Free My TV: Someone Used Claude Code to Build an Ad-Free, Apple-TV-Style Home Screen for Your Smart TV

By Prahlad Menon 4 min read

Turn on a modern smart TV and the first thing you see isn’t your apps — it’s an ad. A sponsored row here, an autoplaying trailer there, a “recommended” shelf that recommends whatever was paid for. You bought the hardware; the home screen belongs to someone else.

Free My TV takes it back. And the story of how it was built is almost as interesting as what it does.

What It Actually Does

Free My TV replaces your TV’s cluttered launcher with a clean, Apple-TV-style home screen:

  • No ads. No sponsored rows, banners, or autoplaying promos. Not one.
  • Your apps, front and center. The streaming apps you actually use, on a frosted-glass shelf, in the order you choose.
  • Trending, not sponsored. Three fresh picks every hour from what’s genuinely trending this week — but only from apps you already have installed. Movies and Shows get their own tabs.
  • Weather and markets at a glance. Hour-by-hour forecast, sunrise/sunset, and live crypto prices, one press away.
  • Light by day, dark by night. The theme follows your city’s real sunset, like your phone does.
  • Fast. The repo reports 60 fps (every frame in 16.6 ms) on the TV’s own chip, using 96 MB of memory instead of the stock 242 MB — a 60% drop, measured on a 98″ TCL Google TV.

It runs on Google/Android TV (TCL, Sony, Hisense, Philips, Xiaomi, Shield, Chromecast, and more) and ships as native apps for LG webOS and Samsung Tizen too.

The Non-Destructive Part Matters

The reason a project like this usually scares people is the fear of bricking a TV. Free My TV is built to be reversible and safe:

  • No root. Nothing uninstalled. The factory home screen stays put.
  • One button to undo. Switch to “Original” and the stock home screen, screensaver, and every app come back exactly as they were.
  • A watchdog. If the new home screen crashes three times in five minutes, a separate process automatically switches back to the stock launcher.
  • A protected list. Picture, sound, inputs, remote pairing, Google services, and the Play Store are checked before every change.

Cleverest bit: it doesn’t need a rooted TV or a PC babysitting it. The app uses the TV’s own on-device ADB, connecting to 127.0.0.1:5555 with its own key (that “Allow USB debugging?” prompt), then runs the same commands you would — set-home-activity, screensaver swaps, pm disable-user. Nothing listens to the network.

Built by Claude Code — and Installed by It

Here’s the part that caught our eye. Free My TV isn’t just built with Claude Code — it’s built to be operated by it. The install instructions are, literally:

Open Claude Code in that folder and say: “Install Free My TV on my TV at 192.168.1.50. I live in Lisbon.”

The agent installs the tools it needs (JDK, Android SDK, adb), builds the 2 MB APK, pushes it to the TV, and walks you through accepting the debug prompt. No Gradle, no frameworks — build.sh just runs aapt2 → javac → d8 → zipalign → apksigner.

And customization is conversational. The repo ships a CLAUDE.md that tells the agent how the codebase is laid out, so you can say:

  • “Set it up for my Sony” — it reads your TV, finds its home screen and promo apps, and updates the right lists.
  • “Add Crunchyroll to the shelf.”
  • “Show the prices in euros.”
  • “Switch to the night look an hour after sunset.”

This is a genuinely new shape of open-source project: software designed to be forked and adapted by an AI agent, not just a human. The DEBLOAT, PROTECTED, SHELF, and LIVE_TV_APPS lists are documented specifically so Claude Code can find and edit them. It’s the same “agent-native repo” idea we keep seeing — a CLAUDE.md as the org chart — applied to a consumer gadget.

Why This Is a Sign of Things to Come

Two threads converge here. First, the obvious consumer win: smart-TV makers have turned the home screen into ad inventory, and open source just shipped a clean, fast, private alternative (no accounts, no analytics, no tracking — it talks only to TMDB, Open-Meteo, and optionally Binance).

Second, and more important for where things are heading: this is what “vibe-coded, AI-installed software” looks like when it’s done well. The barrier to debloating your own TV used to be deep Android/ADB knowledge. Now it’s a sentence to an agent. Pair that with the reversibility safeguards, and you get something genuinely usable by non-developers — with an AI doing the fiddly parts.

It’s MIT-licensed. Fork it, change it, ship it.

Repo: github.com/simbasjungles/free-my-tv · Site: freemytv.io