Remove ads easily from Android TV / Google TV with the Projectivy Launcher ! No hacks or rooting!

hey everybody it's Lon Cy and I've long been a fan of Android TV all of my Nvidia Shields that I've been using now for the better part of a decade have Android TV installed but over the years Android TV and now Google TV is getting busier and busier with a lot of advertising and other stuff that I really don't want to see I just want to get back to being able to quickly launch my apps without a lot of other distractions and the other day my friend smoke monster reached out to me with a new launcher that he's been playing with called projecy that really simplifies things significantly so you get rid of all the ads you just get the apps and what's nice about this is that you can configure it so that it is always the active launcher without having to go through sideloading stuff in or even rooting your device you can basically set it up through the Google Play Store adjust one or two settings and get yourself a much simpler launcher and in this video we're going to install install this on my Nvidia Shield but the installation process will be the same for other Android TV devices as well and the best part is is that most of the functionality you're going to see is free too so you really have nothing to lose here so we're going to get into this in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that this Nvidia Shield I paid for with my own funds all the opinions you're about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded so let's get into it now and see how we can get this new launch ER working on this Nvidia device all right so step one here is to find the projective V launcher on the Google Play Store so we're going to go ahead here and install it and once this is installed we can actually just boot it right up and see how it works which I think we're going to do here once that installation process is complete and when it comes up it'll tell you a couple of things that you can do with the app and I'll show you some of those things as we work our way through here one of the big things you need to do is adjust the exess accessibility settings on your Android TV device and I'll show you that in a minute here because that's really key to making everything work the way you want and then of course it's going to remind you about permissions and then when you get to the end here you just allow it to uh do the things that you may or may not want it to do and once we get through that we can go ahead here and get started and begin using the launcher and what's nice about this is that it basically comes up and is just working for you right out of the gate and as you can see here it's quite a Spartan interface there's not much to it which is actually kind of nice I'd rather have less than more these days and what you'll get initially are all of your apps here organized alphabetically so all the TV apps are here at the top I have sideloaded some mobile phone apps onto my Nvidia Shield here and those are in their own mobile apps category and what you can do if you want to reorder things is just long press on an app like Disney plus here and what you'll get is a menu of options when you do that so I can go over here to reorder and this will move Disney plus around much like I could do on the regular Android TV interface but I can also organize things too so if I scroll down here to visibility and I go over to add to I can add it to a category you have favorites video music and games I'm going to put this one in favorites and now Disney plus here is at the top so I can have my favorite apps here at the top and then I can scroll through the other ones down below here another cool thing that this can do is if you go over to the option to launch on boot what'll happen is after your device boots up it automatically launches that app that you specify now when you leave the app you come back to the launcher but if you have an elderly family member or something and you just want want them to load up for example the HD home run app here basically that will launch automatically when they turn on their Android device and that might be really helpful for people that don't do much with their uh Android devices Beyond using just one app so for TV watching or something for someone who has trouble navigating this stuff that might be a really really helpful feature now the problem is that if I go into Disney plus right now though and we load up the app here and then if I exit the app it's not going to bring me back to the launcher it's going to bring us back to the Google one but there are settings in Android TV to change that so we're going to go up here to the gear icon and what we're going to do is Select accessibility which is going to be found in your device preferences every device might be a little different so you may have to hunt around a little bit more um but now that I'm in here I'm going to look for accessibility and once you have this Pro protiv app installed you're going to see projective launcher inside of this accessibility menu and if I go ahead here and turn it on what this is going to do is first of all give me a warning that it will be able to pick up the text of what I'm typing in so far from what I've researched this seems like a trustworthy developer but this is just something to keep in mind that this is what this app is able to do but in order to do the things we want it to do we have to enable this feature so I'm going to click on okay and now we have projective V enabled for some of the other settings that I want to show you so I'm going to go back over to the projective app here and now that we've got the accessibility enabled and I go up to its gear icon up here what we're going to do now is go over to the projective Launcher settings and in here if I go to General I can have it override the current launcher I'm going to enable that and so what'll happen now is if I load up Disney plus again and I have an error here of course but if I exit Disney plus it brings me back to the projec launcher and not to where we saw it go before which was over to the Google one so now I'm basically using this as my own launcher here without having to look at all the ads and as you can see it seems like it launches apps pretty quickly and feels very similar to the official app here it actually feels pretty good as I jump around from one app to the other I got some old apps on here because this this uh Nvidia Shield it's an original um but it's pretty cool really neat now you might be noticing there's a lot of extra room up here and they have some settings that you can