dumbtv

Your TV should do what you paid for: your apps, your HDMI inputs, and nothing else. No ads from the TV itself, no watch tracking, no update you did not ask for. dumbtv applies that over ADB from another machine — no root, nothing written to /system, every step reversible with one script.

The same idea, told to whichever TV will listen:

Tested end to end on a Fire TV Edition television running Fire OS 7.7.1.7 (Android 9). Fire OS 6 and 8 differ in small ways; Android TV needs a different package list and a different launcher trick. Fire OS 6 (Android 7.1, e.g. the 2018 Fire TV Stick 4K) uses its own lists in data/fireos6/, picked up from the device, and the launcher holds HOME there with a small foreground service instead of the accessibility hook Amazon refuses on 6.7. The ones that cannot be opened, and the honest reason for each, are in docs/OTHER-TVS.md — along with what we are working on to reach them.

What it will not do: replace the operating system, unlock a bootloader, or survive a factory reset. Every current TV has a signed boot chain and a verified system partition, so there is no honest way around it. Pretending otherwise is how people brick their TVs. See docs/WHY-NOT-REPLACE-OS.md.

Add your TV to the catalog

At the end of a session — or any time something surprised you — record it:

./scripts/contribute.sh

It reads the model, OS build and kernel from the TV, then asks only what a robot cannot know: how developer mode was enabled, where the IP address was shown, which dialogs blocked automation and what dismissed each one. It writes catalog/devices/<id>.yaml, validates it, and prints the git / gh commands for a pull request. No git? .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/device-report.yml asks the same questions in a browser.

That file is the part this repo cannot generate: per-model knowledge. Code is cheap; someone's evening is not.

It asks what you want to keep

Nothing is decided for you:

./scripts/configure.sh

It goes through the apps this repo would remove (data/fireos/user-apps.txt, with readable names from data/apps.txt) and asks, one by one, whether to remove each. Answer "no" and that app is never touched. It also asks whether you watch Prime Video — Prime stays installed either way, but if you say yes its video CDN is left out of the blocklist so playback keeps working — and whether you want the launcher replaced and the DNS filter installed.

The answers go into dumbtv.conf (git-ignored). Re-run it any time to change your mind; the scripts read that file, so nothing has to be edited by hand.

Ads, telemetry, experiments and Alexa are removed regardless. This step is only about apps a person might actually watch.

Reversibility

scripts/restore.sh puts back package state, app-ops, network rules and every setting the pass touched — using the snapshot preflight.sh took first, so the values are the ones this TV actually had, not generic defaults. The snapshot is taken once: run preflight.sh before the first pass, and a later run cannot overwrite the originals.

Two things are not reversible:

1. Apps that live in /data. The streaming apps the pass uninstalls (JioHotstar, Zee5, JioCinema, SonyLIV, Discovery+, Aaj Tak, Twitch, FastScreen, MX Player) have their APKs deleted; they come back from the store, not from a script. The keep-list in configure.sh exists so you only lose what you agreed to lose.
2. Anything uninstalled after the fact. restore.sh restores the lists in data/, so an app removed by hand is still gone.

Everything else — the ~65 disabled packages, the launcher, the DNS filter, the settings — is undoable, and a factory reset also undoes it (including this repo's work).

What it changes

Every step is reversible with scripts/restore.sh.

The launcher

launcher/ is a home screen written for this repo: your apps, your HDMI inputs, a clock, and nothing else. Plain Java with no libraries, and no internet permission — it cannot phone home even if it wanted to. On Fire OS 7/8 it requests no permissions at all; on Fire OS 6 it asks for usage access, boot and task order, which its HOME keeper needs there. HOME lands on it in about 0.2 s, with no flash of Amazon's home.

It replaced Projectivy, which this repo used to install: Projectivy is closed source and asks for the advertising ID, ad attribution, install referrer, internet and package install/delete — far more than a home screen needs.

Just the launcher, without the rest of the pass:

adb connect <tv-ip>:5555
./launcher/install.sh            # downloads the release APK, checks it, installs it

No Java or Android SDK needed: the APK comes from the GitHub release, and its SHA-256 is pinned in launcher/install.sh. --build builds it from source instead. Details, settings and how the HOME takeover works: launcher/README.md.

Requirements

• A machine with adb (macOS, Linux, Windows via WSL/Git Bash).
• The TV on the same network, with Developer Options → ADB debugging on (Settings → My Fire TV → About → click the device name 7×, then back to My Fire TV → Developer Options).
• ~10 minutes. The scripts reboot the TV twice.

Quickstart

adb connect <tv-ip>:5555
adb devices                      # must show "device", not "unauthorized"

./scripts/preflight.sh           # read-only: device facts + what would change
./scripts/configure.sh           # asks what to keep, writes dumbtv.conf
./scripts/all.sh                 # the full pass, asks before touching anything
./scripts/verify.sh              # proof: blocked vs still-working domains

If anything looks wrong later, scripts/restore.sh puts it back.

Run one piece at a time

Every script takes --dry-run to print its commands without running them, and -y to skip confirmation.

Safety rules the scripts enforce

• A hard-coded never-disable list (launcher, settings, TV input/routing, device control, Bluetooth pairing, system UI). Disabling those is how a TV ends up with a black screen and no working remote.
• Nothing writes to /system. No adb remount, no pm uninstall without --user 0, no hosts-file editing — Fire OS verifies /system with dm-verity and modifying it is the documented brick path.
• The DNS filter only runs if the app's VPN consent was pre-granted, and it is verified after a reboot before the script reports success.

Documentation

• launcher/README.md — the launcher: install, remote controls, settings file, HOME takeover
• docs/HOW-IT-WORKS.md — the five mechanisms and why each is needed
• docs/GOTCHAS.md — everything that went wrong while building this
• docs/OTHER-TVS.md — which TVs can be opened, which cannot, and what is being worked on
• docs/YOUTUBE.md — why YouTube ads cannot be blocked at the network, and what to replace the app with
• docs/WHY-NOT-REPLACE-OS.md — the bootloader/verity wall, and the root exploit
• docs/FAQ.md — factory reset, updates, Prime Video, "is this illegal" (it isn't)
• catalog/ — per-platform menu paths, prompts and quirks, machine-readable

For AI agents

AGENTS.md is the machine-readable contract: preconditions, the user interview, exact ordering, guardrails, verification and recovery. Point an agent at this repository and it can run the whole thing without improvising.

llms.txt is the short index for agents that look for one, and catalog/devices/ holds the part that isn't automatable — developer-mode menu path, where the IP is shown, which dialogs block a bot — one YAML per platform or model. Adding a TV to the catalog is how this gets better for the next person.

There is also a skill file at skills/firetv-debloat/SKILL.md for agents that load skills.

Credits and licences

Scripts, docs and the launcher: MIT (LICENSE). Device catalog: CC BY-SA 4.0 (catalog/LICENSE).

Installed but not bundled: personalDNSfilter (GPL), downloaded from its upstream release at run time. The launcher APK is built from launcher/ and published on this repo's releases. The Amazon tracker list is fetched from HaGeZi DNS blocklists at run time; nothing is vendored, so the blocklist stays current.

Nothing in this repository is Amazon code.