Aangan

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Aangan (आँगन) is the courtyard at the heart of an Indian home: the open space everyone passes through, where you feel the day's weather and celebrate its festivals. Aangan brings that calm to your TV. It replaces the stock home screen, with its rows of ads and recommendations, with something quiet, beautiful and yours.

What it does

• Your apps, and nothing else. A dock of four favourites, large across the top, and every other app in a tidy grid. You choose the dock, and it never rearranges itself. Hold OK on any app to put it in the dock or hide it. The focused app casts a soft light in its own colour.
• The sky outside. The time, the weather and the air quality for your city, always in the corner. Pick your city from a list of large ones, or type a few letters and choose from what appears; old names like Bombay or Gurgaon work too.
• Today, at a glance. Press Up then OK on the weather: the next hours, high and low, sunrise and sunset, UV, the moon, a 36-hour air-quality trend with your country's safe limit, and the best time to air out the house.
• Festivals. A countdown to the next one, and on the day itself a hand-drawn scene behind your apps. If your family keeps a festival on another day, move it, or hide one you don't celebrate.
• Your family's days. Birthdays and anniversaries get balloons, confetti, rings and petals, with a greeting by name. Add, edit and remove them on the TV or from your phone.
• A quiet screensaver. A dim clock and the weather, drifting slowly so nothing burns in.

Festivals and family days

On the day, Aangan draws a scene behind your apps and plays a short opening. The scene keeps moving gently, but only while the home screen is on screen.

Diwali: diyas, rangoli and fireworks	Holi: clouds of gulal
Karwa Chauth: the moon through the chalni	Christmas: lights and snow
A birthday: balloons and confetti	Festival dates you can move or hide

There are scenes for Lohri, Makar Sankranti, Basant Panchami, Holi, Navratri, Dussehra, Karwa Chauth, the whole of Diwali week, Chhath, Gurpurab, Raksha Bandhan, Janmashtami, Ganesh Chaturthi, Eid, Christmas, New Year, Republic Day and Independence Day, and for birthdays and anniversaries.

Private by design

• No ads, analytics, crash reporting or account. If Aangan ever crashes, it keeps a short note on the TV, which you can read and choose to report yourself from the phone page. Nothing is sent automatically.
• No location permission. You choose your city; Gurgaon is the default.
• The only network use: Open-Meteo weather for your city (two requests, at most every 30–60 minutes, and only while the home screen is on screen), city search when you ask for it, and the phone-setup page below.
• Birthdays and anniversaries are stored on the TV and nowhere else.
• Light on the TV: on an ordinary day nothing animates, so Aangan uses no CPU while you watch.

Install on any TV, without developer mode

Aangan runs on Android TV and Google TV, on Android 9 or later: Sony, TCL, Hisense, Philips, Xiaomi, Chromecast with Google TV and others. It's tested on Sony Bravia TVs (Android TV 9 and Google TV 12) and on Google's emulators for Android TV 13, Google TV 14 and Google TV 16. It can't run on Samsung (Tizen), LG (webOS) or Roku, which don't run Android apps and don't let any app replace the home screen or take the Home button. Fire TV blocks other home screens too. On those TVs, plug in a Google TV or Android TV streamer and install Aangan there; see why, and how.

1. On the TV, install Downloader (by AFTVnews) from the Google Play Store.

2. Open Downloader and enter:

   https://github.com/vaari-dev/aangan/releases/latest/download/aangan.apk
   

   The first time, the TV says it isn't allowed to install apps from this source. Choose Settings, switch Downloader on, and press Back. This is an ordinary setting, not developer mode. If you need it later, it's in Settings → Apps → Security (Google TV) or Settings → Device Preferences → Security & restrictions (older Android TV).

3. Choose Install. The same link always fetches the latest version, so use it again to update.

4. Open Aangan from your TV's apps. A short welcome takes you through the rest:

• Open with Home. Choose Turn on, then Aangan, and switch it on. From then on the Home button, and switching the TV on, bring up Aangan instead of the stock screen.
  • Android shows its standard warning for accessibility services. Aangan uses the service only to react to the Home button: every other button passes straight through, and it can't see other apps or anything on screen.
  • On Android 13 and later, if Aangan is greyed out there, open Settings → Apps → Aangan, choose Allow restricted settings, and try again.
• Your city. Weather and air quality default to Gurgaon. Change the city if you live elsewhere.
• Family days. Add birthdays and anniversaries; the easiest way is from your phone, below.

Prefer adb? You can make Aangan the true default home instead: adb shell cmd package set-home-activity dev.vaari.aangan/.HomeActivity.

Set up from your phone

Typing with a TV remote is slow, so Aangan's settings show a QR code. Scan it with your phone's camera, on the same Wi-Fi, to choose your city (with suggestions as you type), set the dock, add or edit birthdays and anniversaries, and move or hide festival dates, all from the phone's browser. The TV itself serves the page:

• it runs only while the settings screen is open;
• its address carries a fresh one-time secret;
• it stays on your home network, loads nothing from the internet (even its font comes from the TV), and everything is saved on the TV.

"Not secure"? Some phone browsers warn about any page without HTTPS. A page served by a TV on your home network can't have an HTTPS certificate without a cloud service in the middle, which Aangan avoids on purpose. Choose to continue: the page and what you type never leave your Wi-Fi. Most browsers then remember the choice for the TV's address.

Build from source

You need the Android SDK (build-tools 37.0.0, platform android-37.2) and JDK 17 or later. There's no Gradle, and no third-party libraries: the app uses only Android itself.

./build.sh            # builds build/aangan.apk, signed with a local development key
./build.sh install    # and installs it over adb (set ANDROID_SERIAL when several devices are connected)
./build.sh bundle     # also builds build/aangan.aab for Google Play

python3 tools/icon.py # redraws the icon and banner: res/drawable/ and the SVGs in docs/
python3 tools/site.py # builds the website from site/ into build/site/

Releasing

1. Raise VERSION_NAME and VERSION_CODE at the top of build.sh, and add a section for the new version to CHANGELOG.md.
2. Push to main. CI builds and checks every commit, and publishes the website.
3. Seeing a version with no release yet, CI waits for an owner to approve the release environment. Then it builds with the release key, checks the certificate, publishes the GitHub release with the changelog as its notes, and, once Google Play is set up, uploads the bundle to Play's internal track. See store/README.md.

Supply chain

• Actions: every GitHub Action is pinned to a full commit, never a tag, and the repository requires that. Dependabot proposes updates weekly, waiting a week after each release so a bad one is likely caught first.
• Workflows: zizmor audits them on every push. Checkouts don't keep the token, and each job has only the permissions it needs.
• Signing: the signing key lives only in the approval-gated release environment, and a release build fails unless it's signed with the known certificate.
• Downloads: the only one, bundletool, is checked against a pinned SHA-256.

To preview a festival's scene, choose See how it looks on it in Settings, or run adb shell "am start -n dev.vaari.aangan/.HomeActivity --es festival Diwali". Home clears it.

The festival calendar

assets/festivals.csv holds the public calendar: one line per day, with its greeting and scene.

# date,name,greeting,scene[,expected]
2026-11-08,Diwali,Happy Diwali,DIWALI

• Sources: dates follow Drik Panchang for New Delhi. National holidays and Eid follow the Government of India's list.
• Scenes: use the names in Festive.Theme, or PLAIN for none.
• Festival weeks: days between two entries with the same scene, up to 9 days apart, share it, so the whole of Diwali week and Navratri glow.
• Yearly update: add each year's dates once the calendars are published.
• Family changes: a date moved or hidden on the TV or the phone is stored on the TV, on top of the calendar, so an app update with new dates keeps it.

Credits

• Weather and air quality: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0), with air quality from Copernicus CAMS.
• Air-quality scale: India's CPCB National AQI in India, and the US EPA AQI elsewhere.
• Typeface: the wordmark and the phone page use Fraunces by Undercase Type, under the SIL Open Font Licence (assets/phone/OFL-Fraunces.txt).

Released under the MIT licence.