My Android TV is slow: what to do

A television that used to open an app in two seconds and now takes fifteen has not broken. What has happened is that the software grew and the hardware did not.

Measure first

Before touching anything, look at how much memory is free:

adb shell cat /proc/meminfo | head -3

And what is using it:

adb shell dumpsys meminfo | head -25

If MemAvailable is below 15% of MemTotal, that is your problem and everything else is secondary.

The measures, in order of real effect

1. Remove the services that run constantly. Telemetry, recommendations and advertising do not run when you open them: they run continuously. They give back the most.

2. Change the launcher. The factory one loads thumbnails, sponsored rows and recommendations on startup. A light one can be the difference between eight seconds and one. The options are here.

3. Uninstall apps you do not use. Even unopened, many register background services and boot receivers.

4. Clear caches.

adb shell pm trim-caches 999999999999

5. Check storage.

adb shell df -h /data

Storage above 90% degrades flash memory noticeably. It is a cause of slowness almost nobody looks at.

What does not work

"Cleaner" apps. Applications promising to speed up your television consume more than they free. Without exception.

Constant rebooting. Buys ten minutes and fixes nothing.

Factory reset. Returns you to day one... including all the software that was bothering you. Useful for starting clean, not for going faster.

When to accept the limit

If your television has 1 GB of RAM, there is a ceiling you will not beat. You can leave it noticeably better, but you will not turn it into a fast device.

At that point the sensible option is for the television to be only a screen, with the interface arriving over HDMI. That is not giving up: it is recognising where the bottleneck is.