# A sales consultant swapped out the home screen on his Samsung TV: one tweet and one YouTube episode got his only repo close to a thousand stars · GitHub open-source project

> Source: https://stringers.io/en/github/gh_nthnclrk__CleanFrame.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08)
> Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date.
> For agents: these verdicts and the underlying databases (verified revenue, App Store / Google Play charts, ad libraries, GitHub, Product Hunt…) are queryable live over MCP — tools today / hot / products / directions / direction / data. Setup: https://github.com/komako-workshop/stringers (the user logs in at stringers.io → "配置 agent" to get a personal URL). Site index: https://stringers.io/llms.txt

> It rode the mid-October wave of "using Claude Code to debloat your TV". The top projects only covered Android, and nobody covered Samsung. The author's demo post got 300k views, and Oliur's video, which used it as the only reference, got 800k views. Most of the stars came from those two boosts.

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

nthnclrk/CleanFrame · nthnclrk

# A sales consultant swapped out the home screen on his Samsung TV: one tweet and one YouTube episode got his only repo close to a thousand stars

**What it is** A minimal homemade home screen for the Samsung The Frame TV (just the apps you pick, a photo, and a clock). It's open source, and the README says to hand it to Claude Code and have it adapt the code into your own version.

**Why it took off** It landed during the mid-October wave of "using Claude Code to remove ads from your TV", and the top projects all targeted Android while nobody had done Samsung. The author's results post got 300k views, and YouTuber Oliur's video, which used it as its only reference, got 800k views. Most of the stars came from those two boosts.

**C** **How you could follow this** Stop porting software to one brand's TV. Copy the playbook instead: pick a device people hate the vendor software on, get it working, show the result, open-source it once people ask, write the repo as a reference for coding agents, and then send the link to YouTubers who cover that kind of topic.

Grade C: the playbook is worth studying, but the TV angle has cooled (weekly star gain fell to 601 198). Android, LG, Hisense and Sony ports already exist and only picked up a few dozen stars each. Its stars came mainly from being first and from a YouTuber with 800k views, which late followers can't get. Already public / widely discussed

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-10-20 · 1,010 stars · 7 days +173

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-10-21 → 2026-11-08 (19 days, 18 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

On the night of Oct 19, 2026, Nathan Clark, based in Sydney, posted on X: "Ok so I did the TV hack thing...", with a picture of the new home screen on his own Samsung The Frame: a few apps he uses, a photo, a clock, and no ads. He does sales strategy consulting, not development, and had only 4,123 followers on X, yet the post got 300k views. People in the replies asked for the code, and 5 hours later he created the repo CleanFrame. 17 days later the repo had 969 stars and 237 forks (GitHub, 11-06), and it's still his only repo on GitHub. This piece covers why it took off, what you can learn from it if you want an open-source project that gets stars, and what's still left to do.

### What it is

A homemade home screen for the Samsung The Frame TV, technically a Tizen web app. The first line of the README reads "A quieter home screen for Samsung The Frame. Your apps, a photograph and the time". It offers list or dock layouts, includes 15 built-in wallpapers and a glass-style interface, and is operated with the remote.

It's not an installable package. On a Samsung TV you have to enable developer mode, sign the app with your own Samsung certificate, then sideload it. To have the remote's Home button open it directly, you need extra changes, and the author notes a firmware update could break it. The author only tested on their own 55-inch The Frame (Tizen 9.0). The README says, verbatim, "I highly recommend forking it and building on top of it, ideally with a coding agent," and has a whole "Use a coding agent" section with a ready-to-paste prompt. It also ships an AGENTS.md and step-by-step install and recovery guides.

Put simply, it's a reference you hand to Claude Code: drop the link in, tell the agent to build one for your TV.

