For those (like me) who bought a TCL tv at a stupidly cheap price on Black Friday, you have options.
buy an AppleTV (even second hand) and don’t connect the tv to the internet. You won’t see any adverts on your Home Screen and be done with all this bullshit. What’s that? What’s the point in buying a £200 TV if you need to buy a £150 accessory? I hear you, read on…
if you’re broke like me, you can disable the stock launcher with adb and install projectivy launcher. I needed to use some software called launcher manager from xdaforums to replace the stock launcher. I also used adb to uninstall the pre-installed apps I had no intention of using.
Hopefully there are enough key words in there for you to google / research what you need to get going. Good luck!
Gentle reminder Apple does actually take steps to protect you from tracking, the premium you pay comes with some protection from their need to sell you out.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternates by far.
Note about the second bullet: Not all TCL TVs are Google TV, which can be switched to Protectivity - Roku TVs at this point, as far as I know, cannot disable ads if connected to the Internet.
I’m struggling heavily to find that OS to learn more about it (literally just got a google tcl tv delivered today, as my old one died last week), can you provide a link of some variety?
I was very heartened to find out that it’s just big android, so there’s likely a lot that can be done with it (but I got it to be dumb).
You can scroll to the bottom - basically you should just be able to enable installation from third party sources in your Google TV android options, and install the APK. I don’t have Google TV, but worked fine on Android TV. I forget if you have to fiddle with any other settings to get it to boot into Projectivity, or if you just change the launcher app in settings.
I remember when the Google launcher just worked fine. Suddenly, one update later, there’s now ads for shows on services I don’t even use taking up the entire top 2/3rds of the home screen. WTF google.
For those (like me) who bought a TCL tv at a stupidly cheap price on Black Friday, you have options.
Hopefully there are enough key words in there for you to google / research what you need to get going. Good luck!
Gentle reminder Apple does actually take steps to protect you from tracking, the premium you pay comes with some protection from their need to sell you out.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternates by far.
1/1 mobile / OS security experts agree
Note about the second bullet: Not all TCL TVs are Google TV, which can be switched to Protectivity - Roku TVs at this point, as far as I know, cannot disable ads if connected to the Internet.
I’m struggling heavily to find that OS to learn more about it (literally just got a google tcl tv delivered today, as my old one died last week), can you provide a link of some variety?
I was very heartened to find out that it’s just big android, so there’s likely a lot that can be done with it (but I got it to be dumb).
Sorry, do you mean a link to a Roku TV? Assuming you mean a link to Projectivity, here’s a link:
https://xdaforums.com/t/app-android-tv-projectivy-launcher.4436549/
You can scroll to the bottom - basically you should just be able to enable installation from third party sources in your Google TV android options, and install the APK. I don’t have Google TV, but worked fine on Android TV. I forget if you have to fiddle with any other settings to get it to boot into Projectivity, or if you just change the launcher app in settings.
I recommend to replace the default launcher on every Android TV, replaced the default Google Launcher on my Sony TV and it feels faster and has no ads
I remember when the Google launcher just worked fine. Suddenly, one update later, there’s now ads for shows on services I don’t even use taking up the entire top 2/3rds of the home screen. WTF google.