Four free apps that I always recommend installing on a smart TV with Google TV

Smart TVs have in recent years become another household appliance in Europe, usually renewed during an important football competition, such as Euro 2024. Gone are the days when they were expensive and elitist devices. Currently, it is the opposite, It’s almost impossible to buy a TV without an operating system advance. But everything is not the same.

There are many reasons to choose a TV: screen, size, price…but the operating system is becoming more and more important. Each has its pros and cons, but in terms of the number of apps and possibilities, it’s clear that Android TV, and now Google TV, are the clear winners. Plus, many brands use this system, so we don’t need to be tied to just one.

Many applications are available for these televisions, from streaming series and films to music, not forgetting games or other home automation applications. But There are four in particular that change the user experience enough to be recommended on almost all televisions equipped with this operating system.

Button Mapper

The first of these is an application that allows you to modify the operation of the television’s most important accessory: the remote control. With this application The actions of each button on the controller can be reconfiguredwhich means that many buttons linked to certain applications have other functions.

In this way, if our TV has a button to open Netflix but we do not have a subscription to this platform, we can make it open another streaming service or another application. The most useful thing is that it adapts to each particular case, without having to serve each button for something specific. In addition, it allows you to configure a double press to perform other actions, so that each button becomes a double activator, allowing you to open two different applications.

This app can be installed from the Google Play Store and is free, it is also available for TVs and other Android devices. Before you open it, you need to grant it accessibility permissions. You have to pay attention to certain configurations depending on the brand of the device, as we mentioned in the analysis of the application.

X-plore File Manager

The second member of this list is an application called X-plore File Manager. It is a file explorer that allows you to navigate the TV’s memory and open files of different types. Additionally, it is very useful if you want to use an external hard drive and move items from one place to another. Allows you to perform actions such as copy, move, rename files and more.

One of its great assets is that allows you to connect to cloud servers, such as Google Drive or OneDrive, which makes it much easier to send screenshots from TV to computer or mobile phone, load APK files to TV, transfer videos to watch on TV, etc. It is also a free application and available on the Google Play Store. It is not the only file explorer available for Android TVs, but it is one of the most complete and without payment.

Smart Tube

The last application selected in this short list is a YouTube client. The vast majority of televisions equipped with Android TV or Google TV have the official Google streaming application installed, which allows us to watch videos without problems, but which lacks some functions that we have in the web or d versions. other platforms.

For example, SmartTube allows you to change the playback speed, something really useful in these videos that have a too slow pace. It allows you to customize the interface buttons, and even hide categories that we don’t use, making the aesthetics of the application cleaner.

One of the weak points is that does not support some live videos, so on certain occasions it will be necessary to continue to require the use of the original native application. In addition, navigation between certain sections is not intuitive, and subscribing to certain channels or deleting said subscription is not always easy.

This application, unlike others, It is only available for TVs, not for mobile phones or tablets. However, since it is a YouTube client with unauthorized functions, cannot be downloaded from the Google Play Store. It is available on the GitHub platform for free download. To install it, you can use a file explorer like X-Plorer or an application that allows you to install APKs. The update system is internal and is an application that it is updated a lot, even several times a few weeks. Its creator is committed to ensuring that it works as well as possible and is constantly improving it.

VLC

The last application always installed on a television equipped with Android TV is VLC, a video player that stands out for be able to run most audio and video codecs currently in use. It is the perfect application to be able to watch videos that we have on an external drive. With X-Plore it will even allow us to play videos that we copy from an online location, such as Google Drive, on the television. It works more smoothly and stable than streaming a video from your mobile phone to your TV using VLC for smartphones.

As if that wasn’t enough, the app’s creators are planning to support video streaming from within the app itself. It wouldn’t just be supporting IPTV listings, which it already supports, but rather having its own content. This is not something that has been confirmed, but it allows us to glimpse the future possibilities of the service.