If you’re still unhappy with the Android TV home screen—for instance, you don’t like the Recommendations row, or don’t want your games and apps separated, you can install an alternative home screen launcher.
With Android 6.0, Google made this a lot harder on Android TV devices. Even if you install an alternative launcher like HALauncher or TVLauncher, there’s no built-in way to set them as the default. Fortunately, there is a workaround, discovered by the XDA developer forums. All you need is a laptop and USB cable, and it doesn’t even require rooting your device:
- Install your alternative launcher of choice
- On your PC, download and install Minimal ADB and Fastboot
- Nvidia Shield owners may need to install Shield Open Source drivers on the PC, though this shouldn’t be necessary in Windows 10
- On your Android TV device, go to Settings
- Under the Device heading, select About
- Scroll down to Build, and press the “A” button eight times. (A message will tell you that you are now a developer.)
- Return to the main Settings menu
- Under the Preferences heading, select Developer options
- Select Debugging, then select USB Debugging, then select On
- Connect the Android TV device to the PC with a USB cable
- On the Android TV device, approve the connection
- On the PC, launch Minimal ADB and Fastboot
- In the command prompt, type adb devices
- Verify that a device is detected (it should appear as a string of numbers)
- In the command prompt, type adb shell pm hide com.google.android.leanbacklauncher
- Now when you press your device’s home button, it should return to your alternative launcher. To get the standard launcher back, return to the command prompt and type adb shell pm unhide com.google.android.leanbacklauncher.
I’ve confirmed that this works on the Nvidia Shield Android TV. And unlike the more basic workaround that eliminates Nvidia’s home screen section, launching the Shield Hub app from an alternative launcher preserves access to GameStream and Nvidia’s game store.
Does not work on Android Marshmallow:
BalasHapusError: java.lang.SecurityException: Neither user 2000 nor current process has android.permission.MANAGE_USERS.