Homestead

A replacement home screen for Fire TV: no advertising rows, no auto-playing trailers, no sponsored placements. Your inputs and your apps, and nothing else.

It also replaces the Home button, which is the hard part — Fire OS pins Amazon's launcher as the system home activity and will not let anything else take it.

Both pictures are from the same TV, a few minutes apart.

What it does

• A home screen without the ads. Your inputs, your TV apps and everything else, in three sections. No sponsored rows, no auto-playing trailers, no promoted tiles. Row order (Settings → Home screen) puts the rows in the order you want, TV apps first for example.
• The Home button comes here. Pressing Home opens Homestead in about 170 ms instead of Amazon's home screen.
• HDMI and Composite inputs as tiles, so switching source is one press from home.
• A Live TV tile on TVs with a built-in tuner, while Amazon's Live TV app is switched on. It opens Live TV on the last channel you watched. Live TV first (Settings → Home screen) makes it a large tile at the top, and the Home button always lands on it.
• Apps in the order you use them, counted on the TV itself.
• Hide anything you do not want to see: press MENU on a tile, or hold Select.
• Pick a background in Settings: the blue gradient, a few darker ones, plain black for OLED screens and night viewing, or your own photo.
• Optional extras on the Settings → Home screen page, all off until you switch them on: a greeting and the date at the top, non-TV apps as wide tiles, and Fire TV's own icons for Amazon Home, Settings and TV Health.
• Settings opens over the home screen, so changes to the background, columns, clock and sections show behind it as you make them. Larger pages explain the selected row beside the list.
• TV Health shows the state of the TV (animation speed, ad-tracking settings, the screensaver, which Amazon telemetry packages are running, free memory and storage). Each setting it flags can be fixed with one press.
• Debloat switches off dozens of vetted Amazon packages, each with a plain-English description of what it does. Nothing is uninstalled and no data is deleted, and any package can be switched back on from the same page. A few packages are protected by Fire OS and cannot be switched off by any app. On TVs where Home would then come straight to Homestead (not Fire OS 7), Amazon's launcher itself can be switched off too; it is marked risky, takes two presses and is never part of the one-press buttons.
• No computer needed. The on-device tunnel lets the app switch on the Home button, grant itself the permissions it needs and run Debloat, all from the remote. It is off until you turn it on and shuts down when the work is done. A few commands from a computer do the same job if you would rather not use it.
• Updates itself. It checks this repository's releases once a day and installs a new version only when you press Install, and only if it is signed with the same key.
• Simple mode for a TV you set up for someone else: Settings is out of sight, nothing can be hidden by accident, and there are no update pop-ups.

Verified on

Real hardware, not emulators:

Device	Model	Fire OS	Verified
Insignia F30-Series Fire TV Edition	AFTDCT31	7.7.1.5	Everything: launcher, Home button, HDMI/Composite tiles, Settings, TV Health, Debloat, and setup without a computer
Amazon Fire TV Stick	AFTSSS	7.7.1.6	Setup without a computer: key approval, permissions, automatic shutdown of the tunnel
Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K (2nd gen)	AFTKM	8.1.8.5	Reported by a user, not tested here: Home button, Debloat (28 packages switched off; Fire OS 8 protects a few more than Fire OS 7), several reboots, and a background photo sent from a computer (1.2.9). Set up from a computer.
Hisense 65U65SFC Pro (Fire TV Edition)	AFTCIBFBD1	8.1.8.0	Reported by a user, not tested here: Home button, Debloat, a full reboot, and the fix for repeated package events (1.2.3 and later). Set up from a computer.
TCL 40V5D (Fire TV Edition)	AFTTIFB900	14 (build SL14SHIP1021.86N)	Reported by a user, not tested here: Home button, Debloat, TV Health, a full reboot, HDMI/Composite tiles, and setup from a computer. Amazon's launcher switched off and back on, with Home going straight to Homestead after a reboot (1.6.11).

The first two run Android 9 and were tested by the maintainer. The last three are user reports: two on Fire OS 8 (Android 11), one on Fire OS 14. Other devices are expected to work but are unverified.

Debloat's list of packages was checked by hand on the Insignia TV above. Other models and Fire OS versions may use different package names. Anything on the list that your TV does not have is shown as "not present" and skipped, and packages the list does not know about are only reachable through Browse every system app, which locks anything the system is using but cannot tell you what is safe to switch off. If your TV's packages differ, please open an issue with your model and the output of adb shell pm list packages -s (system packages only, so it does not list the apps you installed).

