Seeing what apps your TV has installed

August 27, 2026 · 2 min read

Your television's app menu shows what the manufacturer wants to show you. The real list is considerably longer, and that is where the interesting things live: telemetry services, advertising launchers and promoted apps you have never opened.

The full inventory

adb shell pm list packages

Returns something like this, dozens or hundreds of lines:

package:com.google.android.tvlauncher
package:com.netflix.ninja
package:com.manufacturer.acr
package:android

The useful variants

System apps only (the preinstalled ones, which is what we are after):

adb shell pm list packages -s

Only the ones you installed:

adb shell pm list packages -3

With each one's file, useful to tell whether it lives on the system partition:

adb shell pm list packages -f

Search by name, when you already suspect something:

adb shell pm list packages | grep -i netflix

On Windows, swap grep -i for findstr /i.

Save the list before touching anything

This is the most useful advice in the article:

adb shell pm list packages > tv-original.txt

That file is your starting point. If something feels off in a month and you cannot remember what you removed, comparing takes ten seconds.

How to read the names

Package names follow a reverse-domain pattern and say quite a lot:

com.google.android.* — Google components. Careful: many are essential.
com.android.* — parts of Android itself. Almost none of these get touched.
com.manufacturer.* — the manufacturer's own. Most of what is dispensable lives here.
com.netflix.*, com.amazon.* — preinstalled third-party apps. Usually the safest to remove.

Working out what a package does

If you find one you have no idea about:

adb shell dumpsys package com.example.package | head -40

It will tell you the version, the permissions and whether it is a system app. The permissions are especially revealing: a "product improvement" service asking for microphone access is telling you what it does.

The next step

You have the inventory. What you do not have is the hard part: knowing what can go on your specific model without breaking anything. That is exactly what we are building in the directory, one model at a time.