# A lean, offline home screen for a $30 Fire TV Stick

Luncher swaps the ad-stuffed home screen on Android TV and Fire TV for a fast, offline grid of your own apps, written with AI coding agents.

- Category: Interface (tool)
- Device: [Fire TV Edition television](https://afterware.xyz/d/fire-tv-edition-television)
- Made by: [CVasilakis](https://github.com/CVasilakis) on GitHub
- Original: https://github.com/CVasilakis/luncher
- On Afterware: https://afterware.xyz/p/a-lean-offline-home-screen-for-a-30-fire-tv-stick

## Can I build this?

- Difficulty: Beginner
- AI-buildability: 5/5 (It's a plain Kotlin Android app sideloaded over adb onto a device you already own, so AI tools can write nearly all of it.)
- Time: A weekend
- Cost: $0–30
- Tools: adb, Android Studio

Estimates based on the original write-up. How the AI-buildability score works: https://afterware.xyz/ai-buildability

## Starter prompt

```
Based on "A lean, offline home screen for a $30 Fire TV Stick" on Afterware: https://afterware.xyz/p/a-lean-offline-home-screen-for-a-30-fire-tv-stick

Build a minimal Android TV launcher in Kotlin with no dependencies. It should show installed TV apps as a grid of banner tiles, support reordering and hiding apps with the D-pad, and load a wallpaper with dim and blur. Keep startup fast and avoid background services, ads and network access.
```

## Story

The default Fire TV home screen is slow, full of ads and takes too many clicks to reach anything. Luncher is an open source replacement that's under 200 KB, starts instantly and has no background services, no ads, no tracking and no accounts. Your apps sit in a grid of banners wherever you want them on the screen, with a status bar for the time and date.

It's a plain Kotlin app with no frameworks or dependencies. You can reorder apps, hide the ones you never open, pick the tile shape from square to pill, and set a wallpaper with dim and blur. The repo includes an AGENTS.md file, so the code was written with AI coding tools. The app is signed and reproducible, and it installs over adb on Google TV or through Launcher Manager on Fire OS.

Worth stealing: the install guides are a good template for any hardware you want to repurpose. Luncher uses adb to make the app the default home, and it notes that Home needs a fallback before you disable the stock launcher.

## Resources

- [Repository](https://github.com/CVasilakis/luncher)
- [F-Droid package](https://f-droid.org/packages/com.luncher.launcher/)
- [Latest release](https://github.com/CVasilakis/luncher/releases/latest)
- [Launcher Manager (Fire OS)](https://xdaforums.com/t/app-firetv-noroot-launcher-manager-change-launcher-without-root.4176349/)
- [Android TV launcher list](https://gist.github.com/denilsonsa/80cbb3a14b3bf63de75e6bf81c89ee05)

Tags: android tv, fire tv, launcher, kotlin, offline, fire os, vibe-coded

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