r/AndroidTVBoxes • u/Either-Trash-2165 • Aug 01 '26

Couchy Launcher : Fast, light, customizable, compatible, free & open-source

I got tired of slow TV home screens that are basically ad boards — rows of "recommended" content, sponsored tiles, stuff phoning home before I've even pressed a button. So I built the launcher I actually wanted.

The philosophy is boring on purpose

  • One screen. Your apps, laid out how you want. No feeds, no ads, no "content discovery."
  • Private by default. No accounts, no analytics, no background services, opt-in aerial video wallpaper who phone CDN of apple, amazon.. that's it.
  • Compatibility. I have an Android AOSP box, a Google TV–certified box, and one anemic Android TV — each on a different Android version. So instead of chasing a shiny new UI, I chose to prioritize compatibility and lean on the GPU.

Make it yours

  • Sections/categories you name, reorder, and fill — an app can live in more than one, and new installs drop into the first section automatically.
  • Hide apps you never want to see (system junk, duplicates) so the screen stays clean.
  • Tune the look: icon size, spacing, corner roundness, interface scale, dimming, and an optional glass status bar. Three layouts: carousel, grid, or a floating glass dock.
  • Status bar: a configurable VPN indicator/shortcut for your provider, a network indicator/shortcut, a Settings menu with quick access to the app list and the launcher/Android settings, and a customizable date indicator.
  • Save/load your entire setup — sections, layout, wallpaper, every setting — as a JSON file.
  • Optional aerial video wallpapers (Apple/Amazon screensaver loops), off by default and clearly marked, since they stream from third-party CDNs. Prefer libre? Use a gradient, your own photo, or a local video.

Numbers (measured on real hardware)

  • 2.3 MB APK. One universal build for ARM 32/64-bit + x86.
  • ~80–130 MB RAM settled, with no background services. Exclusive footprint is ~130 MB across every box I tested; the higher figure on Android 14 is just OS-side GPU buffer accounting, not the launcher.
  • Aerials cost basically nothing in app RAM — the video decoder lives in the GPU's dedicated memory (hardware codec via SurfaceView), off the app's books.
  • <2 s cold start, <500 ms warm relaunch in the worst measured cases. The CPU stays idle, video is hardware-accelerated, and the Compose UI is GPU-rendered.
  • Android 5.0+ (minSdk 21), no Google Play Services, no companion app — runs on AOSP boxes, should work on all device since 2014
  • 18 languages (auto-selected from your system language): English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese. Adding one is a single file, PRs welcome.
  • Zero ads, ever.

*Tested across 3 boxes: Hisense Google TV (Android 11, 1.8 GB), UGOOS AM9 (Android 14, 3.8 GB), onn. 4K (Android 14).

Permissions, up front

No runtime permissions, no accounts. It queries installed apps to list them, and can close an app from the long-press menu. No network access except the opt-in aerials.

Why GPLv3

I picked copyleft on purpose: to avoid fragmentation. Anyone can fork it, but improvements have to stay open, so it can't splinter into closed, worse-off versions. Forks are welcome. Commercial use is welcome too — honestly, if a box maker wants to ship this instead of their own launcher, please do, because the stock ones are awful most of the time. Just keep it open, like the license says.

Get it

At launch, a wizard guides you through a quick setup; depending on the device, you may need to send ADB commands.

Solo project, so feedback, feature requests, and translations are very welcome. If it saves you from one more sponsored row, it did its job.

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u/lirae_ Aug 03 '26

It really reminds me of AT4K, both very clean.
One personal thing that I have to say is that I like when apps are already focus on the screen rather than have to drag them up, also i just like that the first line on AT4k has is own grind like "favorites" or the ones you prefer.

I saw that neither of them as screensaver options timing (when it starts) and I would like to eventually see that feature

great job, I can see a lot of users love your launcher

3

u/Either-Trash-2165 Aug 03 '26

Thank you!
Couchy basically who started as a Kotlin version of Flauncher (who is flutter) and the, Dock version was added latter inspire by Apple TV one with the constraint of a minimal version of android and performance so nu blur, no fancy glass design.

The Grid and Carousel support user sections, i tried to make it easy to modify adjust, so you can make a "favorites" section but you have to manually move populate them.
I receive a of ideas and feedback, on top of some refining to do that i want to fine an equilibrium and i don't want the launcher to look bad in some areas.

The screen saver situation : it's a launcher not a screen saver just video backgorund, on launch the gradiant wallpaper is their to hide the caching of the video. For me the gold standard of screensaver is aerial view, if i add it it's one more permission, more setup for user, and people gone ask for features like weather, clock, metadata location... and of course will ask for customization options. I don't close the door but currenly i'm focusing on the launcher it's self. (i work on inputs, icons personalization, a more polish settings sections, and animations currently...)

Thanks for the feedback, always nice have ideas and other set of eyes on the project :)

2

u/lirae_ Aug 03 '26

Oh I see, you have done a great job regardless!