We cleaned 3 Android TV devices with CleanYourTV

CleanYourTV is worth trying if promos on your Android TV bother you. It turned off promos and background apps on all three of our devices. It did not fix everything: one TV turned Netflix back on at every boot, and that TV’s slowness probably had another cause.

Used: November 2026, on 3 devices at home. Cost: free, MIT licence.

What CleanYourTV does

CleanYourTV is a free, open source project. On 5 November 2026 its README listed 407 TV models from 106 brands.

You paste its prompt into a coding assistant. We used Claude Code, and the project says other assistants work too. The assistant connects to the TV over ADB, the debug tool in the TV’s Developer options.

It works in this order:

1. It backs up the list of apps and the settings.
2. It finds the bloat on your TV and asks before it touches anything you might use.
3. It turns packages off with pm disable-user, in small batches, and takes a screenshot between batches. A package is one app or system part.
4. It can install a small launcher, which is the app that draws your Home screen.

Nothing is uninstalled, and you do not need root.

The three devices

These counts come from our own notes and lists. We rebooted each device and checked it after the work.

We did not run a speed test before and after. So we will not tell you that your TV gets faster by a set amount.

What worked

The Mi Box S kept what we wanted. We kept YouTube, Apple TV, the Assistant, the remote mic, Chromecast, Miracast, the Play Store and the firmware updater. After the reboot, the check script found all 25 listed packages still off, with Home, Wi-Fi and ADB in place. We added 2 more packages later.

Chromecast and voice still worked on the Mi Box S. Casting from an iPhone to YouTube worked. Voice input in YouTube search worked too.

The stock Home app was the biggest memory user on the RockTek G2. It used about 290 MB in the background, more than any other app. The next day we moved to the CleanYourTV launcher and turned off that app. We also turned off the recommendations app (33 MB) and the backdrop app (76 MB).

The list of a similar model gave us a start. No list existed for the RockTek G2. The Nokia Streaming Box 8010 uses the same firmware build, so we used its list as a base and kept only what was present and safe on our box.

What did not work

Netflix came back on the Xiaomi TV. The TV’s own software turned it on again at every boot, so turning it off did not last. We left it on, hid it, and blocked it from running in the background. A reboot confirmed that this block stayed.

The Google TV side panel went away on the Mi Box S. It is part of the stock launcher, so it goes when the launcher goes. The Assistant on the Home screen also changed there: it still listens, but it shows no answer. The project already knows about this, and we accepted it.

The Netflix button on the RockTek G2 stayed Netflix. The box’s own software takes that button first, so we could not give it a new job.

We got almost no storage back. System apps sit in a part of the storage that cannot be changed, so turning them off frees nothing. Free space on the Xiaomi TV went from 2.3 GB to 2.6 GB after we cleared speech data and caches. It later fell to 2.0 GB when we added our own apps and wallpapers.

The slow Xiaomi TV had another likely cause. The processor was idle 94% of the time when we measured it, so we looked at memory and storage. A USB stick used as internal memory was the likely cause, but we did not prove it.

One settings page stopped opening. “Usage and diagnostics” on the Xiaomi TV needs the setup wizard, and we had turned that off. We left it that way.

How to stay safe

These rules come from the project, and we followed them on every device:

• Back up first. Keep the list of packages you turned off.
• Work in small batches. Check the TV after each batch, so you know which batch caused a problem.
• Check who owns the Wi-Fi network before you turn off the setup wizard on Google TV. The package is called setupwraith. If it owns the saved network, the TV loses Wi-Fi and ADB. Ours showed android.uid.system, which means the system owns it, so Wi-Fi stayed up.
• Test remote buttons with the real remote. A test key sent over ADB does not prove that a remapped button works.
• Close ADB when you finish. Port 5555 is not encrypted. Only “closed” from tools/adb-closed.py counts.

How to undo it

Run tools/restore.sh with the list you applied, and those packages come back on. If you applied a batch as its own list, you can undo that batch alone. The project’s restore guide has the exact commands.

The script does not undo everything. The Netflix block was our own change, so we would undo it by hand: set both background permissions back to default, then run cmd appops write-settings.

We did not try a factory reset. Our plan is to run the restore first, because a reset may get stuck if the setup wizard and the stock launcher are still off.

Should you try it

We still use all three devices this way, and we would do it again. Try it if your TV has an ADB option and promos on the Home screen bother you. Keep the backup until you are happy with the result.

Skip it if your TV runs Tizen, webOS, Roku OS, VIDAA or SmartCast. The project does not cover those systems. Also skip it if you use the Google TV side panel every day and would miss it.

Start with the README on GitHub and the project’s FAQ. Read the prompt before you paste it.

We write more hands-on notes like this on the Cliqto Media blog. If you also work with public web data, our Apify Actors turn it into tables.

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