People are using this Claude Code Repo to REVERSE ENGINEER Their Android TVs!

0:02Hi. Welcome to another video. So, if you have an Android TV or a Google TV, then you already know the problem. You pay for the TV, and then the home screen shows you sponsored rows, discover suggestions, and apps that you never asked for. The TV also sends analytics back to the manufacturer in the background, and on cheaper sets, all of this junk makes the

0:24TV feel slow as well. Now, a project called clean your TV went viral this week because it fixes exactly this problem, and the interesting part is how it does it. It is not a normal app that you install. It is mostly a prompt and a set of tools, and you give that prompt to Claude code, which then connects to your

0:42TV over Wi-Fi and cleans it up for you. So, let's talk about where this came from first, because the background is what makes it interesting. On the 17th of October, a developer named Gathan posted a before and after picture of their parents' TV on X. The before picture was the stock Google TV home screen with a sponsored ad on it. The after picture was a clean black home screen that looks a lot like an

1:06Apple TV. And the whole thing was done by Claude code over Wi-Fi, without any cable, and without rooting the TV. That post got about 7.4 million views. People saw it and started to do the same thing to their own TVs with Claude code. Then they replied with the lists of apps that Claude found and disabled on their

1:22specific TV models. And those replies became the lists in this repo. In just 4 days, more than 200 people contributed lists for more than 170 TV models. The repo was first called TV vibe hack, and it got renamed to clean your TV on the 19th. As I'm making this video, it has about 21,000 stars and more than 2,000 forks,

1:45and it is only 5 days old. It also has tested lists for 227 TV models from 64 brands, and the read me is translated into 25 languages. Tech Crunch, Tom's Guide, XDA, Tech Radar, Android Authority, and a lot of other sites wrote about it. And most of the headlines say the same thing, which is that people are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again. I think that is a pretty good way to put it. Now, let's talk about how it actually works because it is simpler than you might think. Android TVs have the same debug bridge that Android phones have, which is ADB. If you turn

2:18on USB debugging in the TV's developer options, then a computer on the same Wi-Fi network can connect to the TV and run shell commands on it. Claude code can run shell commands, so Claude code can talk to your TV. That is really the whole trick. The process has three parts. First, Claude backs up the list of installed packages and all of the TV settings. Then it disables the manufacturer's telemetry, the ad services, the content rows, and the preloaded junk. And then it installs a small launcher and makes it the default home screen. The important thing here is that nothing gets uninstalled. Claude disables packages with the PM disable

2:50user command, and it writes a restore script that turns every one of those packages back on. So, if you don't like the result, you can run one command and get your stock TV back. There's no root, there is no cable, and there is nothing that you can't undo, which is really good to see. So, to use it, you go to your TV's settings, then device preferences, then about, and you press

3:08OK on the build number seven times. That unlocks the developer options. Then you go into developer options and turn on USB debugging. If your TV also shows a network debugging or ADB debugging toggle, you turn that on as well. After that, you open Claude code on a computer that is on the same Wi-Fi. You paste the contents of the prompt t.md file from

3:28the repo, and you type in your TV model. If you clone the repo first and tell Claude that you did, then Claude can use the tools and the launcher that are already in the repo, and it doesn't have to write them from scratch. The readme says that with the repo as context, the whole thing takes about 15 minutes. Then you just follow along. When Claude connects, the TV shows an allow USB debugging prompt, and you accept it with your remote. After that, Claude asks you a checklist of like which streaming apps you actually use, how many apps you want in the dock, and whether you want to keep the voice

3:57assistant, Chromecast, and system updates. It only disables the things that you don't tick. And this is the part that I like the most. Claude doesn't just run commands blindly. It pulls screenshots from the TV after each step and looks at them to check that the TV still works. It also disables packages in small batches and takes a screenshot between each batch because one batch can break something important and you would not know which package did it. Now, let's talk about the prompt itself because this is where most of the value of the repo is. The bloat is different on every brand. So, the prompt doesn't use one

4:30fixed list. It tells Claude to discover the bloat on your specific TV. Claude lists all of the installed packages and sorts them into groups like manufacturer telemetry, ad and content services, background services that you probably don't need, preloaded apps, and streaming apps. And if a package name doesn't make it clear what the package does, Claude checks its activities and services with the dumpsys package command first and then asks you if it is

4:55still not clear. The prompt also has a long list of rules that come from things that went wrong on real TVs. For example, it tells Claude to never disable the services that play HDMI and the tuner, the remote control and Bluetooth pairing, the on-screen keyboard, or the Play Store. It tells Claude to run one PM command per shell call because chained commands can stop after the first one without any

5:15error. There is also a really specific one about higher and CVTE boards. On those TVs, if you open a package that has factory in its name, even just to look at it, the TV can switch into a factory mode that breaks the input key and disables Play Services and Netflix on the next boot. So, the prompt tells Claude to never open those packages and to use dumpsys to check what they are instead. You can see that every one of these rules came from someone's TV breaking in a specific way and now the

5:42next person's Claude knows to avoid it. Basically, the prompt is the shared memory of everyone who ran this before you, which is pretty cool, if you ask me. The prompt also handles security, which I was happy to see. At the end of the session, it tells Claude to switch USB debugging and network debugging off again. To revoke the debugging authorizations, to reboot the TV, and then to check that port 555 refuses connections. That is important because port 5555 is plain text, and on some firmware, any device on your network can get a shell on your

6:14TV if that port stays open. And there is an optional extra for ad blocking. On Android 9 and newer, Claude can set the TV's private DNS to an ad blocking DNS server. The prompt even tells Claude to say that this does not block YouTube ads, which is honest, and to check that your apps

6:31still play after the change. Now, let's talk about what you get at the end. The launcher is a small native app of about 470 kilobytes, so it runs fine even on TVs with 1 GB of RAM. The home screen is pitch black, and it has a dock with your four favorite apps the same way an Apple TV does it. When you move to an app, the top of the screen shows the app's name in large text with a glow behind it in a color that comes from the app's artwork. If you press down, the

6:57rest of your apps slide up in a grid. There are also buttons for your HDMI inputs, Wi-Fi, and settings, plus a clock, the date, and a clock screen saver. And there are themes as well, which change the colors, the wallpaper, the dock, and the number of columns without a rebuild. You push a theme to

7:15the TV with one script, and that's it. So, there's that. But I think the more interesting part is what people built after this. The repo has a showcase file, and it already lists 53 projects that people made with this prompt or on top of this launcher, mostly with Claude code. Someone else built a home screen that looks like a Walmart bookcase, where every app is a book, and when you press okay, the book comes off the shelf and and in 3D. There is a cozy home screen with a valley that follows the real sunrise and sunset, a Zen home screen that is only a clock and a list of app

7:48names, an installer for an AirPlay receiver so that you can mirror an iPhone, and even a fork that turns all of the shell and Python tools into one Go CLI. None of these people had to know Android development before. They just had a TV, Claude code, and an idea, and Claude did the rest. And that is the real story here because a lot of these are people who just wanted their parents TV or their own TV to stop

8:09showing them ads. There is one more use case that I think a lot of people will like. If the TV is in a different home, like your parents' house, then the repo has a remote guide that uses Tailscale. You give Claude the TV's Tailscale address, and Claude cleans up the TV from your home without scanning your local network. So, you can basically be the family IT person without leaving

8:29your house. The repo itself is also run with the help of AI. It has a cloud.md file, an agents.md file, and a Gemini.md file. So, every major coding agent gets the same context. And there is a maintainer bot that reviews every pull request against a written policy. It decides if a change goes into the main repo, into the add-ons folder, into the themes folder, or into the showcase as the

8:54contributor's own fork. That is how one person can handle hundreds of contributions in less than a week. Now, let's talk about the limits because there are some. It only works fully on Android TV and Google TV. On Fire TV, the debloat part works, but Fire OS doesn't let a third-party launcher take over the home screen, so

9:12you only get half of it. Samsung TVs run Tizen, and LG TVs run webOS, so this doesn't work on them at all. Although there are some community ports for webOS in the showcase, and a few China market TCL sets refuse to install any launcher. So, on those you only get the debloat. You also need a coding agent with shell access. The readme says that Claude codex and Gemini CLI all work, so you don't strictly need a Claude subscription, but the whole project started with Claude code and most of the people in the showcase used Claude code and I would still say that you should be careful here. You're

9:47giving an AI agent a shell on a device in your home. The prompt does a good job with backups, a restore script, and closing the port at the end, but you should still read what Claude wants to disable before you say yes. Also, a firmware update can turn some of the disabled packages back on and the repo has a check script for exactly that. So, it is a good idea to run it after an update. If you don't want to use an agent at all, you can also do everything by hand. The tools only need Python 3 and the readme shows every command, like the probe command, that shows your model

10:15and Android version, the disable script that applies a list and the restore script that undoes it. Overall, I think this is one of the best real-world uses of Claude code that I have seen in a while. It is not another to-do app or landing page. It is a real device in people's living rooms. It fixes a problem that almost everyone with a smart TV has and the safety rules are written by people who actually broke

10:36their TVs so that you don't have to. If your TV runs Android TV or Google TV, then this is definitely worth a try and it costs you nothing if you already have a coding agent. Please share your thoughts and subscribe to the channel. I'll see you in the next one. Until then, bye.