Firehose Remote

Firehose Remote is an open-source, hand-rolled remote control for fire TV. It talks to the TV directly over your own local network — no ADB, no developer options, no account, and no cloud service in between.

Press Scan, pick your TV from the list, and type the PIN the TV displays. After that the app remembers the TV and opens straight onto a screen of buttons: a D-pad with OK, Back, Home, Options, Play/Pause, volume up and down, mute, rewind, forward, and Sleep.

Pair more than one TV and the app remembers them all — switch between them without typing a PIN again.

That is the whole app.

Deliberately absent: suggested content, watch-next rails, ads, analytics, telemetry, accounts, and Google Play services. The app has zero runtime dependencies — built-in Android platform APIs only, with no AndroidX, no Compose, no OkHttp, and no coroutines. It is built for F-Droid rather than Google Play, and the code is shaped that way.

Waking a sleeping TV: an idle fire TV stops answering its control API while still being visible on the network, which is why some third-party remotes report a TV as "not found". This app wakes it and retries the press instead of giving up.

Security posture, for the record: the app is LAN-only, and the TV presents a self-signed certificate, so the app deliberately disables TLS certificate verification — the connection is encrypted but not mutually authenticated. Anyone on the same network who holds the pairing token can drive the TV, so treat it as a credential. The alternative to this tradeoff — an account and a cloud relay — is what this app exists to avoid.

Requirements: Android 7.0 or newer, and a phone on the same network as the fire TV. The app asks only for what it needs to find and reach the TV on the LAN: internet, network state, and a Wi-Fi multicast lock, which is held only around a scan. There is no telemetry and nothing is sent anywhere except to your TV.

Source code is at https://github.com/AustrianCanvasSociety/firehose-remote

A press cut short by Back or Cancel now always lets go of the key, so the TV no
longer keeps repeating it. Re-pairing a TV keeps the address it wakes by.