Install

Download homestead.apk from the latest release and sideload it: adb install homestead.apk from a computer, or the Downloader app on the TV. When its home screen comes up, the app checks that release page (at most once a day, and never in Simple mode) and shows a new version once, with Install now, Later and Skip this version. Settings → Check for updates checks straight away. It never installs one until you press Install now.

Without the on-device tunnel, an update goes through Fire OS's installer, which first needs Homestead allowed to install apps: in the TV's Settings, Device & Software (My Fire TV on some models) → Developer options → Install unknown apps → Homestead. The update page tells you when this is needed.

Setup

Fire OS does not list Homestead under Settings → Accessibility, so the Home button has to be switched on over ADB, the TV's debugging connection. You can do that from the TV itself or from a computer. Without it Homestead still works as an app you open from Amazon's app row; only the Home button needs it.

The accessibility service is how the app learns that Home was pressed. It sees only which app came to the front: it cannot read what is on screen and does not receive key presses.

From the TV, no computer

1. Turn on ADB debugging under Settings → My Fire TV → Developer options. If Developer options is not there, open My Fire TV → About and press Select on the device name seven times.
2. Open Homestead from Amazon's app row. The first-run setup walks you through the rest. Later, the same steps are under the Settings tile → Setup.
3. Select Set it up (or On-device tunnel (advanced) in Setup) and accept Android's VPN prompt. In both prompts, press Down to reach OK.
4. The TV asks whether to allow the app's ADB key. Check that the fingerprint matches the one Homestead shows, tick Always allow from this computer, then select OK. Without the tick, the TV asks again every time the app connects.
5. The first-run setup then switches the Home button on by itself. In Setup, select Finish setup automatically, which also grants the permissions TV Health, Debloat and the Home button need.
6. Press Home.

The tunnel runs only while the app is making changes and shuts itself off afterwards. SECURITY.md explains what the app can access and what goes over the network. Some Amazon packages switch themselves back on after a restart; with Re-apply after reboot on (the default), Homestead switches them off again about a minute after the TV starts, which needs ADB debugging left on. Firmware updates can also switch packages back on; with Warn if the system undoes Debloat on (off by default), the home screen shows a tile for ten seconds offering to switch them off again.

If the Home button ever goes back to Amazon's home screen, for example after an update, select Finish setup automatically again. If you set Homestead up before version 1.2, run it once more so Home also works while Amazon's home screen is showing.

From a computer

adb connect <your TV's address>          # shown on the Commands page in the app
adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services com.homestead.launcher/com.homestead.launcher.HomeRedirectService
adb shell settings put secure accessibility_enabled 1
adb shell pm grant com.homestead.launcher android.permission.WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS
adb shell pm grant com.homestead.launcher android.permission.READ_LOGS

The first two commands switch the Home button on; the first replaces any other accessibility service you have switched on. The first grant lets TV Health change settings from the remote. The second lets Homestead catch the Home press early, so Amazon's home screen does not flash first, and makes Home work while Amazon's home screen is showing. To switch packages off, open Commands for a computer in the app: it lists exactly the commands still needed on your TV.

Your own background photo

From the TV, no computer

Save a JPEG or PNG to the TV's Download folder; the Downloader app and the Silk browser both save there. Then open Settings → Background → Choose a photo on this TV, pick the picture, and it becomes the background. Homestead looks in Download and hands the picture over through its on-device tunnel, so this needs the tunnel set up (see Setup) but no storage permission. Pictures whose names contain characters other than letters, numbers, spaces, dots, dashes, brackets or + are not listed, and the page says how many were left out: the name goes into a shell command, so anything unusual is skipped rather than escaped.

From a computer

Send a JPEG or PNG to the TV from a computer, in two steps. The first copies it to the TV's Download folder; the second hands it to Homestead, which keeps its own copy in private storage. No storage permission is needed, and this works on Fire OS 7 and 8:

adb push background.jpg /sdcard/Download/
adb shell "content write --uri content://com.homestead.launcher.background/photo < /sdcard/Download/background.jpg"

Then open Settings → Background and select Photo in the list. Any size or shape works: the picture is scaled and cropped to fill the screen, and only that screen-sized copy is kept in memory. Photo dimming darkens it (Off, Light or Dark) so the labels stay readable; Light is the default.