### Why that week

It caught a wave. In mid-October, a trend suddenly took off on X: using Claude Code to strip ads from smart TVs and swap out the home screen. TechCrunch ran a piece on it on Oct 19, titled "People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again". That week a whole batch of repos appeared:

| Repo | Repo created | star(11-06) | Supported TVs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gathin23/cleanyourtv | 10-17 | 52,550 | Android / Google TV |
| simbasjungles/free-my-tv | 10-19 | 5,917 | Google TV, LG, and 10-20, plus Samsung |
| Ansub/tv-detox | 10-18 | 2,192 | Android TV |
| humblemuzzu/dumbtv | 10-18 | 1,956 | Fire TV |
| nthnclrk/CleanFrame | 10-20 | 969 | Samsung The Frame |
| lasharor/cleanyourtv-WebOS | 10-21 | 427 | LG (needs root) |

The top few are all Android-based. Android TVs have ADB, so removing preinstalled apps and swapping the launcher is easy. Samsung's Tizen requires signing and sideloading, a much higher bar, so when the wave started there was almost no solid option for Samsung owners. CleanFrame filled that gap, and it looked good doing it.

The Frame was a smart pick. Its whole pitch is "looks like a painting on the wall," so its buyers care about aesthetics, yet the TV boots to a screen full of Samsung TV Plus and ads. The author's line "I no longer have to deal with Samsung Smart Hub nonsense" speaks for that crowd.

### Where the stars came from

| Timeline | What happened | star |
|---|---|---|
| 10-19 | Author's X post: 303k views, 2,531 likes, 2,026 bookmarks | The repo isn't built yet |
| 10-20 | Repo created 5 hours after the post | — |
| 10-21 | YouTuber Oliur (468k subscribers) posted a video, "I hacked my old TV to make it feel brand new." The first line of the description says "The repo I used," followed by the CleanFrame link. | 99 |
| 10-22 | Oliur posted a written tutorial | 170 |
| 10-24 | — | 501, +331 in two days |
| 10-28 | Max single-day gain +79, source not confirmed | 721 |
| 11-06 | — | 969; last 7 days +198, the 7 days before that +601 |

(Author post data 11-06 is from X; star counts come from the daily GitHub snapshot.)

Oliur is what actually drove the stars. His video has reached 800k views so far. His written tutorial the next day says: "I'd seen a few people on X hack their TVs… The one that got me was Nathan Clark." Notably, Oliur wasn't using The Frame. He had a Samsung Serif, and his first step was pasting the CleanFrame link into Claude Code: "Use this repo as a reference." He said it took about an hour: "Claude did pretty much all of it. I mostly sat there waiting."

So most of the stars came from people who watched the video and wanted one for their own TV, using CleanFrame as a template rather than installing it as-is. The fork count is 24% of the star count, much higher than typical for a "bookmark it for later" repo, which fits this usage (inference).

The rest was secondary spread: Lukas Margerie's video "I Built My Own TV Operating System With Claude Code" has 469k views and credits Nathan Clark in the description. There's also a Medium article, a Reddit repost, and an Instagram short titled "Here's the Samsung version of the TV hack" (view count unverified). Someone posted it on Hacker News, where it got 28 points, which didn't do much. No paid promotion, and it never made GitHub trending.

### Who's competing with it, and who's copying it

The direct competitor is free-my-tv. It added Samsung support in Oct 20 as well, covering Tizen TVs from 2015 onward, with more features (recommendations, weather, screensaver, one-click restore). It has 6x CleanFrame's stars. CleanFrame didn't win on features. It won by being "just The Frame, minimal, good-looking, and openly meant to be forked," which is why Oliur picked it as his reference.

A handful of projects have followed its lead, all small (GitHub, as of 11-06):

- mdrzn/cleanframe-tv, ported to Android TV, 32 stars

- ravizikrillah/CleanFrame-AndroidTV,25 star

- TheLord83/CleanFrame-webos, LG version, 13 stars

- mcncl/cleanframe-hisense, Hisense VIDAA version, 6 stars

- sspadda/sony-tv-clean-home, a Sony version in "CleanFrame-style," 3 stars

- And a large number of personal The Frame launchers and dashboards with 0 to 10 stars each

This list shows one thing: rerunning the same idea on a different TV brand doesn't get stars. CleanFrame's 969 stars came from being the first to do Samsung and from that one video, not from the idea itself.

### What to learn from it

- **Show the result first, open-source later.** The author posted a finished screenshot on X and only created the repo once people asked for it. The demand was validated before the repo existed.

- **Write the repo for an agent to read.** Paste-ready prompts, an AGENTS.md, phased guides, and recovery steps for when things break. Many people now use repos like this by handing the link to Claude and saying "build this," so this kind of repo gets used as tutorial material and forked heavily.

- **Pick the gap the big players missed inside a trend.** Android was overdone, and Samsung's barrier was high and nobody had tackled it. Then pick an audience that cares about looks.

- **Give YouTubers something to film.** The finished product looks good, can be reproduced in an hour, and the process itself makes a video.

### If it were you

**Verdict:** Don't build another "CleanFrame for brand X TV." The wave is cooling, and the brands it could still cover have mostly been covered already, each with only a few dozen stars. What's worth learning is the playbook, which you can use for the next wave of "use an agent to modify the stuff you already own."

**Who it suits:** developers who have a device locked down by its manufacturer with bad software, who can build the finished version first and make it look good on film, and who are used to posting their work on X.

**Who it doesn't suit:** anyone hoping to make money from this. This category gets you stars and notoriety, nothing more. Anyone without a distribution channel who doesn't plan to approach YouTubers: CleanFrame's 800k views were given to it by someone else. Anyone wanting to get into TV from scratch: free-my-tv and cleanyourtv already hold most of the ground.

**How to do it:** If you must stay with TVs, only a couple of gaps are left: the README's own note that "Roku needs a separate implementation" (whether anyone has built it is unverified), or the parts CleanFrame never finished, like auto-launching your custom home screen at boot, handing off to Art Mode, and one-click setup across models. A better move is to switch devices: car head units, projectors, digital photo frames, router admin pages, smart speaker screens. Find a device people hate the vendor software on that you can still get your own code onto, then write a CleanFrame-style reference repo for an agent to read.

**How to get users:** First get it working on your own device, then post a before-and-after shot or a 15-second clip on X, and open-source it once people ask. Put a screenshot and a paste-ready prompt for Claude on the first screen of the README. Send the link to YouTubers covering "AI fixes my life" topics and give them a process they can film in an hour.

**When to do it, and when it's too late:** For TVs, the window has mostly closed, and star growth has dropped from 601 a week to 198. If you switch devices, you need to be in before the next wave peaks. A week late and you're in free-my-tv's position, with the small ports (inference).

**Signs you've misread it:** your result post gets no more than a few thousand views in its first day or two, and nobody in the comments asks for code. Or the device's manufacturer has already opened up custom home screens. Or a same-device project on GitHub already has a thousand-plus stars.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/nthnclrk/CleanFrame)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| free-my-tv(simbasjungles) | Open source | 2026-10-19 (10-20 plus Samsung Tizen) | 5,917★ / 1,023 fork | Covers all Tizen TVs from 2015 onward, plus LG and Google TV, with many features (TMDB, weather, screensaver, one-click restore). CleanFrame only does The Frame and is more minimal and design-focused, positioned as "a starting point to fork" rather than an installer. |
| cleanyourtv(Gathin23) | Open source | 2026-10-17 | 52,550★ | Removes preinstalled apps and swaps launchers on Android/Google TV. Doesn't work on Samsung TVs. |
| tv-detox(Ansub) | Open source | 2026-10-18 | 2,192★ | Uses ADB to clean up older Android TVs. CleanFrame's README cites it as an example of an agent-built project. |
| dumbtv(humblemuzzu) | Open source | 2026-10-18 | 1,956★ | Ad removal and anti-tracking for Fire TV, a different platform. |
| Scattered Tizen launchers (samsung-tizen-launcher, prism, etc.) | Open source | Around 2026-10 | 0–11★ | No distribution channel, no polished design or docs. |
| Samsung Smart Hub / Art Mode | Big-company features | Preinstalled | All Samsung TVs | The official home screen can't be customized and shows ads. Art Mode only handles displaying art, not launching apps. |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **author X post** : effect-demo post by @nathanclark 2026-10-19, 2,531 likes, 303k views (author has 4.1k followers); repo created 5 hours after the post

- Verified **YouTube creator** **Oliur/UltraLinx** : their video 10-21 got 804k views, and the first line of the description, "The repo I used", links to CleanFrame. 10-22 They also posted a written tutorial at oliur.com/fix-samsung-tv. Stars went 10-22 → 10-24 (+331).

- **Verified** **Secondary videos/articles** : Lukas Margerie's video (469k views) credits Nathan Clark; Alex Hitt's explainer video, Medium article, Reddit r/ClaudeWorkflows.

- **查实** **Hacker News** :ingve 10-21 发帖,28 分 7 评论,作用小

- Inference **Instagram/Facebook short video** : "Here's the Samsung version of the TV hack. I'm using CleanFrame…" reel, view count unverified.

## Why CleanFrame (nthnclrk/CleanFrame) took off

**What it is:** a minimal custom home screen/launcher for the Samsung The Frame (Tizen), built as a Tizen web app. It shows only a handful of apps you choose, a photo, and a clock, and you control it with the remote. MIT-licensed. The README explicitly says "fork it, ideally build on it with a coding agent." The author, Nathan Clark, is in Sydney and runs a GTM consultancy (ReadyGTM). He isn't a professional developer, and this is his only repo on GitHub.

**Data** (github repo_profile / repo_day, as of 2026-11-06): repo age 2026-10-20,17 days, 969 stars, 237 forks (GitHub API live today: 998 stars / 244 forks). Daily stars: 10-21 99 → 10-22 170 → 10-24 501 → 10-28 721 (max single-day gain +79) → 11-06 969. Last 7 days +198; the 7 days before that +601. It has never made trending.

### Bottom line

It didn't go viral on its own. It rode the 2026 mid-October wave of "use Claude Code to strip ads from your smart TV and swap the home screen" (covered by TechCrunch, 10-19), and grabbed the Samsung / The Frame gap within that wave. The author's result video on X got 300k views, then tech YouTuber Oliur filmed an episode using it as his reference repo, which has 800k views. Most of the stars came from those two pushes.

### 1. Background: this is a whole wave of "TV hacks", and CleanFrame is just one small branch of it

- 2026-10-19 TechCrunch ran "People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again", covering projects like cleanyourtv and dumbtv: use Claude Code over Wi-Fi/ADB to strip the preinstalled apps off a TV and swap in a clean home screen. Source: aiweekly's rewrite of TechCrunch [aiweekly.co/alerts/developers-use-claude-code-to-make-smart-…](https://aiweekly.co/alerts/developers-use-claude-code-to-make-smart-tvs-dumb-again)

- Repos that showed up together that same week (GitHub repos, as of 2026-11-06):

| Repo | Repo created | star | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gathin23/cleanyourtv | 10-17 | 52,550 | Android/Google TV |
| simbasjungles/free-my-tv | 10-19 | 5,917 | Google TV + LG webOS + **Samsung Tizen** (added 10-20) |
| Ansub/tv-detox | 10-18 | 2,192 | Android TV |
| humblemuzzu/dumbtv | 10-18 | 1,956 | Fire TV |
| udhaykumarbala/cleanyourtv-app | 10-21 | 1,665 | Android TV phones |
| **nthnclrk/CleanFrame** | **10-20** | **969** | **Samsung The Frame / Tizen** |
| lasharor/cleanyourtv-WebOS | 10-21 | 427 | LG webOS (needs root) |

- Most of the wave was Android TV. On Android, ADB is already there, so uninstalling apps and swapping launchers is easy. Samsung Tizen is a higher bar: you enable developer mode, sign with a Samsung certificate, and sideload a .wgt package, so around 10-20 there were almost no solid ready-made options. CleanFrame was the first to target Samsung specifically and make it look good.

### 2. Where users came from (growth tactics)

1. **The author's own X post (the spark)** : @nathanclark posted "Ok so I did the TV hack thing…" at 2026-10-19 23:21 UTC, with a video of a custom home screen. Numbers: 2,531 likes, 63 reposts, 133 replies, 303k views, and the author himself had only 4,123 followers (data from the fxtwitter API). The repo was created about 5 hours after the post (10-20 04:40 UTC). So people on X asked for the code first, and then it was open-sourced.

2. **YouTuber Oliur / UltraLinx (the main source of stars)** : on 10-21 he posted the video "I hacked my old TV to make it feel brand new", 804k views, channel with 468k subscribers. The first line of the video description reads "The repo I used - github.com/nthnclrk/CleanFrame". 10-22 He also published a written tutorial at oliur.com/fix-samsung-tv, which says "I'd seen a few people on X hack their TVs… The one that got me was Nathan Clark", and tells readers to paste the CleanFrame link into Claude Code as a reference. Stars went from 10-22 at 170 to 10-24 at 501, +331 in two days. The timing lines up, and it's the biggest jump.

3. **Other secondary spread** : Lukas Margerie's YouTube video "I Built My Own TV Operating System With Claude Code" (10-21.5M views), whose description credits "the Samsung Frame home screen article by Nathan Clark". Alex Hitt's CleanFrame intro video (10-26,1,331 views). A Medium post "I Replaced My Samsung TV's Home Screen with Claude" (Arnaud Etienne). Reposts on r/ClaudeWorkflows and r/hypeurls on Reddit. Short videos on Instagram/Facebook saying "Here's the Samsung version of the TV hack. I'm using CleanFrame on my 2022 Samsung Frame" (view counts unverified).

4. **HN 作用很小** :ingve 10-21 发了帖(item 50187659),只有 28 分、7 条评论(HN Algolia),不是主力来源。

5. I found no paid promotion and no monetization path. Searching "cleanframe" on TikTok turned up no related videos (TikHub). The local x-radar corpus doesn't include these posts either.

### 3. Why some people star it and others fork it

- **The pain it hits** : Samsung Smart Hub is packed with ads and Samsung TV Plus, which clashes with The Frame's pitch of looking like a painting on the wall. Oliur's take was "beautiful on the outside and ugly on the inside".

- **It works well as a reference for agents** : the README has a section called "Use a coding agent" with prompts you can paste straight in. There's also AGENTS.md, docs/for-agents.md, a staged TV install guide, and recovery steps. Most people use it by giving the repo link to Claude and having it make changes, not by installing it as-is. The fork-to-star ratio is about 24%, far above a typical "bookmark it" repo, which fits that usage.

- **Aesthetics** : Dock and List layouts, pre-rendered glass material, 15 wallpapers, Manrope/Geist fonts. The screenshots look good and spread well on X and YouTube.

- **It shipped as a finished product** : the author got it running first on his own QA55LS03D (Tizen 9.0), and when he posted it was "live and working", not a concept demo.

### 4. Competitors and differentiation

- **free-my-tv(simbasjungles)** : The most direct competitor. 10-20 also added Samsung Tizen, covering Tizen TVs since 2015, with more features (TMDB recommendations, weather, prices, screensavers, one-click restore), and it has 6 times as many stars (5,917). CleanFrame is different: it targets only The Frame, does just a minimal photos + clock + app setup with stronger design, and explicitly positions itself as a "starting point you fork," not a finished installer.

- **cleanyourtv / tv-detox / dumbtv** : these do Android/Fire TV debloating plus launcher swaps, which don't work on Samsung TVs. CleanFrame fills the Samsung gap.

- **The TizenBrew ecosystem and scattered tizen-launcher repos** (abhaymundhara/samsung-tizen-launcher with 11 stars, shriram-ethiraj/prism with 8 stars, willysvarela/tizen-launcher with 0 stars…): most appeared around the same time, with no distribution channel and no polished design.

- **Samsung itself** : Smart Hub can't be customized and its ads can't be removed. Art Mode is Samsung's official "picture frame" feature, but it's separate from launching apps.

