When you fire up Android TV, the first thing you see is a list of movies and shows the system thinks you’ll like. It’s often full of the latest flicks or hottest news, but sometimes it could just be things relevant to your interests and the apps you have installed. The thing is, you can actually optimize this row to show suggestions only from the apps you want.
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The entire point of the recommendations row is, of course, to get you to engage with the applications that are currently installed on your system, some of which you may never otherwise open. By default, any applications that work with the recommendations row—mostly TV, movie, or music based apps—will be enabled as soon as they’re installed.
But what if you don’t want Crackle to show up with every new movie that you’ve already seen? Or maybe you never use Play Movies, and couldn’t care less what’s hot on the service right now? Hell, maybe you just don’t care about YouTube’s suggestions (which I find to be trash most of the time). Cool—you can disable them.
With your Android TV fired up and on the main screen, scroll down to the very bottom row and click on the gear icon. This will take you into the Settings menu.
From there, scroll down to the “Home Screen” entry and click into it.
The first option here is “Recommendations Row,” which is exactly what you’re looking for. If you already have any content hidden, it will display that here as well.
At this point, just scroll through the list and toggle off any app that you don’t want to show up in the list. Enjoy your new, cleaner home screen experience.
If you ever decide you’re ready to invite any of these once intrusive apps back into the recommendations row, just jump back into this menu and re-enable it.
