Users and developers are turning to artificial intelligence tools to reduce advertisements and pre-installed apps on smart TVs, speed up their interfaces, disable tracking features, and redesign their home screens.
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One such tool is the “Dumb TV” project, which aims to limit a television to apps and external device inputs, without manufacturer-displayed advertisements, viewing tracking, or updates the user has not requested.
Another project, called “Clean Up Your TV,” removes unwanted apps from Android TV and Google TV devices over a wireless network and replaces the home screen with one resembling the Apple TV interface.
Modifying electronic devices to give users greater control over them is not new. However, advances in AI tools have made the process easier for a wider range of people. The trend comes amid growing frustration among smart TV owners over advertisements and the collection of data about their viewing habits.
Most modern smart TVs come equipped with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, which identifies what is displayed on the screen using screenshots, audio clips, or other digital recognition methods.
If these “TV simplification” tools gain wider adoption, they could affect the smart TV advertising market, which benefits from selling viewing data to advertisers or displaying targeted advertisements on device interfaces.
Gathin T., the developer of the “Clean Up Your TV” project, said the idea began when he grew tired of seeing advertisements on his parents’ television. On a fundraising website linked to the project page, he wrote that he used Claude Code to clean up the device over a wireless network and create a simple home screen containing only his parents’ apps.
After publishing the instructions on GitHub and sharing before-and-after images on X, thousands of people applied the idea to their own televisions within two days. The devices included models from Xiaomi, TCL, Sony and LG, as well as projectors.
The solution does not require root access to the television and allows users to restore the device to its factory settings when needed.
The “Dumb TV” project, meanwhile, has been tested on a Fire TV model and on Android TV and Google TV platforms running on devices from Sony, TCL, Philips, Hisense, Xiaomi and Nvidia Shield. Its developer, Muzammil Yaseen Sabuwala, recommended using the user’s preferred AI tool alongside the project’s GitHub repository.
Sabuwala said advertisements and the difficulty of accessing the content he wanted to watch directly prompted him to develop the tool. He told TechCrunch that he built it using a combination of DeepSeek, Gemini 4.1 Flash, Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. He plans to continue updating the project and adding support for more models.
However, these solutions are still under development. Users are testing them on different types of televisions and suggesting modifications and fixes. Some have struggled to get results from simple commands such as “hack my TV,” while others have warned that AI tools can make mistakes, potentially disable essential packages or rendering devices unusable.
One user said their Android TV became unusable after an attempted modification, while another reported getting stuck halfway through modifying a Fire TV device.
Those who do not want to use AI to modify their televisions can instead try existing apps that customize home screens on Android TV devices, including ATV Launcher, Projectivy Launcher and FLauncher.