• To change the picture, run both commands again with the new file. It shows on the next Home press. Homestead only replaces the old picture once the new one has arrived whole and reads as an image; anything else is discarded, and the log says why.
• To remove it: adb shell content delete --uri content://com.homestead.launcher.background/photo. The background is then black, and the Settings row says there is no file.
• Run the second command on the TV, as shown, rather than piping the file from your computer (adb shell "content write …" < background.jpg): piped from a Windows computer, the file arrived damaged in testing.
• Up to 1.7.1 a picture could also be copied straight into Homestead's folder on the TV's shared storage. That folder is no longer read, because any app with the storage permission can write to it. A picture already there is kept: the first time 1.7.2 starts it is copied into Homestead's private storage.

The picture is removed when Homestead is uninstalled.

Setting it up for someone else

Choose Simple mode on the first setup screen (or switch it on later in Settings) when the TV is for someone who just wants to watch it, such as a parent or grandparent.

• The Settings and TV Health tiles are hidden. To open Settings, press Menu (☰) five times in a row on the home screen. Setup has you try it before you finish. Every Amazon Fire TV remote has a Menu button; a TV's own remote may not send it.
• Menu and holding Select no longer hide tiles, so nothing disappears by accident. Hide what you want before you switch it on, or open Settings to change it later.
• No update pop-ups. Homestead does not check for updates by itself; use Check for updates in Settings when you visit.
• When chosen during setup, it switches off Debloat's safe list (what the Switch off everything marked safe button does: ads, telemetry, tutorials and demo content), except Amazon Photos, which stays on for family pictures. Alexa is left on too, since asking for a show by voice is often easier than finding it with the remote. This needs the on-device tunnel; without it, use the button in Debloat later (which does include Amazon Photos). Turning Simple mode on or off in Settings does not change Debloat.

Things to know before you leave the TV:

• If Fire OS ever switches Homestead's Home button off (it can after a Fire OS update), the Finish setup page appears on its own. That page is the sign the TV needs you.
• Some Android versions forget an "Always allow" debugging key that has not been used for some days. If that happens and Re-apply after reboot later needs to switch something off again, the TV's key prompt could appear on screen. This has not been seen on the test TV (Fire OS 7) and has not been tested on Fire OS 8.

Removing Homestead

1. Open Debloat and select Undo everything this app switched off. This switches back on exactly the packages Homestead turned off. Uninstalling the app does not do this for you. If you switched off Amazon's launcher, this step matters most: without it the TV is left with no home screen until a computer switches the launcher back on.
2. If you used the on-device tunnel, select Forget our key in Setup, then revoke the TV's copy under Settings → My Fire TV → Developer options, and turn ADB debugging off.
3. Uninstall Homestead under Settings → Applications → Manage Installed Applications.

Uninstalling also removes the accessibility service, so the Home button goes back to Amazon's home screen straight away.

To keep Homestead but give the Home button back to Amazon, select Turn off the Home button in Settings or Setup (press it twice to confirm). Homestead stays installed as an ordinary app. Re-apply after reboot stops while the Home button is off. To turn it back on, select Finish setup automatically in Setup, which needs ADB debugging still on. This switch needs Fire OS 6 or later. To visit Amazon's home screen for a moment without turning anything off, use the Amazon Home tile.

How the Home button works

Fire OS does not let any app replace Amazon's launcher as the system home screen, so Homestead uses an accessibility service to notice when Amazon's launcher comes to the front, and covers it straight away.

Fire OS holds back app launches for several seconds after a Home press, so Homestead shows its home screen as an overlay window, which is not held back. Its normal screen takes over once Fire OS allows it, keeping the selected tile, the scroll position and any page you opened, such as Settings.

The overlay is an accessibility overlay, which needs no extra permission.

The accessibility service only hears about Amazon's launcher once its screen is being drawn, which is a few hundred milliseconds too late to hide it. The system log records the Home press earlier, as the system starts Amazon's launcher, so a small separate process watches the log for that one line and the overlay goes up first. It is also the only way to notice a Home press made while Amazon's home screen is already in front, since that changes no window. That needs READ_LOGS, which setup grants over ADB; SECURITY.md says exactly what is read.

