Aerial uses AI to give smart TVs a clean desktop, replacing the system launcher without root

When I went home for the National Day holiday, my grandma, trembling, grabbed my hand and said, "Grandson, I can't find that TV drama I was watching last time. Find it for me."

I asked, "Grandma, what's it called?"

My grandma said, "I can't remember the name, it's just a war of resistance one."

I hopped around among all sorts of apps, some I could name and some I couldn't. Some of them, once opened, first make you watch 30 seconds of ads for Zulijian shoes, blood glucose meters, liver-protection pills...

In the end, I found that poorly made anti-Japanese fantasy drama in a "xxTV" I'd never heard of, and my grandma's eyes instantly lit up. "Yes, yes, yes!"

I clicked on the episode, and there were another 90 seconds of ads. After 10 or 20 minutes of playback, another ad would be inserted. Taking advantage of the gaps, my grandma went to the toilet, poured water, and even managed to rinse rice (this ADHDer salutes her).

Beyond the non-interoperable payment systems, the dazzling screen interfaces, the motley array of preinstalled apps (which gradually make the TV lag), the cumbersome operations, and the ads specifically designed to fleece the elderly—these are what people loathe even more.

The whole world has long suffered under "smart TVs"!

Fighting poison with poison

A netizen abroad posted a complaint that their parents' TV had to play an ad before even opening the Netflix interface, which was truly unbearable.

Unable to stand it any longer, they sent the TV model to Claude Code, had the AI connect to the TV over the local network, deleted 25 built-in apps, and casually wrote a clean desktop.

Soon, a series of related projects appeared on Github, with things like dumbtv and cleanyourtv popping up. AI has finally been developed for another conscientious use—making "smart TVs" dumb.

Although I really wanted to remodel the TV at home this way, my first reaction was that domestic TVs probably wouldn't be so easy to talk to.

Even though they all run Android, in China each manufacturer customizes its own system. I'd tinkered before with how to replace the system's built-in desktop. Installing a new desktop isn't hard; the hard part is replacing it as the system default desktop.

Because there's no root permission, I never found a way to disable the system's built-in desktop. The moment you press the Home button, it gets summoned, like a stubborn plaster.

And I actually did find one.

There's a tool called Aerial. Once installed on a TV, the desktop becomes as clean and simple as Apple TV, with only wallpaper, a clock, and apps. Although this clean interface can't block the ads that come with the TV at startup, at least the ads that pop up from time to time on the home screen are gone.

The issue I cared about most—the inability to replace the system desktop without root—was solved.

Its implementation is very clever. After Aerial is installed on the TV, if the TV allows changing the default desktop app, then you just set it normally.

For the stubborn ones that don't allow changing the desktop (most manufacturers), Aerial arranges a "desktop guardian" program to watch in the background. Whenever the original desktop is awakened, it pulls Aerial back to the foreground, directly covering the system desktop.

Brilliant!

In standby, some TVs forcibly clear third-party apps from the background. I looked at how Aerial solves this problem. It uses a system-level feature Android launched back in July 2013: "notification listening."

When the TV enters standby and clears Aerial, the notification listener disconnects along with it. The Android system will rebind the notification listener, thereby waking up Aerial's application, which can revive within 0.5 seconds and continue running the desktop guardian. Shutting down and restarting is unaffected.

In other words, the developer used Android's underlying capabilities to bypass the human-written standby background-clearing rules and achieve a self-start mechanism similar to "rogue software."

For some TVs that by default block third-party apps from auto-starting, Aerial's installation script also explains how to get the TV to allow it, without any manual settings.

In less than a day after release, it got more than 200 stars on GitHub. From what I see now, after updates it also supports features like hiding icons, adding signal input sources to the home page, and customizing the interface. The developer community is also quite active—in just two days, a large number of bugs were reported and fixed, and adaptations were made for many TVs.

Let TV return to being TV

What's beginner-friendly is that the developer made Agent-based automatic deployment. In Agents like Doubao and WorkBuddy, just copy in the prompt provided by Aerial's official site and follow along.

Then the second step: turn on adb debugging on the TV, which is essentially the key for you to send commands from your computer to the TV.

Don't be scared off by the name; this step isn't hard either. The developer wrote instructions for several mainstream brands on the official website. Find the one for your TV and follow the tutorial step by step.

If there isn't one, ask an AI and you can also find a way to enable adb.

Step three: go to the TV's network settings and find the TV's IP address. Usually you can see it on the WiFi details page (for example, mine is 192.168.1.131).

After remembering this address, open Aerial's official website (aerial.qust.me) on your computer, click the "Install" button in the upper right corner, and fill the address you just found into "TV IP."

Then select "Let Agent install" below, click "Copy" in the upper right corner of the text box, and copy the entire contents of the box.

As for those commands inside, it's fine if you don't understand them—just send them directly to your AI Agent and press Enter.

At this point, the AI will fetch the relevant required code itself and then try to connect to your TV. All you have to do is keep an eye on the TV and, when the TV popup asks "Allow USB debugging?", use the remote to select "Allow."

Congratulations! You'll have an "old-fashioned" TV.

Go ahead and tear it down!

For a long time in the past, I felt that the "smart" in "smart home" was a derogatory term.

Take TV manufacturers: they wish they could stuff a single screen full of recommendations and ads, and feel that leaving any blank space is a waste.

Never mind that the elderly at home can't find the entrance to watch an anti-Japanese fantasy drama—even young people like me have to aim carefully before pressing the remote, for fear that with one lag, one wrong click, we'll be bounced into some ad or subscription payment again.

The developer said that from the code to the apk, to the revival mechanism, and even the official website, everything was produced by AI Vibe Coding (AI, what on earth have you been distilling!).

I thought of Apple's "1984" ad: a hammer flies toward the big screen and smashes the established order.

The cost of "changing an unusable feature" has been reduced to a few sentences, and the walls manufacturers built on technical barriers are now being torn down.

I have a strong feeling that the speed at which users tear down walls has almost caught up with, and may even exceed, the speed at which manufacturers build them.

At first, it was only a few people making the effort. But soon, those who had originally just planned to watch from the sidelines were also handed a hammer, and they discovered, "Huh? So I can do it too."

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Guokr" (ID: Guokr42), author: Wantong, editor: Shen Zhihan, published with authorization from 36Kr.