Chromecast HD Alternate Launcher
Tuesday, February 6, 2024Recently there has been news of Google deploying advertisements more invasive than content banners in their Google TV launcher. Upon experiencing this directly it seemed like a good idea to dig into replacing the launcher.
The first step was testing out alternative launchers. I tried Projectivy Launcher and FLauncher and ended up preferring FLauncher, it is very simple and it's open source which is an added nicety.
The next step was figuring out how to set the default launcher. The most conservative approach was to do some button remapping which led me to Button Mapper which didn't actually work on my Chromecast since it, at least with the free version, didn't even list the Home button as a remappable key. I could add it as a custom button but testing was going to require the paid upgrade. That, coupled with the extra step at every start up of going from the default launcher to the preferred launcher, made more investigation seem like the right answer.
Eventually I came across
a guide
to disabling the
Google TV Launcher
which also covered choosing a new default! It basically boils down to
using adb commands to disable 2 apps:
pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx
pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.tungsten.setupwraith
and then choosing a new default once you press the Home button.
I've only ever used adb with a USB connection. Another guide I came
across made mention of
ADB TV
which is an app that allows running adb commands from the Android
environment running on the Google TV. This made it easy to disable the
two apps listed.
However, I only disabled the launcherx app. I then exited ADB TV and landed at a black screen. This was rather nerve-racking and after rebooting and pushing various buttons the only response I could get was from the dedicated YouTube and Netflix buttons launching their respective apps. However, pressing back a few times from that put me back in FLauncher for a reason I can't explain. Then, I could re-open ADB TV and disable the setupwraith app which allowed me to choose a new default launcher by pressing the Home button. All told following the guide would have been much easier. Oops.
Everything is working nicely now though!
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