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I turned my streaming stick into a dumb app launcher, and that's all it should be
(www.xda-developers.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Congratulations, you just made a copy of Apple TVOS, on much worse hardware.
Love them or hate them, the Apple TV is the best streaming box around. I’ve got One and a shield tv, and the Apple TVs level of polish and performance is on a whole other level.
Yeah, let's get more close ecosystem shit. Stop buying things you can modify because you own them. Think of the executives, what's wrong with you people?
What?
I’m just saying that Apple TVs are already a simple app launcher interface with basically nothing else.
I can assure you there's a whole lot of telemetry and. Teaching in those. It's not "and nothing else."
Apple is the least awful about data privacy. Owning your hardware and stack is still better for privacy.
Yes but isn’t this article just about installing a custom launcher on a Google device? Presumably this does not solve data harvesting by Google, which would make this solution, while effective for app launching, probably worse than using an Apple TV device.
I also prefer using an AppleTV as my TV media player, but as long as the UI is snappy and it it’s capable of decoding HEVC, AV1, and other modern codecs smoothly, this solution is perfectly cromulent.
I have a shield tv from forever ago. It’s still plenty fast enough. All the apps we use come right up. I use a third party launcher so I can declutter the screen a bit and it’s just fine. These things done have to be blazing fast.
The shield tv is still by far the best Android box in the market. It’s insane how it’s still supported by Nvidia, and still better than anything else out there.
The Apple TV is “decluttered” by default.