIAL=<IP>:5555 tools/install.sh.

How it stays smooth on a weak TV

Measured with tools/bench.py: late frames went from ~99% to ~3%.

• Rounded tiles and shadows are pre-rendered bitmaps, so the GPU never clips shapes or computes shadows.
• The full-screen backdrop is a single opaque 64×36 image blended on the CPU. No live blur, and the window background is off.
• Animations are read in the draw phase and never trigger recomposition.
• Ahead-of-time compilation (cmd package compile -m speed); otherwise the JIT eats ~30% of the CPU during animations.

tools/cadence.sh reports the panel's real refresh rate. tools/bench.py --dbg N turns off parts of the drawing (bits in Debug.kt) to measure what each one costs.

Code layout

app/src/main/java/io/github/margantcovka/tvlauncher/
  MainActivity.kt              screens (home / settings), reload on onResume, Home button
  data/LauncherRepository.kt   all tiles: apps + sources + More
  data/AppSource.kt            TV apps, banners and icons (cached by lastUpdateTime)
  data/InputSource.kt          live TV and HDMI/AV inputs
  data/SymbolTiles.kt          icon-and-label tiles (inputs, More)
  data/LauncherPrefs.kt        tile order and hidden tiles (SharedPreferences)
  data/Weather.kt              location by IP or chosen city, Open-Meteo / MET Norway, cache
  data/Launcher.kt             what a tile does on OK
  data/Images.kt               rounded tiles, shadows, blurred top shelf backdrop
  ui/HomeScreen.kt             top shelf + grid by section, tile menu, reordering
  ui/Tile.kt                   tile: scale, shadow, light sweep, label
  ui/TileMenu.kt, FocusRow.kt  hold-OK menu, tvOS-style rows
  ui/SettingsScreen.kt         home screen settings
  ui/CityScreen.kt             city search for the weather
  ui/ShelfRenderer.kt          CPU blending of the top shelf backdrop
  ui/Tokens.kt                 colors, sizes, timings

See also

SmartTube New: a SmartTube fork with a UI in the style of this launcher.

Credits and license

• Design and idea: HarshInvader/webos-launcher (MIT).
• Inter font (SIL OFL 1.1, see licenses/Inter-OFL.txt), Material Icons (Apache 2.0).

Released under the MIT license.