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🔒 TV App Lock

English · Українською

Put a PIN on any app on your Android TV. Built for parents. No root. No cloud. No ads. No tracking.

License: MIT Release Build Android Offline Size

👪 For parents, first and foremost

This app exists for one everyday situation: the family TV, a curious kid, and apps you don't want opened unsupervised. Everything in it is designed around that: a simple 4-digit PIN typed with the living-room remote, a per-app switch, a grace window you control, and zero accounts, servers or telemetry. It is child resistance, not security: think "keep a 5-year-old out of YouTube", not "protect state secrets". A determined adult with the remote can undo it in Settings — deliberately so, there are no dark patterns to fight.

TV App Lock watches which app is on the foreground of your Android TV and puts a 4-digit PIN gate on top of the apps you choose — SmartTube, YouTube, Lampa, whatever you want to keep behind a password. Built for a real living-room remote: everything is operated with the D-pad.

How it works

  • A tiny foreground service polls the system usage stats every 250 ms.
  • When a locked app enters the foreground, the launcher is parked to Home and a PIN screen is raised over it.
  • Correct PIN → you land inside the app, and a configurable grace period (0–60 min or "until reboot") decides how long re-entries stay unlocked.
  • A watchdog re-arms the gate if Android silently refuses the overlay launch, and an alarm keep-alive resurrects the service if the firmware kills it.
  • Everything is local. No network permission at all.

Why not an accessibility service?

Accessibility-based app lockers (most of the Play Store ones) intercept window events, but on Android TV they globally change how the remote's OK button is delivered — short taps start opening the long-press context menu in the launcher. TV App Lock deliberately uses polling instead of accessibility: zero interference with input, at the cost of a ~0.5 s window between an app's icon and the gate appearing.

Features
🔢 PIN 4 digits, typed with the remote, auto-saves
📱 App picker pick any app visible on the TV home screen (LAUNCHER + LEANBACK_LAUNCHER)
⏱️ Grace period 0 / 5 / 15 / 30 / 60 min / until reboot, cycled from the UI
🔓 State visible the main screen always shows whether the lock is armed or open
♻️ Survives reboot boot receiver + keep-alive; no root needed
🌍 UI English & Ukrainian

Requirements

  • Android TV 6.0+ (API 21), tested on Android 14
  • ADB available for the one-time install and permission grant

Install

  1. Download tvapplock-release.apk from the latest release and verify it against SHA256SUMS.txt.
  2. Enable ADB debugging on the TV (Settings → Device preferences → USB debugging; on some builds you must first tap "Build version" 7 times in About).
  3. From any computer on the same network:
adb connect <TV_IP>:5555
adb install tvapplock-release.apk

# grant the two permissions the locker needs (one-time setup)
adb shell appops set com.alexk.tvlock GET_USAGE_STATS allow
adb shell appops set com.alexk.tvlock SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW allow

# start the guardian service
adb shell am start-foreground-service com.alexk.tvlock/.LockPollService
  1. Open TV App Lock on the TV → Set PIN → pick the apps to lock.

Known limitations (honest list)

  • ~0.5 s race: polling is not a hook. The locked app may show its first frame before the gate rises. Without root/system signature this is not solvable completely.
  • Bypassable by anyone who can reach Settings: disabling Usage Access or force-stopping the app lifts the lock. This is child resistance (4–10 y.o.), not security against a determined adult.
  • Grace period is a tradeoff: 0 (ask every time) is the safest; longer windows leave the door open for everyone, not just for you.
  • The PIN is stored locally, hashed only by SharedPreferences — fine for a family TV, never reuse a real password.

Build from source

Requires JDK 17 and an Android SDK with platform 34 (or just Docker):

./gradlew assembleRelease            # with env vars RELEASE_KEYSTORE, RELEASE_STORE_PASSWORD, ...
# or fully containerized:
docker build -t tvlock-build .
docker run --rm -v $PWD:/project -v $PWD/.android:/root/.android \
  -v $PWD/secrets:/secrets tvlock-build \
  ./gradlew assembleRelease

Privacy

The app requests no internet permission. The usage-stats permission is used solely to determine the foreground app, locally and in real time. Nothing ever leaves the device.

License

MIT