- **Takeaway** : the differentiation is "Samsung The Frame only + design + agent-friendly docs", and that's part of why it took off. But distribution was the deciding factor: the author's X post got 300k views, and Oliur's video got 800k views. free-my-tv, which also does Samsung Tizen and has more features and more stars, isn't the leader in this niche. CleanFrame is just the standout example of the "Samsung + good-looking" angle.

### 5. How many people saw it, and who followed

- **Exposure** : a YouTuber with 468k subscribers made a feature video (800k views). It hit HN's front page, Medium, and Reddit, so it was widely discussed, not an unknown project. But most of the TV hack conversation centered on cleanyourtv (52k stars) and the TechCrunch story. CleanFrame is just the Samsung branch.

- **Followers and ports** (GitHub search, as of 2026-11-06): mdrzn/cleanframe-tv (Android TV port, 32 stars), ravizikrillah/CleanFrame-AndroidTV (25), TheLord83/CleanFrame-webos (LG, 13), mcncl/cleanframe-hisense (Hisense VIDAA, 6), sspadda/sony-tv-clean-home (a "CleanFrame-style" Sony port, 3), Goy2Joy/calm-home (Samsung, copy nearly identical), plus a large batch of individual Samsung Frame launchers/dashboards with 0–10 stars each (frame-dashboard, Nikolai-Cook/frame-launcher, Project-FrameOS, kitchen-dashboard…).

- No revenue and no monetization.

### 6. What to borrow

- **It shipped a demo video first, then open-sourced once people asked for the code** . The repo was written for coding agents to read from day one (prompts, AGENTS.md, staged guides, recovery steps). In a wave where people use agents to modify their own gear, a repo like this gets forked heavily and gets picked up as tutorial material by creators.

- **In a big wave, it picked the platform the big players skipped** (Android was already saturated, Samsung Tizen was high-barrier and unclaimed), then picked an audience with high aesthetic standards (Frame buyers bought the TV to look good in the first place).

- **It gave YouTubers something to film** : the finished product looks good, can be reproduced in an hour, and the process itself makes a full episode.

### 7. Uncertain

- I couldn't trace where 10-28's +79 stars in a single day came from. It might be a new batch of secondary videos or Reddit posts. Unverified.

- The creators and view counts of the CleanFrame short videos on Instagram/Facebook are unverified.

- There's no way to count how many people actually installed it on a TV (as opposed to just forking the reference). compatibility.md includes feedback from several owners.

- The wave is cooling: daily star gains dropped from 7 to 601 198. A Samsung firmware update could break the Home-button takeover, and how long it stays viable is unclear.

### Sources

- GitHub API / github repo data: repo_profile, repo_day (2026-11-06)

- X: [x.com/nathanclark/status/2112323327704621459](https://x.com/nathanclark/status/2112323327704621459) (data from the fxtwitter API)

- YouTube: [www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCfbcoQgeWo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCfbcoQgeWo) (Oliur), [www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0ytu6k8uac](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0ytu6k8uac) (Lukas Margerie), [www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTG9UznNorc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTG9UznNorc) (Alex Hitt)

- [www.oliur.com/fix-samsung-tv](https://www.oliur.com/fix-samsung-tv)

- [news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187659)

- [aiweekly.co/alerts/developers-use-claude-code-to-make-smart-…](https://aiweekly.co/alerts/developers-use-claude-code-to-make-smart-tvs-dumb-again) (rewrite of the TechCrunch story 2026-10-19)

- [medium.com/@arnaudetienne/i-replaced-my-samsung-tvs-home-scr…](https://medium.com/@arnaudetienne/i-replaced-my-samsung-tvs-home-screen-with-claude-6f72e98c55fc)

- [www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeWorkflows/comments/1xc7ulh/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeWorkflows/comments/1xc7ulh/)

- [github.com/simbasjungles/free-my-tv](https://github.com/simbasjungles/free-my-tv), [github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv](https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv)

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.