8 Must Have Android TV Apps - 2020: Useful Apps..

 

Hey guys this is Paige from vm.com and I know you guys haven't seen me in a video since a couple of weeks and more and that's because of Kobe 19. yep 2020 Sucks long story short I am back anyway android tv has been getting very popular in India and a lot of you guys I'm sure are using an android tv or a tv with an android tv box setup so which are the absolutely must-have apps for an android tv well I'm gonna tell you exactly that today so let's begin so most android TVs come with fairly compact remotes but a lot of TVs come with remotes that look like this yeah that's a lot of buttons and if you're using just the android tv Platform most of these buttons are kind of useless but that's where button mapper is so useful with button mapper I can just add say this button and customize it to open an App then I can set this button to trigger an action like taking a screenshot now here's me taking a screenshot from this button yeah that's cool right now that's not all button mapper also lets you set actions for double taps as well as long presses and not just for these additional buttons even the default android tv buttons like home back volume buttons etc so I can set the volume up button to change tracks on double press I mean that is cool right now as you must have noticed that I'm using this app with my tv at home and that's because the app did not work with the tv at the studio so yeah that's something you'll have to Check so tv usage is a digital well-being app for android tv and it's handy because it's much  more than that as you can see it shows you the duration of time you have spent on different apps my data here is pretty lean and nice because this is a tv from the studio that I don't really use now I can also check out the details of the app usage which is great but if you have say kids at home the app lets you set screen time and usage hours to limit their Usage you can even go further and lock a certain app with a pin so there's no way to access it and yeah your kids will hate you but yeah this is actually useful for everyone using android tv now one thing to note the app shows you the usage details for free but if you want to put limits or lock an app you'll have to make a one-time purchase of 300 rupees android tv android both basically have the same code yet there's no way to send files between them which is strange anyway the app I think a lot of people use and I use to send files which is mostly APKs from my android smartphone to the android tv is send files to tv it's a super simple app all you need is your phone and the tv connected to the same wi-fi network now you can just select send on the phone and receive on the tv then select the file select the tv and that's it the file will be set to note that this works fine for smaller files but I did notice that it kind of slows down at times with bigger files but yeah for APKs and other small files this is very good so I like most android tv users was using puffin browser in the past and it Was great until they started a subscription Service to use the browser without any time Limit yup a subscription to use the browser I mean the rating says it all anyways I was looking for another browser and that's when I came across tv bro now I found the UI to be not so intuitive at first but once I got used to it I really like the whole feature set and the browser first of all let me make it clear I like the name tv bro second it loads up all the websites I use very well and it's very fast and smooth something very important plus navigating the web pages or going through the different menus is responsive with the DVD mode which again is very important and as for the features it has download manager Voice thread support and it is open source so it's free and nice so yeah tv bro a file manager app is definitely a must-have for android tv because you need to access files like APKs local files etc and there are a lot of file managers available for android tv But my favorite and I think it's the best file manager app for android tv is FX file manager now there are a number of reasons I think that I personally think it's android tv UI looks good especially because it's clean and navigation is very good and like that most of its features from its phone version is here there's support from multiple windows with split screen view so you can move files between different folders easily there's built-in video player music player image viewer text viewer and Editor it supports creating and packing archives such as Zape 7zip and RAR so it has all the features and its free version has no ads no privacy issues and all of the important features I use so yeah it's got to be perfect for most People see play store android tv has a lot of popular apps but I think it's still pretty limited and side loading apps on android tv is still a little bit of a hassle and that's where I think alternative app stores come in really handy now Aptoide tv is the app store to install an android tv because this tv aimed version has all the different android tv apps you need apps like prime video in case you have one of the older android TVs that don't have prime video support it has apps like the smart you tube tv app which I know a lot of people use the point is there are a lot of apps on approach tv that I think you'll find Handy so make sure to check it out so by default the stock android tv launcher does not show side loaded apps in the apps list so we have to use apps like side load launcher to access these apps well there's an app to get these apps on the default android tv launcher it's called nebula manager and it just works it's very simple just  open up the app and it shows the different third-party apps here now I can just select tabs that I want to see in the app drawer like say tv bro or Aptoide tv which I have side loaded that's it now they're here in the app drawer and I can even add them to the home screen I know it's a very simple app but it's very handy if you side load a lot of Apps one thing I don't like about android TVs is that there's no way to switch between different apps there's no way to see the apps running in the background yeah some tv is Allowed but mostly most android TVs don't have this functionality with the latter the ability to see background apps is fixed by this app called background apps and process list so this is again a very easy to use app that shows you all the apps running in the background I know the UI looks kind of basic but it gets the job done anyway so you can see all the apps here and also kill apps right here the process to key labs isn't the most intuitive because even when you use the close all button it opens up the app info page of each app one by one where you have to press four stop for every single app so it's kind of an annoying process so I choose to only kill the app that I'm not using for the time being overall it's not the best solution to kill apps in the background but at least it's a solution so yeah check it out so the last app kind of the bonus app I want to talk about is google home now I know this is not an android tv app but I think with google home you can do a lot of cool things with android tv now there's obviously the fact that you can cast songs or you know cast videos to android tv but there's a lot more so there's the cast my screen option to mirror your android phone screen to the tv to maybe show photos do a presentation or anything else I also like the ambient mode which you can find here and it lets you customize the screen saver on the tv there's the google photos option the art gallery option which includes some really cool photos and even photos captured from pixel phones there's also the experimental mode which lets you set photos from Face book and Flickr and also enable a low bandwidth mode as for other options you can hide whether or choose to show it in Celsius or Fahrenheit sure hide the time there's also a different google photos options and the option to set the slideshow speed so yeah these are some interesting options and yeah this is an app that google will always improve with more and more features so yeah this is a must-have now apart from one of these apps there's one more thing that you should maybe try Fano tv is transitioning to google tv but if you want to experience the google tv home screen right away we have a detailed guide on the same so check it out anyway those are some of the must-have android tv apps that you should be using on your android tv and the links to all of them are in the description down below so go ahead check them out and if you think there's another must-have app that we kind of missed out on make sure to comment below so that everyone else Knows also give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it make sure to share it around and I will see you in the next One You