TvExplorer — Android TV / Amazon Fire TV / Jio STB (Set-Top Box) exclusive File explorer

3 min readJun 3, 2017

Its been a year I started working on Android TV and I couldn’t find a decent file explorer app for Android TV. All the file explorer/manager apps out there is just a porting of the mobile/tablet app to TV. You will have to adjust with the unreliable navigation these app have. The problem is in the way we interact with these mobile/tablet apps and TV apps. They are different.

In case of TV we only have the TV remote for all the interactions. We don't have the luxury of touch screen unlike mobile or tablets. So all apps for TV needs to be build around this. Google has provided a superb library for this: the leanback library. it provides some predefined views and navigations that enables the user to use the apps in TV using remote with ease.

TvExplorer uses leanback library to provide you the most intuitive file explorer app for Android TV.

TvExplorer also has a Video/Audio player, Text File viewer, Photo Viewer and a PDF viewer. Video player and PDF viewer has resume function where you can resume from the last played/read position. You can change the PDF viewer background color using the color selector which can be invoked using the D-PAD Center/OK button of your remote.