piermark/omarchytv

Adopt this only if you enjoy tinkering with your TV's interface and accept beta-grade behavior. OmarchyTV swaps the stock, tile-based TV launcher for a desktop-inspired shell built around the Omarchy/Hyprland aesthetic, and its most interesting pieces are the PC link and phone-based installer rather than the theme itself.

The problem

On a stock Android TV, the home screen is a fixed recommendation carousel: you press the remote, scroll a row of sponsored tiles, and get to the app you want after several steps. There is no numeric workspace switching, no fuzzy app search from the home surface, and no way to push your desktop theme or see PC status on the TV. OmarchyTV replaces that home surface with numbered workspaces (Home, TV & Inputs, All Apps, PC Link & AI, System & Settings), a fuzzy search, and a Waybar-style top bar, so the intended result is a TV that looks and navigates like a keyboard-driven desktop rather than a streaming box.

What's different

The distinctive mechanism is the pairing with a PC or Mac. A companion plugin pairs over the LAN with a 6-digit code using SPAKE2, signs requests with per-PC tokens, and pushes CPU, RAM, active media player and deploy status to the TV every five seconds while the home screen is visible; it can also sync the active Omarchy desktop theme and push custom themes and wallpapers to the TV, capped at 50 MB on the TV side. That turns the TV into a small status display for your workstation, which is a use case general TV launchers do not target. Separately, the launcher ships a native Grok Bot TUI window rendered inside the theme rather than opening a browser.

The trade-off is where the complexity lands. Making this work means enabling network debugging, checking APK signatures, and optionally changing the default home activity via ADB; the phone companion is the friendlier path, but it still depends on wireless ADB on ports 5555/47800. The desktop look is also a deliberate departure from remote-first design, so anyone expecting the familiar lean-back TV layout will find the workspaces and keyboard metaphors overhead rather than convenience.

Who should try it

A good fit is someone with an Android TV or Google TV device who already uses Omarchy or a tiling-window-manager desktop and wants the TV to mirror that, with the PC link showing workstation telemetry. Someone who can install an APK, enable developer options and run ADB commands will get the most use out of it. A poor fit is a household that just wants Netflix and YouTube with the fewest button presses, or a user on Roku, Apple TV, or Amazon's Vega-based Fire TV Stick 4K Select, which the README lists as not natively supported. LG webOS owners are a separate case: that path is explicitly experimental, so it is worth trying only if you accept the testing label.

Requirements and limitations

The core device requirement is Android TV or Google TV on Android 7+ with network debugging enabled; this is documented as tested on a Sony Android 9 set, a Google TV Streamer on Android 14, a Sharp AQUOS and Noblex/Hisense on Android 11, and on the Android TV emulator. The install guide covers both ADB and the Android phone companion, which performs the wireless ADB handshake and sets the launcher as Home for you, so a PC is not strictly required if you have an Android phone. Fire OS devices are listed as untested, and Roku and Apple TV are not supported natively.

Ongoing upkeep matters more than a one-time install. The project is at 2.12.0-beta and states plainly that things may not work, with missing features on some TVs and bugs expected. It says it does not root or uninstall anything and that you can switch back to the stock home screen, but that is a recovery path, not a guarantee of smooth upgrades; upgrades require keeping the same signing certificate so settings survive. Samsung Tizen and Hisense VIDAA are reachable only through the browser mode served by the phone app, which is a different experience from the native launcher.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo's coverage is a single dated snapshot: 121 total stars and #4 on the NEW-REPOSITORY board for Java on 2026-10-26, with no comparable daily history. That supports noting a young, newly surfaced repository, not judging whether interest persists. Before committing a TV, check which device tier you are in and whether the documented install path matches your hardware; verify the README's install instructions and compatibility notes rather than assuming your TV is covered.