Comment by sfRattan

1 day ago

With a bit of fiddling, Android TV can be as good as Apple TV in terms of privacy. Not out of the box, of course, but ADB can remove advertising/surveillance related APK files from most devices sold in big box stores and there are open-source, alternative clients to YouTube and a few other platforms available due to the popularity on the underlying AOSP platform. The same is possible to varying extents on smart TVs that use Android TV as their OS.

You can even completely replace Google's sponsored-content-feed launcher/homescreen with an open source alternative that is just a grid of big tiles for your installed apps (FLauncher).

For me, SmartTube with both ad-blocking and sponsor block is the killer feature of Android TV as a platform.

If you're into local network media streaming, Jellyfin's Android TV app is also great. Their Apple TV app is limited enough that people recommend using a paid third party client instead. And that's usually inevitably the case with Apple's walled gardens... The annual developer fee means things that people would build for the community on AOSP/Android are locked behind purchases or subscriptions on iOS and Apple TV.

4 comments

sfRattan

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queenkjuul  17 hours ago

It never occurred to me that that's why all the macOS utilities cost money. (I mean not literally all but way more basic stuff than you'd ever think to pay for on Windows or Android). I did figure Apple encouraged it because of their massive cut off the revenue but i forgot they charge devs to publish in the first place.

  • sfRattan  16 hours ago

    MacOS isn't as locked down as iOS or Apple TV (yet) unless you publish via the Mac App Store, but a secondary factor is that Apple customers expect to pay to solve a problem without having to think about it.

    The good is that the above norm encourages the creation of high quality software. The bad is that, by the same token, some ideas that would be free/libre community projects on other platforms are instead paid utilities in Apple's walled garden, especially on iOS and Apple TV.

  • coldtea  10 hours ago

    >It never occurred to me that that's why all the macOS utilities cost money

    All macOS utilities absolutely don't cost money. There are countless free macOS utilities in the Mac App Store, as well as open source utilities for macOS specifically too.