Two days ago I fixed my parents' TV. Then the internet fixed theirs.
TL;DR: A prompt that debloats any Android TV or Google TV over Wi-Fi and gives it an Apple TV-style home. No root, nothing uninstalled, one line undoes it.
One tweet, two days, and it now has a name and a site: cleanyour.tv.
Skip to "Try it" at the bottom if you want to get started right now. Otherwise, keep reading :)
Two days, in numbers
And the ones that did not fit on the card:
30 TVs with tested lists across 16 brands, two of them projectors. Eight languages. 45,000 repo visitors. Nine launchers and add-ons built on top.
How it started
My parents' TV showed an ad before you could reach Netflix. A full-screen one, for a bank, on a TV they had paid for. So on Saturday afternoon I sat down with Claude Code and gave it the model number.
It found the TV on the Wi-Fi, listed everything running on it, and we went through the list together. Twenty-five Xiaomi packages later the ads, the telemetry and the "Discover" tab were gone. Then it wrote a new home screen: black background, four big tiles, a clock. My mum said "oh, that's nice" and that was the whole review.
I tweeted the before and after at 2:21 PM and went for lunch.
The part I did not plan
By the time the lunch was done the tweet was moving. By the next morning it had 20,000 likes and the repo had 2,000 stars. Forty-five thousand people have since read a README about TV bloatware, on a weekend.
Then the pull requests started, and they have not stopped. 50 merged today alone 🤯
The replies were the best bit, because people did not say "nice", they did it. On a Sony from 2017. On a Hisense that booted into recovery once, then behaved. On a Samsung projector that runs Samsung's own version of adb, and someone made that work too.
A grandmother now has a TV that does not shout at her. Someone pinned two Tamil serials to the dock so his wife gets there faster. Someone's Fire TV "now looks like a Wii". Someone put live Polymarket odds on theirs.
What it actually is
Honestly, it is a prompt. One markdown file you paste into Claude Code, or any assistant that can run a shell. It tells the assistant how to reach the TV over Wi-Fi, what to back up, and how to find the junk on your model.
It asks before touching anything: which apps you use, which four go in the dock, whether the voice assistant stays. Then it builds a small launcher, makes it Home, and checks its work with screenshots from the TV.
Three rules, from day one. No root. Nothing uninstalled, only disabled. One line undoes everything. I ran that line on my parents' TV tonight to be sure. The ads came back. Then I ran the install again.
What changed since Saturday
- From 1 TV to 30. Xiaomi, TCL, Sony, Hisense, Philips, OnePlus, NVIDIA Shield, Chromecast, BenQ, CHiQ, RCA, SANYO, Toshiba, Insignia. Sixteen brands, every list written by the person who did it.
- Projectors. XGIMI by @zarubaf, Stellamore by @aravinddass, with the keystone and autofocus services marked "never disable".
- Fire TV. Debloat works on Fire OS now. Amazon's ads go, Amazon's home stays.
- Themes. A config.json and a wallpaper, pushed to the TV, changes the whole look. No rebuild.
- Module cards. Any app can declare its own tile. The launcher asks you once, "Keep hidden" by default. Built by @udhaykumarbala, who also shipped an NES library as the first module.
- 8 languages. Russian by @angelwzr, French by @ScaryFr92, Thai, Chinese, Catalan, Spanish and German from others in the replies.
- The Google TV crash loop, fixed. The setup wizard was grabbing Home and crashing the system every 200 ms. The installer now checks and rolls back.
- Windows support. Every script has a PowerShell twin.
- No adb needed. macOS silently blocks Google's adb. tools/tv.py is a pure-Python client that does not care.
- Live tiles when apps come and go, by @angelwzr. Ethernet icon by @sonalder-darlene. A VPN badge that turns red when the VPN dies, by @zarubaf.
- A 250 KB launcher. No network, no services, built for 1 GB sets.
- A Clock screensaver that drifts so nothing burns in.
- One-command restore. Tested tonight on my parents' TV, both directions.
- Nine things built on top. A webOS port by @OmkarK97, a Hisense restyle by @YouLop009, a Stremio shelf by @benfirad, a Control Center by @samdegan2311, an aurora screensaver by @rakshajag13, click sounds by @rocavence, AirPlay by @nguyenduchoai, Fire TV launchers by @itsmeterrylin and @ljis120301.
- A website, a name, a domain. cleanyour.tv.
So, CleanYourTV
The repo was called tv-vibehack, a fine name for a Saturday and a bad one for something 25,000 people are reading.
As of today it is: https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
Try it
- On the TV: Settings → About → press OK on Build seven times → Developer options → USB debugging on.
- On your computer: paste the prompt from cleanyour.tv into Claude Code and give it your TV model.
- Accept "Allow USB debugging?" on the TV and answer its questions.
About fifteen minutes. If your TV is not on the list, the prompt finds the bloat itself, and sending the list afterwards saves the next person the trouble.
Star the repo if it helped. Send a screenshot if it worked. If it saved you from buying a new TV, there is a coffee button.
Thank you to the 36 people whose pull requests were merged, the many more who sent lists in the replies, and to my parents, who still do not know what any of this is but like that the ad is gone.
GIF
