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My parent’s have a good old “Dumb” TV…
As such I’ve found myself using my XD+ as an impromptu streaming solution every time I was over to visit, and found the regular good old Lean Launcher that CleanROM uses by default to be somewhat of a chore to control from the couch with a Bluetooth gamepad.
The reason CleanROM doesn’t include a gamepad friendly launcher by default is mostly a combination of copyright, licensing and quality issues.
Sure, there are a few launchers out there that fit the copyright / license bill, but to be honest, most of them look and operate as if they were ripped out of a bad near-future Sci-Fi movie from the 90s. I wouldn’t feel good putting you guys through that kind of torture.
Enter the Leanback for Fire TV project! A humble attempt by two developers over at Github to make the official Android TV launcher play nice with Fire TV streaming sticks by reverse engineering most of its smali code back into java while also licensing the resulting code under the GPLv2 license.
With a compatible license in place, I figured this project was the perfect base for a gamepad compatible CleanROM launcher of choice, and as such I set out to fix the handful of remaining bugs the launcher had over at my Github page while also adding a few extras on the side like CleanROM integration and custom wallpaper support (which Leanback doesn’t have by default).
As you guys might have figured: The plan from here on out is to ship CleanROM with both the Lean (Android tablet style) as well as this new custom Leanback (Android TV style) launcher and let you guys decide which one you prefer.
Under normal circumstances I’d release changes like this as part of a bigger CleanROM release, but given the big number of upcoming changes I’m currently working on I figured it would make more sense to give you guys an early taste by releasing the launcher standalone while I work out the last few issues in the upcoming CleanROM build.
As always, I’ll keep you guys posted!
– Black-Seraph