Developer debloated his smart TV with Claude, but the risks remain

Even fresh out of the box, most smart TVs carry software their owners never asked for: preloaded apps, advertising tools and data-collecting services. Developer Mert Cobanov decided to get rid of that burden with an AI agent, and his experiment with Claude, published in full online, shows both the appeal and the risks of the approach.

What the developer did

Cobanov opened the developer options on his Android TV and had Claude connect to the device to debloat it. His prompt told the agent not to uninstall anything: instead it disabled unused applications, shortened animation durations and kept a record of every action for later review. He also turned off Google TV's home screen, which he said is largely filled with ads and "recommended for you" content, and installed FLauncher, a free open-source app on the Play Store that simply shows a grid of the TV's apps.

"The big payoff was that the TV now runs smoother than when it was new, four years ago," he wrote on X, adding that the work was done without root access.

Why TVs ship so loaded

Smart TV ownership keeps growing: by the end of 2026, more than 50 percent of households are expected to own one, compared with 34 percent in 2020. Many of those sets arrive with software their owners did not choose. Samsung TVs, for example, ship with roughly 20 percent of their storage already taken up by the operating system, and much of the rest goes to streaming apps such as Netflix, YouTube and Prime Video; some manufacturers even prevent customers from uninstalling them.

Advertising tools add another layer. Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) regularly captures screenshots of what appears on the screen. According to the Center for Digital Democracy, such software has turned connected TVs into a "privacy nightmare" for viewers, and it can also slow the operating system down.

The risks of letting an agent loose

Giving an AI agent full debugging access is where the danger starts. Agents make mistakes and rarely admit when they do not know something, so a hallucinated step can disable a critical component and leave a TV unstable or unusable. If key packages are removed or turned off, the set may also lose the ability to install future system updates. On top of that, AI prompts themselves can be hijacked by malicious actors.

Safer ways to speed up a smart TV

Most of what Cobanov achieved can be done by hand. FLauncher can be installed without giving any AI system access to the device, and other Play Store utilities let owners decide which packages run. Clearing the cache frees memory without deleting anything. In Android TV's developer options, animation controls can be reduced from 1x to 0.5x for a snappier interface, and users can disable autoplaying videos on the home screen, turn off usage diagnostics and enable "apps only" mode.