Your TV is full of ads. People are fixing that

The TV that wanted to sell you things

Most smart TVs arrive stuffed. Apps nobody asked for, rows of sponsored shows, a home screen that feels more like a shop window than your own space.

cleanyourtv is a free, open-source tool that tidies that up. It connects to an Android or Google TV over your Wi-Fi, clears out the preinstalled clutter and gives you a calm, simple home screen in the spirit of Apple TV. Its tags mention Sony Bravia, TCL, Xiaomi and Fire TV, and it sat at the top of Trendshift's weekly trending list.

Not a one-off

What caught my eye is that it isn't alone. free-my-tv offers an ad-free Google TV home screen with one button to undo, and says plainly it was built with Claude Code. aerial-tv does something similar for Xiaomi, TCL and other TVs made for the Chinese market. cleanyourtv itself carries a "vibe coding" tag.

So people are using AI helpers to take back control of things they already own. A quiet little shift.

What it means for you

If there's a screen in your waiting room, shop or café, it's part of how your place feels. A wall of ads isn't the mood you designed. And the annoying gadget in your business might now be fixable by someone with an afternoon and an AI assistant.

Words worth knowing

• Bloatware: apps a manufacturer preinstalls that you didn't choose and often can't easily remove.
• Launcher: the home screen of an Android device. Swap it and the whole thing feels different.
• Vibe coding: building software by describing what you want to an AI, rather than writing every line yourself.

Tonight, look at the TV in your space and ask: whose screen is this, really? The project lives at github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv.