We’re at a strange stage in the evolution of Google TV, mostly because of one word: Gemini. TVs capable of running that AI should handle the platform as a whole well, since there’s a baseline of required performance. Yet because most people don’t upgrade their TVs (or add-on media streamers) that often, there’s a chance that you’re stuck with a product that not only can’t run Gemini, but might be falling behind in general performance.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, there are a few tricks you can use to get a Google TV device to run faster. You may be sacrificing features in some circumstances, but nothing critical. I’m assuming here that you’re using a TV with Google TV preloaded, but some of these tricks will carry over to a Chromecast or Google TV Streamer.

Apps-only mode

Cutting to the chase

By default, the Google TV homescreen is full of promoted and recommended content, including your Watchlist. This all takes time to load and render. If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t care about watchlists, and knows perfectly well what they want to watch, you might as well switch to apps-only mode to streamline your viewing. You can do that by going to Settings (the gear icon) -> Accounts & Sign In -> [your profile] -> Apps only mode.

There are some caveats to this. You can’t use voice commands, or even search functions, so you’ll have to open apps individually with your remote to do anything. One consolation is that apps are still building recommendations behind the scenes — they’re just not displayed in a centralized way. You can revert to the regular layout at any time.

Limiting background apps

Don’t be too draconian

You wouldn’t know it at a glance, but your TV is often juggling multiple tasks simultaneously. If it’s powerful enough, this keeps apps ready to use at a moment’s notice. If your TV is struggling, though, it may be worth experimenting with limiting background processes. You’ll need to enable Developer Options first by going to Settings -> System -> About, then clicking on the Build Number seven times. Once that’s done, go to System -> Developer Options -> Background process limit.

I wouldn’t recommend going any lower than two processes. Selecting one or zero will force apps to launch cold in too many situations, making things feel slower than they need to.

Animation scale

Just the facts, ma’am

There are a lot of subtle animations in Google TV. These make the experience feel a little more slick, or less jarring, depending on your perspective. They do require memory and processor usage, however, and affect how snappy the UI feels. If you’re trying to squeeze out every last drop of speed, scaling animations back is worth a go.

Under Developer Options (see the last section for help enabling them), adjust the settings for Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale. I’d recommend trying 0.5x first. If that’s not enough, you can disable animations entirely.

Uninstalling unused apps

Absolutely critical for older hardware

Okay, I’m cheating a bit here, since you’re probably well aware that you can uninstall apps. Yet this is extremely important, especially on older TVs. Some manufacturers are stingy with internal storage — and when that runs too low, Google TV has to work harder to shuffle data in and out of its swap space, creating very noticeable stuttering.

Head over to Settings -> System -> Storage -> Internal shared storage if you want to see how much space is free. You need at least 1GB, possibly more. To start making room, I recommend going to Settings -> Apps -> See all apps, which will help identify items with a large footprint. Select an app and choose Uninstall to get rid of it.