With the recent updates to Android TV basically ruining the experience by adding the homescreen ads, the only way to get rid of them is by downgrading the Android TV home. You can easily do that if you go to the Settings > Apps > See all apps > Show system apps and click on the Android TV home app and select Uninstall Updates. But some devices like in my case only go as far back as to a version that still has homescreen ads. Here's the way I did it using ADB.
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- Downloading the stuff you need
Go to APKmirror and download the APK for an older version of the Android TV home on your computer or laptop. The version I downloaded was version 1.11.1 .
You will also need platform tools by Google , go download the version for your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux)
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- Preparing files
Extract the platform-tools zip, and then rename the Android TV home APK to app.apk for simplicity. Move the app.apk file to the folder containing the files for platform tools
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- Getting the local IP of your Android TV device
Then you will need the IP of the TV or Android TV device which can be found in Settings > Network & Internet > (the WiFi you are connected to) and it should say your device's local IP.
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- Pushing the APK to the device and downgrading the launcher
First you want to open the platform tools folder in CMD, Windows Powershell, or Terminal for Macs. On Windows, you just hold shift and right click inside the folder and click "Open Command Prompt window here" or "Open Powershell window here"
In the shell that you opened in the platform-tools folder, type in adb connect <the IP of your TV/device> When it connects, then type in adb push app.apk /data/local/tmp/app.apk. The APK file for the Android TV home version you downloaded will be sent to /data/local/tmp/. Then after that's done, type in adb shell pm install -r -d /data/local/tmp/app.apk and it will downgrade the launcher. Then boom, all done. All of the steps except for the last one only have to be done once, after that you only need to type in the last command in if it updates the launcher to the latest version after a reboot like in my case.
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If it upgrades the version of the launcher to the latest version, to make it easier you can just download Remote ADB Shell on your phone (Android only) from the Play Store, connect to your TV and just type in pm install -r -d /data/local/tmp/app.apk . The app even remembers the IP of the device, and the last few commands you typed so after the first time after typing the command, just connect to the TV and touch and hold the area where you type in commands and there are your recent command.
This is nice, but then you would have to manually keep up with app updates in Play Store. If you turn automatic updates back on, you'll get the newest Android TV Home again, and thus, you'll also get the update to enable the ads pushed from the servers once again.
The only way to guarantee that you keep this old version of the Android TV Home launcher on your device is to disable automatic Play Store updates and manually update your apps. This can be a pain if, for example, Netflix just stops working one day and you're not sure why, but an app update is required for it to properly work again.