TV Tweak

Debloat and tune Android TV devices over ADB. No root, fully reversible, keeps DRM playback working. One generic POSIX sh script; everything that depends on the device lives in a profile directory under devices/.

Profile	Device	Verified on
firetv-stick-hd	Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (karat / AFTKRT)	Fire OS 8.1.8.0
sharp-4k-googletv	Sharp 4K UHDTV (MediaTek MT9676 / maniatika)	Google TV, Android 14

Every package list was taken from pm list packages on the device it names. Generic Android TV lists are how Widevine gets broken: com.amazon.firebat looks like a service worth killing and is the Prime Video app; com.mediatek.tv.oneworld.tvcenter looks like bloat and is the HDMI input switcher. The logic is pm disable-user in a loop — the value is the curated list.

Setup

Needs adb and curl on the host, and ADB debugging on the device — each profile's README has the steps. Android Studio installs platform-tools without putting it on PATH, so the standard SDK locations are checked as a fallback; set ADB=/path/to/adb if yours lives somewhere else.

macOS and Linux both work, and CI runs the checks on both. The device is reached over TCP, so Linux needs no udev rules.

The profile is picked by matching ro.product.model against devices/*/device.conf; pass --device <profile> to choose explicitly. With exactly one device attached, or exactly one advertising Android's wireless debugging over mDNS, it is detected automatically:

export DEVICE=192.168.1.50:5555        # only if several devices are attached

Usage

./tweak.sh [--device <profile>] <command>

  info                 device summary
  backup               snapshot which packages are already disabled; pins the device serial
  debloat [tiers...]   disable packages (default tiers come from the profile)
  restore              undo everything: packages and settings
  tune                 apply the profile's settings.conf, trim caches
  apps                 sideload the profile's apps.conf (checksum-pinned)
  verify [--deep]      DRM props, protected packages, drift, launcher; --deep launches media apps
  status               list currently disabled packages
  launch <package>     start an app with no home-screen icon
  home [package]       show or set the launcher
  dns [host|off|show]  system-wide DNS-over-TLS
  sleep <min|never>    display-off and device-sleep timers

First run — verify first, so you can tell a regression from a pre-existing fault:

./tweak.sh verify && ./tweak.sh backup && ./tweak.sh debloat && ./tweak.sh tune
./tweak.sh verify

debloat appends everything it disables to backups/<profile>/applied.txt and every setting written goes to backups/<profile>/settings.txt with its original value. restore reverses exactly those, so it stays correct after you edit packages.conf and never touches what you had already disabled yourself.

backup also records ro.serialno; every later run refuses to touch a device with a different serial, which guards against DHCP handing the IP to something else. EXPECT_SERIAL= overrides it.

Run verify after reboots and after installing anything: some firmware re-enables packages on its own, and verify reports exactly which ones drifted.

Profiles

devices/<profile>/
  README.md        what was verified, the tiers, and the device's quirks
  device.conf      model, device codename, default tiers, accepted launchers, props to verify
  packages.conf    tiered package list with rationale
  keep.conf        packages that are never disabled, whatever packages.conf says
  apps.conf        sideload targets as <package>|<url>|<sha256>; `play` as url opens the store
  settings.conf    <namespace> <key> <value> lines applied by `tune`

Adding a device is adding a directory. Start from pm list packages on the device, put the launcher, input stack, DRM services and every streaming app in keep.conf, and grow packages.conf from what dumpsys meminfo and dumpsys package tell you. test.sh checks that every profile parses, names a launcher, has all of its default tiers, and never lists a kept package.

Safety

keep.conf is enforced independently of packages.conf, so editing the package list cannot break playback. verify checks the DRM props named in device.conf, that nothing kept is disabled, that disabled packages stayed disabled, that settings held, that sideloads are present, and that the home screen resolves to an accepted launcher. --deep also launches each installed streaming app; it takes over the TV.

verify shows the DRM flags are advertised, not that a licence was fetched. Playback was confirmed by hand on each verified device after the full debloat and tune.

apps downloads over HTTPS and aborts on a checksum mismatch; the pins are recorded in each apps.conf together with the date. Both verified devices are 32-bit (armeabi-v7a) and reject arm64-v8a-only builds.

Layout

tweak.sh         the tool
test.sh          self-test for the parsing logic and every profile; no device required
devices/         one directory per device, see Profiles
backups/<profile>/
  state-*.txt    what was already disabled before the tool ran
  applied.txt    what the tool disabled; the exact input to `restore`
  settings.txt   every setting written, as `<namespace> <key> <applied> <original>`
  serial.txt     the device this profile was first used on

License

MIT — see LICENSE.