TV Launcher

TV Launcher is a compact home-screen replacement made specifically for Android TV. Its main screen is a fixed grid with fourteen app positions and a permanent plus tile. It avoids content recommendations, service accounts and animated feeds: choose the apps you want, put them in order and launch them.

This page covers F-Droid’s 1.6.2 build. We matched its file to F-Droid’s signed index, inspected the manifest and checked the fixed v1.6.2 source tag. We did not test it on a physical television or set-top box, so remote-control behaviour can still vary by firmware.

Choosing and arranging apps

The plus tile opens an app picker with text search and three filters: All, Selected and Shortcuts. Selecting an app adds it to the home grid. Long-pressing a tile opens actions for changing its position, viewing Android’s app-info screen or removing it from the grid. Supported pinned shortcuts can be added as their own tiles, which is useful when an app exposes a direct route to one of its screens.

The fourteen-position limit is intentional, not a count of how many apps may be installed on the device. The picker selects or removes home-screen tiles; it does not launch unpinned apps, and this launcher has no separate app drawer. The launcher queries the installed package list to build the picker, which explains its broad package-visibility permission.

Wallpapers and optional device workarounds

The default Dark Minimal (No Wallpaper) background is stored with the app. The picture button on the home screen opens two other choices: Cycling Online Wallpaper and Custom URL Image. Cycling uses the category and interval you choose, but its providers are a fixed fallback chain: Wallhaven first, then Bing, Picsum and Reddit after failures. Reddit results can point to a third-party image host. The gear button opens Android’s system settings, not this wallpaper panel. Leaving Dark Minimal selected avoids wallpaper traffic.

Two compatibility controls deserve care:

• Override TV Default Launcher uses Android’s Accessibility service to return to this launcher when Home is pressed on devices that do not respect the normal default-launcher choice. It is optional and off by default. Try the ordinary system launcher setting first.
• Kill Stock Launcher Background RAM calls Android’s background-process kill API whenever this launcher resumes, for a built-in list of Google TV, Fire TV, Xiaomi and TCL launchers plus detected system Home apps. It is off by default; Android 14 and later do not let an app use this call to affect another app’s processes.

Both switches are in the Settings & About dialog. Neither is required for the basic grid, and their existence is not evidence that they work on every TV brand; Android TV vendors change launcher and remote behaviour extensively.

Version and file details

Version 1.6.2 changes the build rather than the launcher workflow: the F-Droid flavour removes WorkManager and four related permissions, while the updater is compiled only into the GitHub flavour. The release also moves the official images into Android TV’s screenshot directory. Updates to this build therefore come through F-Droid or a manually installed compatible F-Droid-signed file, not from an in-app installer.

The APK declares internet, installed-app visibility, background-process control and Android’s automatically generated dynamic-receiver permission. Our static scan found no tracker SDKs. “No trackers found” describes the APK scan, not the wallpaper network path: cycling contacts its provider chain, and a custom URL contacts that host whenever those modes fetch an image.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s source build of 1.6.2, signed with F-Droid’s key. A GitHub build signed by a different key cannot update this signing line in place.
• The 1.1 MB APK needs Android 5.0 or later and contains no native libraries, so it is not restricted to one CPU architecture.
• Its measured SHA-256 is 7afde83f96ccf30d1bc69ca06692d385800d2d9a14dd5f7d85fb4ad4f3c5c210, matching the signed F-Droid index.
• TV Launcher is licensed under GPL-3.0 or later. The images returned by optional wallpaper services retain their own licences and terms.

Flagged by F-Droid:

• NonFreeNet: Relies on or promotes a proprietary network service.