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When I bought my first Sony Bravia TV, I wasn't concerned with customizing the Google TV Home; I was more excited about watching sports on a large 45-inch screen.
This is the first line I tell people about how ignoring the launcher on my Google TV for a long time has cost me. It took me a couple of years to notice that the default Google TV Home launcher was slow.
One major reason it felt sluggish was that Google TV is bloated. I realized this only after trying a third-party launcher on my smart TV. The change immediately made my TV faster and smoother.
However, not every third-party launcher can deliver a better experience on your smart TV than the Google TV Home. But the one I tried after several failed attempts finally did.
I can't praise Sideload Launcher enough for saving me from Google TV's bloated and ad-filled home screen. Here is why I like it more than Google TV Home.
The default Google TV launcher is bad, and it's stubbornly possessive
It knows it's bad but doesn't want to make it look like it
You can't replace the default Google TV launcher with a third-party one as easily as you do on your Android smartphone. For someone who loves Android's openness, it's frustrating beyond words.
You can count me among those who feel the same way. The default launcher tries to do a lot of things together.
It shows both platform-wide content recommendations and app-specific ones, lists installed apps, and adds content rows that display movies and TV shows you watched recently but haven't finished.
This not only clutters the home screen, but it also slows down the launcher. I might have lived with this had the recommendations actually served me. They confused me more than they helped.
All of this makes Google TV Home a bad launcher. I think Google knows it, and that could be why it desperately wants people to stick with it. The Android TV OS doesn't let you change the default launcher to something else that easily.
Google TV feels stubbornly possessive, and it tries to hide that by pretending it cares a lot about users' experience. More on how I bypassed this limitation later.
I tried the Sideload Launcher and was blown away by its minimalistic feel
I love its no-nonsense approach
I'm not a radical minimalist and don't like anything that takes minimalism to an extreme level. I tried several launchers on my Android phone that make exactly this mistake.
The Sideload Launcher cleverly avoids making that mistake. It takes a no-nonsense approach without compromising functionality.
The first thing you'll notice on the Home page is a filter bar that shows options like "All," "TV Apps," "Phone apps," "Store," "Sideloaded," and "System."
The first one shows all your apps; the second one limits it to TV apps, and the third one does the same for TV apps. You can easily guess what the last three options will show you. In the upper-right corner, you also get a settings button.
That's it. No recommendations, no ads, nothing; it acts only as a gateway to apps installed on my TV, much like my phone launcher.
Before I switch on my TV, I know what I want to watch. Since the Sideload Launcher has no recommendations or ads, I don't feel distracted and can get straight to the content I want to watch.
I came for the ad-free experience, but I ended up getting two more unexpected benefits: a faster home screen and a distraction-free TV experience. Win. Win. Win.
I bypassed Android TV's limitation to replace Google TV Home with the Sideload Launcher
It doesn't feel exactly like a default launcher, though
You don't need to be an Android expert on a technical level to bypass this limitation. I did with an app called Button Mapper.
I used Button Mapper to assign the Home button on my TV remote to open the Sideload Launcher on my TV. That's all it took to replace the default Google TV launcher.
However, this still doesn't feel like a default TV launcher. It's very close, but there is a slight delay in opening the launcher app when I press the button.
It's not the best experience, but at least it doesn't take nearly as long as Google TV to load on my smart TV.
I'm not going back to Google TV Home anytime soon
This Google TV limitation is uncharacteristic of Android. I can even say it's anti-Android because I never felt Android stood in the way of a better option on my phone.
Unfortunately, I can't say the same thing about TV. I'm not going back to Google TV Home until it addresses the issues I faced. Until then, long live Sideload Launcher.