Known limitations

• Without READ_LOGS, Amazon's home screen shows for a moment on each Home press, and Home does nothing while Amazon's home screen is already showing (open any app, then press Home). Setup grants it.
• With it, the screen can still go black for a moment between the app you leave and Homestead: usually under a quarter of a second, longer on the first press after an update. Pressing Home while Homestead itself is in front can still show Amazon's home briefly, because Amazon's screen comes back quickly from there.
• The Amazon Home tile pauses Homestead for 30 seconds. After that, Homestead may take over again while you are still browsing Amazon's home screen. Pressing Home brings Homestead back at any time.
• On Fire OS 7, Back from a Settings page can land on Homestead. Amazon's main Settings screen there is a tab of its home screen, so going back to it from a page such as Network looks the same as going home. Open Settings again to carry on.

Building

Only needed if you want to build the app from source; to use Homestead, install the signed homestead.apk from the releases. No Gradle, no dependencies, under ten seconds:

./build.sh            # build + sign
./build.sh install    # and adb install -r

On Windows without Git Bash, build.ps1 does the same from PowerShell:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build.ps1            # build + sign
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build.ps1 install    # and adb install -r

The two scripts must make the same APK, byte for byte. After changing either one, run tools/test-builds.sh from Git Bash: it builds with each script, under Windows PowerShell and PowerShell 7, in a few different setups, and compares the results.

Needs the Android SDK (build-tools/36.1.0, platforms/android-34) and a JDK. The signing key is not in this repository; build.sh looks for ~/.homestead-keys/ or the HOMESTEAD_KEYSTORE / HOMESTEAD_KEYPASS environment variables (to make your own key, see Building and signing your own copy). Set ADB_TARGET to your TV's ip:port for ./build.sh install.

The ADB client is written from the AOSP sources (system/core/adb, libcrypto_utils/android_pubkey.c); no code is copied.

AI assistants

Notes for coding agents, and for anyone else picking this repository up cold.

Where things are

There is no Gradle; everything is in src/com/homestead/launcher/. Each class starts with a comment explaining why it exists. Read it before changing the class.

Area	Classes
Home screen	MainActivity, HomeGrid (the UI, shared by the activity and the overlay), AppModel (tiles, artwork, order), Backgrounds (presets and the photo), BackgroundProvider (receives the photo over adb), UsageTracker, HdmiActivity, BootReceiver
Home button	HomeRedirectService (accessibility service and overlay; its timings are deliberate), HomeKeyWatcher (Home presses, from the system log)
Pages	Panel (the settings page: a sheet over the home screen, or a full page with an explanation pane), OnboardingPanel (first-run setup), SetupPanel, SettingsPanel, HealthPanel (TV Health), DebloatPanel, CommandsPanel, UpdatePanel, PhotoPanel (choose a photo on the TV)
ADB	AdbBridge (one worker thread, link state, command batches), AdbConnection (the client), AdbCrypto (the key), TunnelVpnService and VpnSetupActivity (the on-device tunnel)
Debloat list	Debloat (the package catalogue, the never-touch lists, live locks)
Updates	UpdateChecker (the GitHub repo is UpdateChecker.REPO), UpdateInstaller, UpdateFileProvider
Preferences	Prefs

Building and signing your own copy

./build.sh needs a JDK (11 or newer), Android build-tools 36.1.0 and platform android-34. It has been run on Windows (Git Bash) only; it picks the right tool names for Linux and macOS, but those are untested. minSdk is 22 and targetSdk is 28. Do not raise targetSdk: newer levels tighten the background-start rules the Home button relies on.

The release signing key is not in the repository. To build your own, make a key once:

mkdir -p ~/.homestead-keys
keytool -genkeypair -keystore ~/.homestead-keys/homestead-release.keystore \
  -alias homestead -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000
export HOMESTEAD_KEYPASS='<the password you chose>'
./build.sh

A build signed with your own key cannot install over an official one (or the other way round), so uninstall first. Uninstalling loses Homestead's record of what it switched off, so run Undo everything this app switched off in Debloat before you do.

