Replacing Nvidia Shield launcher

Monday, 1 November 2021

Some time ago, there was an update to Android TV that added some “Hightlights” section taking up the top 30% of the screen space on your TV. These would range from irrelevant to disturbing depending on the content that Google decided to show you. Apparently Google doesn’t consider this to be an advertisement, although I don’t see how you could consider showing me content I don’t own and asking me to buy it isn’t considered an advertisement but maybe you see the world differently when you are an advertising company.

Why is this the world we live in?

There is a support page Asking for an option to disable this “feature”, and the answer from a google product employee was to downgrade the application to a version from before they made this change. I decided if I’m going to be changing versions of things I sure am not going to be continuing to use a Google application.

Trying to take a quicker approach

I tried blocking the domain androidtvwatsonfe-pa.googleapis.com on my router, but that just changed the ads from annoying features on TV shows and/or movies I don’t care about to trying to tell me to use YouTube and Google TV, which was almost more annoying.

Taking the “nuke it from orbit” approach

Luckily it is actually pretty easy to replace the stock launcher, although it does require some minor technical competence at using abd to disable the stock launcher. I decided to try out FLauncher which is available on the Android app store. I was able to load the application and see what it looks like and it seemed like a perfect fit. Nice and simple and just shows me a listing of the few streaming application I like to use. Where adb comes in to play is when you want to actually disable the stock launcher and have the Nvidia Shield device load directly into this ad-free environment.

Enabling adb connections over the network on the Nvidia Shield is easy enough:

Android Settings
│
└─ Device Preferences
    │
    └─ About
        │
        ├─ Build (click 7 times, this enables the hidden "Developer Options")
        │
        └─ Developer Options
            │
            └─ Network Debugging

Take note of the IP and port next to Network Debugging, you will need this in a moment.

If you don’t already have adb installed you can either figure out how to install it on your host OS, or just do what I did and run an Ubuntu docker container and do apt install adb in there.

With adb ready to go, just run adb connect <ip:port from previous step> and then accept a prompt from the Android device to trust this connection.

The only thing we need to do is disable the launcher, and to do that we can just run adb shell pm disable-user –user 0 com.google.android.tvlauncher.

The Android device should now ask you which launcher you want to use (I had a few installed at the time, maybe it doesn’t list anything for you if you only have one), Assuming it presents you a choice, make one and then a reboot should now be all you need to confirm that you don’t see any advertisements on your launcher.

Closing remarks

I did disable a few other services as well in earlier troubleshooting, but I don’t think they are relevant to swapping the launcher. For the sake of completeness they were com.google.android.leanbacklauncher and com.google.android.leanbacklauncher.recommendations

It is maybe a good idea to turn off the network debugging option when you are done, since it probably reduces the overall security of your device or something.