TV users struggle to browse and control non-TV-friendly apps
People using Android TV or a television as a computer display find that standard remotes and TV-oriented interfaces work poorly with sideloaded apps and regular websites. Existing workarounds range from using a keyboard and custom Linux setup to searching for a suitable browser, and neither addresses every use case. This is mainly an app and interaction problem; a standalone product cannot prevent platform owners from restricting app installation.
For android TV and TV-as-computer users. Mentioned from Nov 2023 to Jul 2026 on Bluesky, Hacker News and Stack Exchange.
6 different people described this problem in 6 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 2.0/10
- Pain
- 5.7/10
- Frequency
- 7.0/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 4.7/10
- Who pays
- Consumers
- Competition
- Medium
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
The reason to turn Smart TV into tablet via phone is to manage sideloaded apps that have no TV support as they can't be fully controlled by a standard or virtual remote
Free/fairly basic web browsers for Android TV I'm trying to get a TV set up for my dad - it's running Android TV 11 - and I'm trying to essentially run something like Chrome without sideloading it, for accessing websites with media that don't have an 'official' Google TV app.
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
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- 4 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks