Clean Your TV (cleanyourtv): Remove Android TV Ads & Bloat with a Coding Agent

What is Clean Your TV?

Clean Your TV (Gathin23/cleanyourtv) is the open-source project that topped GitHub's trending chart (week of Oct 19–25, 2026, via trendshift) by answering a question every Android TV and Google TV owner has asked: why does my own television show me ads?

The project does two things. First, it debloats the TV — disabling manufacturer telemetry, ad services, sponsored content rows and preloaded apps over Wi-Fi. Second, it replaces the ad-filled home screen with a small native launcher (about 572 KB) that looks and behaves like an Apple TV home: a dark screen, a dock of your four favorite apps, and nothing phoning home.

It has been covered by TechCrunch, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Mashable, Android Authority, XDA and others — 412 articles from 54 countries, with contributor-tested lists for 387 TV models across 103 brands.

One warning before anything else: the official site is cleanyour.tv and the official repo is the GitHub link above. Look-alike domains such as cleanyourtv.com are not run by the project.

How it works

Android TVs expose the same debug bridge as Android phones. Once USB debugging is switched on in the TV's developer options and your computer is allowed once, everything else is standard Android tooling — no root, no cable:

Step	What happens
Back up	The list of installed packages and settings, recorded before anything changes.
Disable	The manufacturer's telemetry, ad services, content rows and preloaded junk — using Android's pm disable-user, so nothing is uninstalled and a restore script can undo every step.
Install	A small native launcher, made the default home screen.

Because the bloat differs by brand, the bundled prompt has your coding assistant discover it on your actual TV and ask before touching anything you might use.

How to install and run

You need a computer on the same Wi-Fi as the TV, with Python 3, a JDK from 17 through 22, and Android SDK platform 34 with build-tools 34 (the assistant builds the launcher there). The whole run takes about fifteen minutes.

Any of these coding assistants work: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI or Antigravity CLI — which is where the DeepSeek Harness angle comes in: any agent CLI that can follow a repo prompt and run shell commands can drive the flow.

1. On the TV — Settings → Device Preferences → About → press OK on Build seven times → back → Developer options → USB debugging on. If you see a Network or ADB debugging toggle, turn that on too. Keep the TV on.
2. On your computer — git clone https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv, open that folder in your assistant, then paste the repo's PROMPT.md and fill in your TV model.
3. Follow along — accept "Allow USB debugging?" on the TV, then answer the checklist: which apps you use, the dock size and app order, whether to keep the voice assistant, Chromecast and updates.

Cloning the repo matters: the assistant reuses the repo's own tools/disable.sh and launcher/build-and-install.sh — that is where the backup, the Home guard and the restore record live.

No coding assistant? The same repo ships the manual commands (tools/tv.py, tools/disable.sh, tools/restore.sh), and there is a third path: a community-built phone app at cleanyour.tv/app that does connect → analyse → clean from an Android phone in about five minutes, no laptop needed.

Which TVs are supported

Platform	What works
Android TV / Google TV	The full flow: debloat + the launcher.
Amazon Fire TV	Debloat only — Fire OS will not hand Home to a third-party launcher (2015 Fire TV Box fails even that).
Samsung (Tizen), LG (webOS), Roku, Vizio, Hisense VIDAA	Not supported — no ADB. The project's site has tracking-off guides instead.

Is it safe?

The design is deliberately reversible:

• Nothing is uninstalled. Packages are disabled with pm disable-user, and before changing anything the tool records the TV's state in ~/.cleanyourtv/.
• One-line restore: TV_HOST=<tv-ip> tools/restore.sh examples/<your tv>/debloat.txt puts the stock home back.
• The scripts never leave the TV without a Home app — they only disable a stock launcher they recognise, and skip the Home app in any list until another launcher answers HOME.
• After a firmware update, tools/check.py compares the TV against the applied list and --fix puts it back.

FAQ

Does Clean Your TV work on Google TV? Yes — Google TV is Android TV under the hood, and both get the debloat and the launcher. For Google TV the restore command takes the stock launcher package (com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx) as an extra argument.

Do I need Claude Code specifically? No. The README names Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and Antigravity CLI as options. It is a prompt-driven workflow over standard ADB tooling, so any capable coding-agent CLI works — the same way DeepSeek Harness agents run shell-driven automations.

Does it void my warranty or root the TV? No root, no cable, nothing uninstalled. It uses the same developer-mode debug bridge Android phones have, and everything it changes is reversible with the restore script.

Is there an app instead of the command line? Yes — a community-built Android app (cleanyour.tv/app) cleans the TV from your phone in about five minutes, no laptop or coding agent involved.

My TV is a Samsung / LG / Roku. Can I use it? Not directly — those platforms don't expose ADB. The project points you at per-platform tracking-off guides instead (cleanyour.tv/not-android).

Related DeepSeek Harness plugins

If you like the idea of an agent doing hands-on device maintenance, the DeepSeek Harness ecosystem has native plugins in the same spirit:

• Desktop & Apps plugins — desktop automation, screen control and system tools driven by DSH agents.
• Utilities — including the ArtCraft creative-suite bridge and knowledge-graph tools.
• Agents, Automation & Workflows — scheduled jobs and multi-step agent workflows.