Debugging on a TV

Test on real Fire TV hardware. The behaviour this app works around (Amazon's pinned home screen, the delay on app starts after Home, protected packages, the missing Accessibility entry) does not exist on an emulator or stock Android.

adb connect <tv-ip>:5555
adb logcat -s Homestead                                        # every log line uses this tag
adb shell settings get secure enabled_accessibility_services   # is the Home button switched on?
adb shell dumpsys accessibility                                # ...and running? look for label=Homestead
adb shell dumpsys activity activities | grep mResumedActivity  # what is on screen
adb shell pm list packages -d                                  # what is switched off
adb exec-out screencap -p > screen.png

Log lines worth knowing: HomeRedirectService connected (the service started), Home pressed then overlay shown in … ms (one Home press, caught by HomeKeyWatcher), dispatchLag=… (Amazon's launcher reached the front), handing off to activity, foreground is now …, removing overlay, tunnel up, adb connected, adb idle, closing, package change […], grid unchanged or …, reloading model once (package and HDMI input events, gathered for 1.5 seconds; inputs are listed as input:…), opening Settings (key … from device …, source …) (device -1 is an injected key rather than the remote, and (HDMI-CEC) marks one sent over HDMI), update check: … (the result of each check for a new release).

Things that look like bugs but are Fire OS:

• Fire OS's Accessibility menu does not list third-party services. The service has to be switched on over ADB.
• The system's Home broadcast is restricted to Amazon-signed apps, and the accessibility event for Amazon's launcher arrives as its screen is drawn (and not at all if it is already in front). The earliest trace an app can read is the START ... cat=[android.intent.category.HOME] ... from uid 1000 line in the system log (tagged ActivityManager on Fire OS 7 and ActivityTaskManager on Fire OS 8, where some TVs log it from uid 0), which is what HomeKeyWatcher looks for. READ_LOGS takes effect only in a process started after the grant, which is why the watcher runs in its own process (:homekey).
• Some Amazon apps, such as Luna, handle Home themselves (CustomHomeButtonHandler: Bypassing HOME key in the log) and then start the home screen under their own uid, so a HOME start from the app in front counts as a press too. That hook needs an Amazon-only permission, so Homestead cannot use it for its own screens.
• Amazon's Settings opens by starting the home screen under its own uid (com.amazon.tv.settings.v2), then its settings page. That HOME start is not a press, and for a few seconds after it Amazon's home windows do not bring Homestead back.
• Fire OS refuses an ADB connection that starts on the TV itself; that is why the tunnel exists. The connection over Wi-Fi from a computer also drops often, so reconnect before each command when scripting.
• pm disable-user on some Amazon packages fails with "Cannot disable a protected package". Batches carry on past it, and TV Health counts those as protected.
• In the system VPN and USB-debugging prompts, no button has focus at first. Press Down to reach OK.
• uiautomator dump cannot read Homestead's windows. Use screenshots.

Homestead pauses the Home redirect while the user is on a setup screen (settings, VPN prompt, key prompt), and lifts the pause when they come back. If Home "does nothing" during testing, check whether a pause is active before suspecting the service.

Rules for changes

• Debloat list: add a package only after switching it off, restarting the TV and switching it back on, on a real device, with nothing broken. Say which device in the pull request. SAFE entries are included in the one-press switch-off; anything with a visible side effect is CAUTION. Never add anything on the never-touch lists.
• Everything the app changes must be reversible from the app.
• Keep the accessibility service as narrow as it is (canRetrieveWindowContent="false", no key filtering, no package filter). SECURITY.md promises this.
• Release notes appear as raw text in the app's Update available page, so write them as plain text: no Markdown links, code spans or headings. Bump versionCode and versionName in AndroidManifest.xml; the app compares the release tag (v1.2) with versionName.
• Describe only what you have tested. "Should work on X" belongs in a pull request description, not in the README.

Verified Homestead on a device not in the table?

Open a pull request that adds a row to Verified on above:

• the device's name;
• the model, from adb shell getprop ro.product.model;
• the Fire OS version, from adb shell getprop ro.build.version.name;
• what you checked: the launcher, the Home button, setup from the TV, TV Health, Debloat.

Only list what you actually tried. If Debloat shows rows as "not present", or the TV has Amazon packages the list does not know about, attach the output of adb shell pm list packages -s (system packages only, so it does not list the apps you installed).

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.

This app can change system settings and package states on your television. Keeping it copyleft means anyone shipping a modified build has to publish what they changed, and you can read exactly what it does before you let it near your TV. That matters more here than it would for an ordinary app.