Throwing my Roku in the trash • Cory DransfeldtSkip to main contentJune 23, 2026Throwing my Roku in the trash<br>/posts/2026/throwing-my-roku-in-the-trashtechRoku<br>I work from a big corner desk and part of the space on that desk is taken up by a small TV positioned in the corner. I use it occasionally and, for the longest time, it's had a Roku stick attached to it. It's reliable, but the UI has been filled with more and more cruft when all I ever want to do is launch Jellyfin.1This was the lone Roku device on our home network, it was mostly idle and the top two domains blocked by NextDNS were a pair of Roku tracking subdomains. Roku is also being acquired by an odious media company. I'm invested to the tune of, maybe, $29.99. I bought a cheap device and got a progressively crappy experience. It's not a whole ecosystem, it's not inescapable, but it's all irritating.I looked at onn streaming devices2 but ended up buying a cheap Xiaomi TV box running Google TV. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, sort of. The key differentiator here is that Google TV means Android, Android means I can install and meaningfully change things.I plugged the thing in, added Xiaomi to my native tracking denylist in nextDNS, set up a throwaway Google account and configured things:Unlock developer options: navigate to Settings -> System -> About -> scroll to "Android TV OS build" and click it until it says "You are now a developer.Enable Android Debug Bridge: Settings -> System -> Developer options -> turn on USB debugging (conveniently this also enables network ADB).Install ADB: brew install android-platform-tools.Connected to the streaming box: adb connect :5555. The TV'll prompt you to allow USB debugging and you can opt to always allow from this computer.From here, things are wide open. I grabbed the F-Droid APK from their site and installed it (adb install F-Droid.apk) and installed SmartTube as well. Google TV's home screen is about as noisy as Roku's (it also includes ads) but you can get around that by using a custom launcher. I went with Projectivy. When installed it'll prompt you for access necessary to override the default launcher and you can configure it to be far, far more minimal than the defaults for either of these platforms.The last change I made was to install Button Mapper. It'll prompt you for permissions much like Projectivy does and let you remap all of the (often useless) streaming app specific buttons on your remote. Netflix now opens Jellyfin, Prime opens Apple TV and YouTube opens SmartTube (naturally).It's a reasonable amount of configuration but now, when I do use this particular TV, it's not at all grating.3 There are no ads, no unnecessary apps, no irritating screensavers. It plays what I want, without issue.Pressing the home button conveniently scrolls you up to rows of Roku-provided junk, rather than the top row of apps you have installed. ↩Apparently these are made by Walmart? Are they any less terrible than Fox? ↩We'll see how Xiaomi does in the NextDNS tracker blocker rankings. ↩

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