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Comment by nickthegreek | Hacker News Reader

replacing launcher is gonna take you 10-15mins. 30 max if you aren’t a complete fool.

Projectivy has turned out to be my favourite launcher for the Shield TV after trying a bunch. It displays only the things I want to see, and has a great deal of options.

A million times this. I was so frustrated with how slow and ad-laden the default Shield launcher was. When I got it, it had no ads and was really snappy. Changing over to Projectivy (or any custom launcher really) fixed so many issues and made the device snappy again.

Throwing in my recommendation for the ultra minimalist Flauncher.

Oh, I've seen instructions, most of them start with "enable dev mode, then use adb to run ton of inscrutable commands that may or may not break the system over time".

Overall, it seems like a recipe to end up in an unknown state where you can no longer easily get updates and the only recovery is to wipe the system.

I've seen similar methods to "Clean up Windows 11", and it always seems like you're just putting the device into an unknown state. A few ads you can become blind to is not as bad as a totally broken system.

If you are uncomfortable with ADB on the CLI, you can look up the subject ''Debloat++ Shield TV'' as discussed in XDA Forums' Shield TV subforum for how to use an app for that.

It does seem sketchy, but you can kind of guess what it's cleaning based on the name in the uninstall command. I just skim down to the section that says it's for removing the launcher and reqd those, then run only a few. The upside of the launcher thing is that you can setup a new default launcher and use it for a while without doing any adb. That let's you verify it's working for you first. And when you do finally remove the Google one, a lit if the ad and nloatware stuff no longer runs in the background even if you haven't removed it, so it's abh8ge perf0rmance benefit.

Friend, you are #11 on the leaderboard here on HN and you stated that enabled dev mode is too scary. I promise you, you have the skillset to research that your worries are false and you can accomplish this easier than rebutting me on this. I believe in you.

Once your find your comfort, you might even find other items of joy that are being gatekept from you like SmartTube.

Friend, I never said it was scary, only that it was not maintainable and would put your system in an unknown state.

How different is this from say installing Debian, then picking out a bunch of globally installed software that supports "make install" and spraying files all over the root filesystem, then expecting the next run of "apt update" to work properly without things breaking?

Maybe my concerns are unwarranted, but the vast majority of Android mangling I've done over the years has not generally resulted in long-term stability, for a variety of reasons. Recall that the point of this article is that it's 10 year old hardware still in support!

It’s a single app. several are open source. I recommend flauncher. Once again, you are overly complicating a process that you do not know and are arguing from a point of ignorance. As you point out, it’s a 10 year old platform. It’s very stable and known. I am done trying to let you see what you are not interested in.

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