Netflix or Disney+ stopped working after cleaning up
· 2 min read
You cleaned up the television and now Netflix sits on a black screen, or Disney+ errors on startup. Almost always a dependency that did not look like one.
The three usual causes
1. Google services. Many streaming apps depend on
com.google.android.gms for authentication. If you touched it, that is why.
adb shell cmd package install-existing com.google.android.gms
2. A manufacturer playback component. Some manufacturers split the video
decoding layer into their own packages. If you removed anything with media,
player, drm or playready in the name, put it back.
3. WebView. Several apps use it for login and legal notices.
adb shell cmd package install-existing com.google.android.webview
Working out which
Watch the log while opening the app:
adb logcat -c
adb logcat | grep -i netflix
Open Netflix on the television and watch. Dependency errors are quite explicit: you will see package names it cannot find.
The DRM case
If the error mentions content protection, the short answer is that we have touched none of that and are not going to. No operation documented on this site modifies content protection systems: it is not in our scope and we say so on the limits page.
If DRM fails after a clean-up, it is because a system component that uses it is missing, not because it was altered. Restore it and it will come back.
If nothing works
Reinstall the app itself from the Play Store. And failing that, a factory reset puts everything back where it was.
For next time
Packages relating to playback and to Google services are the category where most things break. Before touching one, check whether your model is in the directory: that "what stops working" column exists for exactly this.