Fire TV Lite Launcher

What it is

Amazon's Fire TV home screen is slow and full of adverts. Lite Launcher replaces it with a clean, quick one: the focused app shown large at the top, a soft colour wash taken from its artwork, and a grid of apps underneath. The whole APK is about 130 KB, built from plain Android views with no libraries.

What it does

• Top Shelf and ambient backdrop. The backdrop is cheap to draw: the app's artwork is shrunk to 16×9 pixels and stretched back with filtering.
• Top bar with the date, free memory, a Wi-Fi pill that can switch networks, a sleep timer and the clock.
• Pin, hide and app info on any app, and hidden apps aren't loaded at all, so they cost no memory.
• Keeps Amazon's extras down: while the home screen is up it stops the background processes of Amazon's launcher, Appstore, Alexa, adverts and telemetry.
• firetv-services.sh disables or restores the rest of Fire OS's bloat over ADB. Nothing is uninstalled.

The hard part: the Home button

Fire OS 8 always sends Home to Amazon's own launcher and ignores the normal way of changing it. So an accessibility service brings Lite Launcher back the moment Home is pressed, when Amazon's home window appears, and again as a safety net.

Fire OS 5 needed a different trick: it resets third-party accessibility services, so a foreground service follows the system log and puts Lite Launcher up in an overlay within about 20 ms, before Amazon's home has even drawn.

Built and tested on a Fire TV Stick 4K (Fire OS 8) and a 2nd-gen Fire TV Stick (Fire OS 5).