[Shield Android TV Android Development] brando56894:
I don't understand what is "completely wrong" about my statement. Also you seem to get pretty defensive when someone says that "Android TV is just Android with a different launcher" since you seem to think that they are a lot different. You obviously haven't looked that hard at the availability of "leanback" apps because ChainFire has an app for Android TV called Sideload Launcher which will show you all the non-leanback apps that you have installed from within the leanback launcher. So no, you can't see them directly in the launcher itself but by opening one app, you now have access to all the apps that you sideloaded! I will be using Kodi as my launcher, which already has a section for all user installed Android apps. Also, if you just want a standard launcher, you can sideload it and use it until your heart's content! I had Nova Launcher installed on the stock firmware in case I wanted to use it for some reason, it worked fine and showed all the apps installed.

As for your other "issues" with Android TV, those can all be remedied in various ways:

DPI: there are various root apps and at least one xposed module that allows you to set custom DPIs for apps, or at the very least you could change the DPI system wide. You want a small DPI count on a large screen so it's easier to read, why would you want a high DPI on something you're sitting feet away from? It's impossible to read!

No Menu button access: This is really only an issue with apps using the leanback UI, a normal sideloaded app still contains the menu button, it doesn't just magically disappear.... A very simple solution is to buy a cheap wireless remote that is meant for Android and has a menu button on it, another option is buy to a cheap generic one and re-program the buttons to issue a menu call. Also what "normal" android apps would you want on your Android TV (other than games) that would actually be useful? I can think of maybe 3-5.

Status Bar: What apps rely on the status bar for their primary functionality? None that I have ever used. Sure, a lot of apps make use of the status bar for various things but I haven't used any in the 5 years that I have been using Android that rely on the status bar to work. I'm sure it could be enabled in the code on Android TV, I highly doubt they removed it completely, it probably just requires a build.prop tweak or something similar. It's probably no different the mods in custom ROMs that allow you to permanently hide/disable the status bar and navigation bar (I'm not talking about Immersive Mode where they disappear from view then come back with a swipe, this way there's no way to bring them back except for reenabling them in the settings).

Poor Navigation: Yes the navigation with the joystick/d-pad is kind of annoying, but a mouse can easily be used in Android TV, I've been using my wireless keyboard/trackpad remote for weeks with the stock build with absolutely no problems (other then certain keys not being mapped to Android functions because it's a generic remote meant for Windows). I saw that you made a build (here) and that someone got it to work the stock firmware, so there's your mouse support in Leanback! The mouse works natively in other apps, such as Kodi.

I have been waiting for something like Android TV for years, ever since I got into media streaming (my whole library) I've wanted to outfit the main TVs with some sort of PC that would play the content via XBMC/Kodi but it was always a challenge. A typical desktop PC is too big and unsightly as a media streamer, a low-power PC is usually underpowered to work as a hardcore media receiver (I have a Zotac Pico and it works fine for Kodi but struggled with game emulation) and to get one that's up to the task you'll spend about $500, an ARM based miniPC (RaspberryPi, Odroid, BeagleBone, etc...) usually works with pure Linux but support for things lags behind the x86 counterparts and Android works but navigation is terrible and Kodi would tend to crash and it only supported 720P at the time. The Shield TV is the perfect media center since it has a beastly CPU/GPU to handle serious Android games and can render 1080P and multiple heavy Kodi plugins (like PseudoTV) with no sweat. The leanback launcher is what makes the experience top notch in my opinion since it's easy to see and really easy to navigate, plus it looks nice. Removing leanback is essentially killing everything that is Android TV, so without that you might as well just hook your phone or tablet up to your TV and get the same stock Android experience without spending $200 and modding the firmware. Also in your ROM I couldn't figure out how to get the "Stream Games [from pc]" app that exists in the stock firmware on your ROM which was a giant buzzkill for me, it doesn't seem to exist on the play store. I was able to find Shield Hub which allowed me to stream games via GRID and the play store version of Play Games sufficed enough (can't remember if it had a leanback UI or not) even though it didn't look like Nvidia's version The only downfall of Android TV is the limited market, which may just be a different APK than the one for phones and tablets, or it may just be a few tweaks somewhere that tells the market to only display leanback apps.

I had been trying to use a Hardkernel Odroid-U2 (same processor as the Galaxy S3, 2 GB of RAM and HDMI out) for about two years as a low-power multimedia PC and it always fell well below my expectations. My biggest problem with it was the navigation. Clicking and dragging stuff was so annoying, it was far more natural to swipe things on a touchscreen than it was to click and drag things (or long click things) to do a desired action, such as opening the status bar (which usually took 2-3 times since if you don't reach the height threshold it will roll back up), also having to use the on-screen navigation keys were a massive pain not to mention extremely unslightly when trying to watch a movie or something. As noted before it would have taken a lot of that annoyance away if I had just bought an Android specific remote.