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by psy-q 1393 days ago
Android TV now also comes with forced ads (since rebranding to Google TV).

I was pretty upset when the very expensive Android TV gadget I bought (Nvidia Shield TV) specifically to have an external device without ads suddenly had them. They take up the upper third of the home screen.
3 comments
commoner 1393 days ago
It takes a bit of work, but you can replace the default Android TV launcher with an ad-free launcher, such as the free and open source FLauncher:

- Instructions for changing the default launcher on Android TV: https://www.reddit.com/r/ShieldAndroidTV/comments/o96npc/ins...

- FLauncher: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.efesser.fla...

- Source: https://gitlab.com/flauncher/flauncher

This should work on any Android TV device.

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aembleton 1392 days ago
Thank you for this. I've now spent my evening going down a wormhole of launchers for my fire stick.

Finally got it all working, with wolf launcher and some adb commands to set it up as the default.

So much cleaner than the amazon launcher with its ads all over the.

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gpspake 1393 days ago
What they did to the shield was a tragedy. It was so refreshing to have a device that I could completely customized to remove ads and suggested content. I don't blame Nvidia I think this is more on the Google TV side. I still think the shield is the best TV box on the market. I keep meaning to look into loading a different launcher that will let me go back to the old style.
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wccrawford 1393 days ago
I have no proof, but I have a feeling nVidia is working to fix this problem. They were probably blind-sided and so it's taking a while, but I fully expect them to create their own launcher now to combat this. Their customers were quite upset about it.
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blibble 1393 days ago
if it's Google it's always going to have ads at some point

sad

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