Cleaning up a Philips Android TV

Philips televisions are manufactured by TP Vision under brand licence. That explains why many packages carry no "philips" in the name at all.

What to look for

adb shell pm list packages | grep -iE "philips|tpvision|tpv|nxp"

Ambilight: leave it alone

If your Philips has Ambilight, that backlighting system depends on its own packages. Removing them by mistake kills Ambilight, and it is not always obvious which one it was.

It is probably the most-loved manufacturer feature we have come across on a television, so it earns its own warning: before removing any TP Vision package, check that Ambilight still works afterwards.

What does come off without trouble

• Preinstalled streaming apps.
• Shop demonstration modes, which on Philips are particularly loud.
• Content recommendation services.

A known problem on older models

Several Philips sets running Android 8 suffer from very tight internal storage, to the point where the system can no longer update apps. There, removing preinstalled software is not cosmetic: it is what returns the set to a usable state.

To see how much space you have left:

adb shell df -h /data

Common models

The PUS series, and the 43PUS6, 50PUS7 and 55PUS8 ranges. Send us yours.