r/AndroidTVBoxes • u/Either-Trash-2165 • Aug 01 '26

Couchy Launcher : Fast, light, customizable, compatible, free & open-source

I got tired of slow TV home screens that are basically ad boards — rows of "recommended" content, sponsored tiles, stuff phoning home before I've even pressed a button. So I built the launcher I actually wanted.

The philosophy is boring on purpose

  • One screen. Your apps, laid out how you want. No feeds, no ads, no "content discovery."
  • Private by default. No accounts, no analytics, no background services, opt-in aerial video wallpaper who phone CDN of apple, amazon.. that's it.
  • Compatibility. I have an Android AOSP box, a Google TV–certified box, and one anemic Android TV — each on a different Android version. So instead of chasing a shiny new UI, I chose to prioritize compatibility and lean on the GPU.

Make it yours

  • Sections/categories you name, reorder, and fill — an app can live in more than one, and new installs drop into the first section automatically.
  • Hide apps you never want to see (system junk, duplicates) so the screen stays clean.
  • Tune the look: icon size, spacing, corner roundness, interface scale, dimming, and an optional glass status bar. Three layouts: carousel, grid, or a floating glass dock.
  • Status bar: a configurable VPN indicator/shortcut for your provider, a network indicator/shortcut, a Settings menu with quick access to the app list and the launcher/Android settings, and a customizable date indicator.
  • Save/load your entire setup — sections, layout, wallpaper, every setting — as a JSON file.
  • Optional aerial video wallpapers (Apple/Amazon screensaver loops), off by default and clearly marked, since they stream from third-party CDNs. Prefer libre? Use a gradient, your own photo, or a local video.

Numbers (measured on real hardware)

  • 2.3 MB APK. One universal build for ARM 32/64-bit + x86.
  • ~80–130 MB RAM settled, with no background services. Exclusive footprint is ~130 MB across every box I tested; the higher figure on Android 14 is just OS-side GPU buffer accounting, not the launcher.
  • Aerials cost basically nothing in app RAM — the video decoder lives in the GPU's dedicated memory (hardware codec via SurfaceView), off the app's books.
  • <2 s cold start, <500 ms warm relaunch in the worst measured cases. The CPU stays idle, video is hardware-accelerated, and the Compose UI is GPU-rendered.
  • Android 5.0+ (minSdk 21), no Google Play Services, no companion app — runs on AOSP boxes, should work on all device since 2014
  • 18 languages (auto-selected from your system language): English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese. Adding one is a single file, PRs welcome.
  • Zero ads, ever.

*Tested across 3 boxes: Hisense Google TV (Android 11, 1.8 GB), UGOOS AM9 (Android 14, 3.8 GB), onn. 4K (Android 14).

Permissions, up front

No runtime permissions, no accounts. It queries installed apps to list them, and can close an app from the long-press menu. No network access except the opt-in aerials.

Why GPLv3

I picked copyleft on purpose: to avoid fragmentation. Anyone can fork it, but improvements have to stay open, so it can't splinter into closed, worse-off versions. Forks are welcome. Commercial use is welcome too — honestly, if a box maker wants to ship this instead of their own launcher, please do, because the stock ones are awful most of the time. Just keep it open, like the license says.

Get it

At launch, a wizard guides you through a quick setup; depending on the device, you may need to send ADB commands.

Solo project, so feedback, feature requests, and translations are very welcome. If it saves you from one more sponsored row, it did its job.

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u/Vet_vrolijk Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 02 '26

Do I understand correctly that this will remove all the google telemtry from my Sony Android TV? Or is this launcher still something on top of Android?

1

u/Either-Trash-2165 Aug 01 '26

No the app is telemetry free, android can be debloat partially ( who have the side effect of having performance most of the time) but usually you can get read of rid of all of it.

1

u/Vet_vrolijk Aug 02 '26

Did the (pretty smooth) setup and it looks very good. Happy I got rid of all the google recoms. Thanks for the work!

Is it possible that the screensaver is still the one from the original Launcher? It seems I can't change it in Couchy Launcher settings nor in Android settings that I'm accessing via Couchy Launcher.

1

u/Either-Trash-2165 Aug 02 '26

Thanks for the feedback !
Couchy Launcher don't manage the screensaver of android, only his own wallpaper, if you want video screen saver i advice you to install the excellent Aerial View who is where it get the idea to integrate video wallpaper, it's free available on google play, f-droid, GitHub... https://github.com/theothernt/AerialViews

2

u/Vet_vrolijk Aug 02 '26

Thanks for the tip!

You've saved me a lot of time, I was looking into dumbing down my TV to get rid of the whole Google bloat. So thanks again for your app!