AI TV Debloat (2026): CleanYourTV, TV Detox and DumbTV Compared

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How we got here

On October 17, 2026, developer Gathin T. posted a before-and-after of his parents' Xiaomi TV: it had been showing a sponsored ad before Netflix, so he gave Claude Code the model number. The agent found the TV on the home Wi-Fi, disabled 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a clean new launcher. The post took off — the project says it reached 7.4 million views — and within days thousands of people were doing the same to their own sets. His prompt and scripts became CleanYourTV, which collected roughly 7,000 GitHub stars in three days and, as of November 1, 2026, sits at 48,002 stars with tested debloat lists for 398 TV models across 104 brands. TechCrunch, Android Authority and PCWorld all covered the wave, and two sibling projects — TV Detox and DumbTV — grew alongside it.

The reason it works at all: Android TVs carry the same debug bridge (ADB) as Android phones. Turn on USB debugging in the TV's developer options, allow your computer once, and a machine on the same Wi-Fi can list, disable and re-enable the TV's packages — no root, no cable, no opening the set.

How the cleanup works (all three projects)

Back up first. The tool records the TV's installed package list and settings before touching anything, and writes a restore script.
Disable, never uninstall. Ad services, telemetry, sponsored content rows and preloaded junk are switched off with pm disable-user — the same mechanism as disabling an app in Settings. The packages stay on the device, so every step can be undone.
Swap the home screen. A small native launcher becomes the default home: your apps, your HDMI inputs, a clock — nothing else.
Undo exists. Each project ships a restore path (a one-line restore in CleanYourTV, undo.sh in TV Detox, restore.sh in DumbTV) that re-enables everything and hands Home back to the stock launcher.

You drive it with a coding assistant that has shell access — Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini CLI and similar — from a computer on the same Wi-Fi as the TV. All three repos are written to be read by the agent: you clone the project, open it in your assistant, paste the prompt, and answer its checklist. Note that these agents typically require a paid plan, which is a real cost of taking this route.

The three projects, compared

	CleanYourTV	TV Detox	DumbTV
GitHub stars (Nov 1, 2026)	48,002	1,980	1,825
Best for	Android TV / Google TV owners who want the most-tested path	Older, sluggish Android TVs; the cautious, minimal option	Amazon Fire TV owners
Supported systems	Android TV and Google TV in full; Fire TV gets the debloat half only (Fire OS will not hand Home to a third-party launcher)	Tested on Android TV 9, 11 and 12, and Google TV 14; Fire TV cleanup partly works, home screen stays Amazon's	Fire TV / Fire OS first (Sticks, Cube, Fire TV Edition sets); Android TV and Google TV lists included, with the repo itself pointing to CleanYourTV for the full tool there
Not supported	Samsung (Tizen), LG (webOS), Roku, Vizio and Hisense VIDAA — none of them expose ADB, so no project can do this there
Home screen	572 KB native launcher, Apple TV-style dock and grid, themes	Plain-Java minimalist launcher, about 30 MB of RAM, no libraries	54 KB launcher, no permissions, no internet access
Signature move	398 community-tested TV models across 104 brands; the agent discovers your model's bloat and asks before disabling	Asks before every change; candidates are graded never / keep / safe / review before anything is touched	Disables about 50 Amazon packages including ACR viewing tracking, and runs an on-TV DNS filter blocking roughly 400 Amazon telemetry, ad and update hosts
Undo	One-line restore from the pre-change backup	`undo.sh` plus a written undo list	`restore.sh` re-enables packages and restores the pre-change snapshot; nothing is written to /system, and a factory reset removes everything
License	Custom (see repo)	MIT	MIT (launcher)
Official links	cleanyour.tv · GitHub	GitHub	dumbtv.org · GitHub

Which one? On an Android TV or Google TV, CleanYourTV is the default: the deepest bench of tested models and the largest community to search when something behaves oddly. On a Fire TV, DumbTV is the one actually built for your platform — it is also the most aggressive about Amazon's viewing tracking. TV Detox is the pick if your set is old and slow and you want the smallest, most conservative change set, with the agent asking permission at every step.

