Marquee: an ad-free Android TV launcher

My Sony Bravia XR-65A90J came with Google TV: a slow home screen full of ads and sponsored rows, run by a launcher that alone takes up 267 MB of the TV's storage. Over a week I redesigned the whole experience. First I stripped the TV of what it didn't need, then I designed and built a launcher of my own. Marquee is the result: a 1.4 MB app, no ads, no trackers, no telemetry, and only what I actually watch, from the platforms I pay for. It started life as Bravia Home; nothing in it is specific to Sony, so it now has a name of its own.

• Apps: seven pinned apps and an All apps tile in a 4×2 grid, under a billboard that rotates through the best-rated titles on your watchlist that you can stream right now, each with its scores, a short description and an Open in… button. With fewer than three matches, it shows what's trending on your platforms instead.
• Watching: continue watching, from the TV's own Watch Next list, as large posters with a progress bar and the minutes left.
• Watchlist: every title on your Must or Letterboxd watchlist that's streaming on one of your platforms, in one grid of posters, eight per row. Focus a poster and the billboard shows its details.
• Match days: when your football team plays, the game leads the billboard with its kickoff time, and the button opens the app that's actually showing it.
• Screensaver: when the TV sits idle, your watchlist becomes ambient art: backdrops of the titles still waiting for you drift slowly across the screen, each with its title, platform and a short meta line.
• The details: time, date and weather in the top bar, and wallpapers that change every 15 minutes.

I wanted the calm of tvOS with the content smarts of Google TV, and every decision came from using it on the sofa:

• One page, three views. A frosted switch (Apps, Watching, Watchlist) that the remote moves through; pressing down on a tab always opens that tab's section. It began with four views, and folding two of them into the Watchlist grid put the point of the launcher on a single screen.
• Crisp on a 4K panel. Posters are fetched at the size closest to the card and scaled down once with filtering, and platform logos sit next to the title at a size you can read from the sofa.
• Clean posters. True 2:3 posters with nothing on top. The grid fades out at its top and bottom edges instead of cutting a row in half, and art that only comes in landscape is letterboxed, never cropped.
• A focus that fits. On a poster, the highlight is a clean ring that floats an even distance outside the card and follows its corners. App tiles get a frosted glass that hugs the tile.
• A billboard that holds still. The title has a fixed two-line slot and the description always takes two lines, so the button and the pagination dots never move as titles rotate. The dots sit on the screen's centre line, and the text starts at the same spot on all three views.
• Scores inline. IMDb, the Tomatometer and Letterboxd sit as small chips right after the rating, year, length and genre, never cut off.
• A screensaver that stays quiet. The clock and date sit top right; bottom left, the title with its platform's badge and one line: film or series, rating, year, length and genre. No description, no scores. Each backdrop drifts with a slow zoom and a sideways pan for 16 seconds before crossfading to the next, and the text shifts a few pixels with every slide so nothing burns into an OLED panel.
• One type style, on a grid. Every title uses Inter in normal case with tight spacing, and the margins line the app tiles up with the text on the left and the switch on the right. Over the poster grid, the billboard trims itself to one title line and two lines of description so nothing collides.

• Your watchlist. With a Must username, Marquee reads everything you've marked as want to watch, films and series; mark something as watched in Must and it leaves the TV within the hour. Without one, it reads your public Letterboxd watchlist (films only) and your watched log, so a film you've seen never comes back.
• Matched to your platforms. TMDB finds each title by type and year, so same-named titles don't mix, and supplies posters and descriptions in your language. When a title streams on several of your platforms, the card goes to the one with the fewest matches so far, so every subscription gets its share.
• Only what you can watch. TMDB's availability data can lag, so every match is re-checked against JustWatch's live data for your country. No confirmed offer on one of your platforms, no card. Plex's free-with-ads titles count; Prime add-on channels that need their own subscription don't.
• Scores. IMDb ratings come from OMDb. The Tomatometer is read from each title's Rotten Tomatoes page and, for series, averaged across every season. Films add their Letterboxd average. The billboard ranks titles by the average of the three.
• Match days. Fixtures come from TheSportsDB. The card turns live at kickoff and leaves after the match. Its button opens the app that holds the rights in your country, and for La Liga, where rights change every matchday, it reads the real channel for each match from futbolenlatele.com.
• Continue watching. Marquee remembers when it first saw each item in Watch Next and drops it a week later, even if an app keeps bumping it to stay visible.
• Straight to the title. When JustWatch confirms an offer, it comes with the title's own link, and Marquee hands each app the form it actually accepts, checked against each app's intent filters on the TV: Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV and Plex take the link as is, while Movistar Plus+ and SkyShowtime get it rewritten into their own private formats. Netflix only lets partner launchers open a title, so Netflix cards open the app at its home; in Watching, Netflix's own resume links still play the episode. Without a link, Prime Video and HBO Max open a search for the title, and any other app opens fresh at its home, as do titles redirected to another app, like Apple TV+ to Movistar Plus+.
• Light and sturdy. A native Android app written in Java. A background lookup that fails is contained instead of crashing the home screen, and nothing leaves the TV except the lookups above, made with your own free keys.

You'll need JDK 17, the Android SDK (platform 34) and a TV with ADB debugging switched on. The download is the source code, a 1.6 MB ZIP; the app you build from it is 1.4 MB as a signed release or 3 MB as a debug build. Nothing on the TV is deleted, so everything can be undone.

1. Your accounts, region and team. Unzip the download and copy launcher/secrets.properties.example to launcher/secrets.properties. Fill in your MUST_USER (or LETTERBOXD_USER), WATCH_REGION (the country whose catalogs count, ES by default), CONTENT_LANG (en-US by default), the free TMDB and OMDb keys, and your teams' TheSportsDB ids in SPORTS_TEAM_IDS. Leave anything empty and that feature switches off. The file is never committed, so your keys stay yours.
2. Your platforms. In launcher/app/src/main/res/values/config.xml, set the apps pinned to the home row (dock_apps), the platforms behind the trending fallback (rec_apps), redirects such as Apple TV+ titles opening in Movistar Plus+ (launch_redirects), and which app shows each competition in your country (sports_league_apps, plus sports_tv_guide_teams and sports_channel_apps for La Liga's per-match guide). The defaults are Spain's.
3. Build and install. In launcher, run ./gradlew assembleDebug. For the smaller signed build, create a key with keytool -genkeypair -keystore release.keystore -alias tvhome, put its password in RELEASE_STORE_PASSWORD and run ./gradlew assembleRelease. Then connect with adb connect <tv-ip>:5555, install the APK with adb install -r, grant android.permission.READ_TV_LISTINGS, make Marquee the home screen with cmd package set-home-activity and switch off the stock launcher with pm disable-user.

The README in the download has every command in full.

Free to use and change under the MIT license. Marquee started from tv-vibehack by Gathin23 (MIT), whose license is included in the download. It uses the TMDB API but isn't endorsed or certified by TMDB. Streaming availability data comes from JustWatch.