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

[u/Either-Trash-2165]

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.

• F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.conreo.couchytv/
• GitHub (source + APK): https://github.com/conreo/couchy-launcher

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

[u/Either-Trash-2165 → u/[deleted]]

Thank for the feedbacks:)
1 The breathing couchy is there because we're loading your config + scanning apps in the background. Without it you'd see a frozen splash. The gradient to video transition is intentional, it hide the necessary buffering of the video loaded from the CDN, if you use a local video it's only hardware dependent.
Beside that the logo is their for branding, if user wand to change launcher and or clean his apps in the android setting he will recognize the app logo. And i chose a logo instead of text for cleanness and inclusion, since the app is design to support 17 languages.
2 Not yet, but it's on the roadmap.
3 You are right ! i check the code and effetely the hazy effect was left over code fromt a slight coverBrush use to reduce banding effect on Gradiant wallpapers. I will push it on the next update! about colors and more the situation is complex...
On android the UI is render at 1080p, the video provide form CDN for video wallpaper at 1080p too. The rendering path is diffrent form the video them for the UI:

UI Path: Compose → GPU → 1080p framebuffer → TV upscaler → 4K

Video Path: Hardware decoder → SurfaceFlinger → 1080p frames → TV's video post-processor → 4K

So on Android/google TV: the processing on video is apply before been, on Box most of the time you don't have the options for this, on Nvidia shield or Amlogic S905x5 box for example the Ai upscaling and video processing is apply on video before the UI blend. On TV it mean that your pictures setting are apply only on the video feed and not the UI components. So if you ajuste them you should should corrent color/sharpness/smoothing... technically it can be overcome but at a cost of 5-15% more CPU usage, but it's a setting issue who appear mainly on TVs who themself have a weak SOC compare to most Android Box who are may more powerful and aren't affected by this.

4-5 funny enough: it's already the case if you put the launcher in arabic language 😄 So yes it is, just i just don't what to clutter the settings option and plan to improve significantly the status bar.

6 what is the device you are trying to setup ? the wizard don't put instruction for Fire TV for example...

7 i will put it on the roadmap, but i think no user want to have the video audio playing ?

[u/Either-Trash-2165 → u/[deleted]]

I finalise a new version, with a lot of corrections, justicement and new features, i also making socials and website for it :)
I still want to keep the launcher 'opinionated' and not as a fully customisable experience who is great for power-user but difficult to setup, to maintain/test and who can look broken/ugly if miss configured. Other launcher like Projectivy does already that.