Read this before you touch anything: the safety list

PCWorld's verdict on the trend was blunt — its October 22 piece is titled “Please don't use AI hacks to debloat your TV” — and its core warnings match what the projects themselves admit. Take them seriously:

Boot loops are real, and bricks have happened. Both CleanYourTV and TV Detox warn that some TVs got stuck at the logo or kept restarting after a cleanup. TechCrunch reported at least one owner who bricked an Android TV this way and another who got stuck halfway through a Fire TV cleanup. The undo scripts only help while the TV still boots far enough to accept them; after that, a factory reset from the recovery menu is usually the way back.
Never disable the TV's own launcher first. On Google TV devices, switching off the stock home screen (com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx) before a replacement is verified running has left sets in a restart loop whose only fix was a factory reset. TV Detox now leaves it on by default — keep it that way unless you know exactly what you are doing.
Disable is reversible; uninstall is not. The entire safety model rests on pm disable-user. If a guide, prompt or agent proposes pm uninstall on system packages, stop — that change cannot be undone from the TV.
Turn debugging off when you finish. While USB, network or wireless debugging is on, other devices on your network can ask to control the TV. All three projects tell you to switch it off afterwards and only re-enable it to run the undo.
You may be disabling your own security updates. Vendor update services are exactly the kind of package these tools switch off, and DumbTV's DNS filter blocks Fire OS updates while it runs. A debloated TV can quietly stop receiving security patches — decide consciously, and check for updates manually.
Agents make mistakes. The agent is choosing which packages are “junk” on your specific model. Casting receivers, the remote, HDMI-CEC and tuner components are easy to misclassify. Use the projects' tested lists for your model where they exist, keep what you use, and test casting and inputs before you call it done.
It won't fix in-app ads. These tools remove the TV maker's ads and tracking. They do not remove ads inside Netflix, YouTube or other streaming apps, and they do not stop those services collecting their own viewing data.

The no-hack route: most of the privacy win, none of the risk

If your TV is new, under warranty, or simply not worth gambling on, PCWorld's alternative path gets you the biggest single privacy win in about five minutes with the remote:

Turn off ACR (automatic content recognition). This is the system that identifies what is on your screen and reports it back. Every major brand buries it under a friendly name — Samsung calls it Viewing Information Services, others use terms like viewing data, live viewing information or ad personalization. Find it in your TV's privacy settings and switch it off, along with interest-based ads and voice-data collection you do not use. CleanYourTV maintains a remote-only guide for exactly this at cleanyour.tv/not-android — and it is the only option on Samsung, LG, Roku and Vizio sets anyway.
Install a Play Store launcher instead. On Android TV and Google TV, established launchers such as AT4K, Kyu and Projectivy install straight from Google Play — vetted, reviewed, and uninstallable in seconds — and give you the same calm home screen without a debugging session.
Block tracking at the network level. A Pi-hole or any DNS filter on your home network can block known TV telemetry and ad domains for every device at once, and it un-breaks the moment you turn it off.

One warning about copies

The trend is hot enough that lookalike sites have appeared. The CleanYourTV repository itself states that its only official homes are cleanyour.tv and github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv, and that other domains using the name — it names cleanyourtv.com — are not run by the project. It also publishes no app in any app store. Download scripts only from the repositories linked in the table above.

Bottom line

The underlying complaint is legitimate: TV makers turned the home screen into a billboard and the viewer into a data source, and these projects are the pushback. If you have an Android TV or Google TV, a paid coding-agent plan, and a set you can afford to factory-reset in the worst case, CleanYourTV (or DumbTV on Fire TV) is a genuinely reversible experiment — backup first, disable only, keep the undo close. If any of those conditions fail, do the ACR settings and a Play Store launcher instead: you will keep most of the privacy and all of the warranty. Either way, the sponsored row before Netflix is a choice the maker made — and now it is one you can unmake.

Sources: the projects' GitHub repositories and official sites (checked November 1, 2026), TechCrunch's October 19, 2026 report on the trend, and PCWorld's October 22, 2026 cautionary guide. HoardAds has not run these tools on its own TV; when hands-on testing lands, this page will be updated and dated.