Previously used ES File Explorer on all my devices, without really thinking about why I used it. It was an old recommendation years ago and it just stuck with me on every phone tablet and Android TV.

Now it turns out they are permanently DELETED from the Android TV Google Play store since mid-2019, because ES had embedded spying code that clicks on hidden ads to earn money without user consent!

So I needed a replacement and went through old threads here and saw many people recommending FX File Explorer ( http://www.nextapp.com/fx/ ).

The screenshots were beautiful but I saw that it had some 7 day trial and costs money, so I went to look at other alternatives such as the free but awfully ugly and clunky X-Plore. Many people like that one since it is totally free, though.

By accident, I went back to the FX File Explorer page and accidentally installed it. Tried to cancel the download but I was too late... So I decided to run the application.

Turns out it was a wonderful accident. The UI is very clean and beautiful. And the navigation is much better than ES (which was always absolute HELL to navigate properly to the desired buttons since it jumps all over the screen randomly). The navigation in FX is absolutely solid and perfect.

You can even open multiple folders at the same time and easily cut/copy files between them, which is insanely useful (and seems to be unlimited since I have 11 folders open so far and got bored of opening more). The cut/paste clipboard is fantastic and lets you view exactly which files you have in the clipboard at the moment, so that you never blindly paste anything.

You can also split the screen view to see two of the open folders at the same time.

Selecting multiple files is very easy by tapping and holding on each file to add them to the selection.

You can easily navigate to any folder in the open path by clicking on the address bar which shows a breadcrumb bar of every subfolder.

You can change file view modes to icons, list or cards.

The progress bar when copying/moving/deleting files is fantastic and provides clear information about progress and file count.

While you are doing a long and slow copy/delete, you can click the "X" icon at the top of the progress dialog, and it will minimize itself to the "tasks" sidebar and let you do other stuff while you wait for the long process. I have never seen other file managers with that feature before.

There is also a very nice "completed tasks history" which lists every serious file action you have done, such as cut-/copy-paste, delete, etc.

You can search for and find files, which uses an indexed database for very quick searches.

You can add folders to your bookmarks/favorites to easily navigate to them from the app's start page. You can even organize the bookmarks in folders/groups if you have tons of them. For example, I added a SMB1 network share, and then created a shortcut to that share for instant access to my NAS media box. You can also set custom icons and titles for your shortcuts.

It has a built in video player, music player, image viewer, text viewer, text editor, and binary hex viewer.

It supports creating and unpacking archives such as zip, 7zip and rar.

There are cleanup tools for visualizing disk storage and cleaning up trash files. You can navigate the disk/storage folder by folder and it shows what the largest folder/file is within each folder you check (so let's say you look at Main Storage and it shows that the Android folder takes 2970mb, then you click on that and see that the largest folder in there is "org.xbmc.kodi" which is your media center app, and voila you realize you should do some cleanup/maintenance of Kodi to free space, very useful). You can also see APK sizes for all installed apps which tells you what applications are huge and bloated and maybe should be uninstalled. It can also find duplicate files on your system, and show you the largest files on your system, for easy cleanup.

There is a Web Access feature which lets you start a web server on your device and access it in your computer's web browser to see the files in your device and upload/download/manage the files.

You can customize the colors very deeply with tons of choices for the UI colors and trim colors, and light/dark modes, so you can make it look any way you desire. And you can customize the built-in icon colors and their shapes (square, round, etc). There are also alternative icon themes to install.

They have no ads (at least not on Android TV from what I can see, but their slogan is "No ads. No annoyances. No tracking. Manage your files. Retain your privacy." so I assume it is ad-free everywhere), and the infinite free version lets you manage the local device and attached USB/SDCard storage.

If you want Network shares (SMB1, SMB2+), Bluetooth (transfers to/from Bluetooth devices), FTP (including secure FTP-S/FTP-ES), SSH FTP, WebDAV, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, OwnCloud, SugarSync support, and FX Connect (easy transfers between two devices that both run FX), then you can get a 7 day trial (it says there's no charge after the 7 days end) for the Plus version.

I ended up buying a lifetime license for the FX Plus version which has all features, and only costs $1.99 dollars as a one-time fee. Seriously nothing to complain about at that price.

The company that makes it is "NextApp, Inc." so it's made by a large American company and not an indie developer or foreign company, which is nice to know for respecting privacy laws and quality reasons.

Furthermore, I installed it on my other Android devices, and my FX Plus license (the one I bought via my Android TV) is valid on all of them, which is awesome! Everything is really fantastic with a touch interface, and the UI animations are beautiful. So it's great no matter which device it's on!

Had to share my recommendation here and thank everyone who had recommended FX File Explorer. It is way better, way cleaner, way more reliable, and way more intuitive than ES ever was! I definitely have only begun to scratch the surface of what this app can do!