Hello, turns out you can use the guide below (requires root) to make system volume read/write and replace android home with ads with an older, ad-free version. Worked for me on a rooted onn 4k.
It's a bit of a deep dive, and yeah, using a 3rd party launcher is easier, but it's the principle of it, dammit.
If you try to do this on a low capacity device, like the onn, you will need to monitor the script as it's running and delete super_original.bin when the script starts to build super_fixed.bin or you will run out of space and the script will fail and will need to be run again. The file is in /data/local/tmp/img. You will have plenty of time, but I would suggest navigating to the folder with your file explorer prior to starting the script.
a cleaner way to get the old android tv launcher back is to install
leanback on fire,
which is the pre-android 9 launcher forked & changed to build as a user app. after that just run
adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.tvlauncher
& reboot to fully disable the default launcher.
also i wouldn't recommend modifying the system partition on modern android devices. it'll cause a problem when an ota rolls out & trips safetynet (not that many tv apps use it but still). if you have to modify system you should make your modifications into a magisk module instead. a lot simpler & no issues.
Does this work on Android tv 11?
Which old version of the launcher are you using? Is it that really old "android 7" style launcher?