adjust for that as well so if we go up back to the Gear I can go over to the Launcher settings again and in appearance you can actually go ahead and change how it looks so for example in the category section here I I can reduce the top margin percentage and if I go down to like 29% for example and back out uh you will see now things are closer to the top so you can tweak things around a little bit the only paid feature that I can see right now is background customization and specific user profiles so if those things aren't important to you you can get by using the free version the paid upgrade is about $7 and change and I think if you want to support the development of this app it might be helpful to kick a few bucks to the developer and overall so far it seems to be working pretty nicely there are a couple of other things though to show you let's take a look at those so we're going to start up here on the gear icon and I'm going to go over to edit categories this is where you can add more categories to the mix if you want more than the four that you saw earlier and if I go over here to New category you can see the options that I have here one thing I like about the category editor is that I can very quickly run through all of the installed apps on my system here and just add them from the menu which might be a little quicker than going through each app one by one in the interface and now that I've got this created and I jump back to the screen here as you can see I've got a full category and a scrollable list of applications that I just added so that's pretty handy there you also have the ability to edit channels and these are exactly the same as they are on the typical home screen so for example on Netflix here if I select this and I make it visible uh what it's going to do is pull in recommendations from the Netflix app so this is identical to how the Google TV interface works so if you liked having the recommendations on each app you still have that option here which I think might be very useful now if you want to edit the order of things you can do that so right now that channel just got added to the bottom but maybe I want that more towards the top so if I scroll all the way over to the left and I keep going what you'll see here is this little icon lighting up as I cursor over it and this is a settings icon here right here is a move icon and if I click on that I can move this whole Channel up higher so I can maybe drop it under the category I just created and so now I've got that here and again you can customize this screen for each user but you do have to get the paid version of the app to do it but this is something that you can at least get a feel for and if it's something that you find valuable this might be worth doing another thing I really like if we jump back into the settings is that once you find a layout that you're happy with you can actually export it and then repport it to your other devices through the manage settings option here so I can go ahead and just save locally or share it with another app so I could basically drop it into a file sharing app for example and bring it quickly over to another device I don't have to do this on every single device in the house now unfortunately there is no way to synchronize these settings across multiple devices you have to manually move those files around but I think if enough people support the app that might be something the developer could add in the future now if you wanted to get to your Android device settings that will still be accessible to you you click on the gear icon you get the projecy launcher option here and you can go to Android settings to adjust your device settings like you could before so overall I am very pleased with the Simplicity of getting this launcher to work and I want to thank smoke Monster again for letting me know about it and what's cool is that we're able to get this thing to become our default launcher basically bypassing the Google one and I don't have to go through the process of rooting this or sideloading stuff or going through some crazy multi-step configuration that might get wiped out by a system update this is all working through the accessibility settings and I suspect it will survive from One update to the next unless they get wise to whatever they're doing to make this launcher be the default one in addition to the Nvidia devices here I did install it on a Google TV device namely the new on stick it worked fine there one thing I noticed with it though is that the existing launcher is still loading and then this is getting loaded on top of that as you can see from that stick loading up so devices like this one that don't have a lot of ram might have some performance issues I didn't really notice anything with my stick here but it's possible because that other launcher is still in Ram it's just being kind of kept away from the user here but the shield with all of its memory doesn't seem to struggle at all here and if you were looking for a simpler way to get your apps launched without a lot of extra fluff I think this is really worth taking a look at it will also work on Fire TV devices but that does take a few extra steps I might do a follow-up video that goes into detail on that it's not as simple as what we demonstrated here through the Play Store and of course there are ways to root your device and basically Force this launcher to be the launcher as opposed to the default one but a lot of times especially with these Nvidia devices when you get an update it wipes out those changes so this should survive I think from One update to the next and we'll keep an eye on the launcher here I think it's got a lot of potential and I think there's a lot of neat features that the community might suggest for it but even in its current form I think it is something that a lot of people are looking for which is why I thought I would make today's video that's going to do it for now until next time this is lon sibin thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lon.tv supporters including gold level supporters Brian Parker budley hot sauce and video games Steve Green and om de brown if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over 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Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 37,697

Keywords: Projectivy, launcher, how to, tutorial, ad free, Nvidia Shield, Android TV, Google TV, Onn, Chromecast, replacement launcher, alternative, alternative launcher, Lon Seidman, Lon reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: WAKno02w7J0

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024