Shows the apps that are hidden
Anything you installed from an APK is missing from the stock home screen entirely — not buried, absent. Ranch lists it like anything else, which for most people is the whole reason to be here.
An Android TV home screen with no sponsored rows, no recommendations for apps you do not have, and no shop. It starts almost empty and you arrange it from there.
Anything you installed from an APK is missing from the stock home screen entirely — not buried, absent. Ranch lists it like anything else, which for most people is the whole reason to be here.
No advertising, no promoted content, no telemetry. The home screen shows what you put on it, and Ranch has nothing to gain from changing that.
It draws one list of your apps and stops. On an older set-top box that difference is felt on every press of the remote.
Shelves you name, six accent colours, three backgrounds, and controls for card size and spacing. Turn the labels off entirely if you want only icons.
The one genuinely useful row from the old home screen is kept. Your half-finished episodes are still there; the things around them are not.
A system update can quietly reset which app is your home screen. Ranch notices, says so on screen, and offers the fix — instead of silently going back to the old one.
On the TV: Settings → Security & restrictions → Unknown sources. Turn it on for the browser or file manager you are about to use.
Open ranch.okaay.com on the television, or sideload the file
from a phone with an app like Send Files to TV.
It appears in your app list with everything else. Opening it lets it finish setting up.
Press the Home button. The system asks which launcher to use — choose Ranch and select Always. If it does not ask, open Ranch and use the "Make Ranch the home screen" row at the top of Customise.
On a device that offers no launcher setting at all, this does it over ADB:
adb shell cmd package set-home-activity tv.ranch.home/tv.ranch.home.MainActivitySet a different home screen first, then uninstall Ranch from Settings → Apps. Doing it in that order means you are never left on a television with no home screen — which is recoverable, but not from the sofa.
The remote works the moment a screen opens. Ranch could open a screen with nothing selected, so the arrow keys did nothing until you pressed OK first — worst of all on the home screen, where it looked like the television had frozen. A screen now always has something selected.
Hiding apps takes one press each. Customise, then Your apps, then Hidden apps: everything installed in one list, and OK takes an app off the shelves. It stays installed and search still finds it. Holding OK on a card still works when you only want to change your mind about one.
You can do the same from your phone, faster. Every app in the phone's list has a Shown or Hidden button beside its name.
Deleting a shelf is now where you would look for it. It used to sit underneath everything on the shelf, so a full shelf meant scrolling past every app to find it. It sits with the shelf's name and layout instead.
| Version | 0.2.1 |
| Size | 1.9 MB |
| Requires | Android 6.0 (API 23) or later |
| SHA-256 | be932bc51395911f928cc7e95c2e35a0ee09c425403eb85fccb155e747cac1b5 |
| Other builds | arm64-v8a · armeabi-v7a · x86_64 |
The universal build above works on every device. The per-architecture builds are smaller if you know which one your box needs.