Migrating Saved Playlists Across Launchers on Android TV After

Updated 2026-11-03

Problem: Why a Playlist Stops Working After a Firmware Update

Android TV systems that ship with a custom launcher often lose saved playlists right after a firmware refresh. The CleanYourTV launcher (and similar overlays) stores watch history, favorite shows, and recipe bookmarks in a sandboxed user profile section. When Google pushes an OTA update, the underlying storage schema can shift, and the old launcher may stop recognizing the new file structure. Result: you open a fresh build of the TV and find your “My Shows” list empty, or worse, the launcher itself fails to load at all. In practice, many users spend hours trying to recreate their custom watchlist before discovering the official cleanup tool is available on the support page. This guide walks through the exact steps to recover and port playlists without losing progress.

What CleanYourTV Actually Does With Your Playlists

CleanYourTV is not a native Android TV app but a lightweight overlay that sits on top of your home screen. It pulls data from the system’s activity manager and the user-facing “Watch List” API, then writes entries into a private directory on the internal flash: bookmarks, TV series tags, and even recipe collections tied to specific shows. On stock Android TV, the launcher is either Google TV (LumaFusion’s successor) or the Pixel TV launcher, both of which read the same canonical storage path. After a firmware update, the package name sometimes changes (e.g., from com.google.android.tv to a renamed package), and the new version of the firmware may enforce stricter per-app sandboxing. If your launcher lives in a separate container folder, the update can strip shared libraries that your saved-playlist module relied on, causing silent corruption or missing lists.

The key point is that the migration problem isn’t the launcher itself—it’s the gap between two storage schemas (old vs. new) that your backup and restore scripts don’t cover.

Step-by-Step: Exporting From the Old Launcher Before You Reset

Before you touch any settings or perform a factory reset, take a complete snapshot of what you have. On your Android TV, go to Settings > Apps & System > Storage (or directly into the Developer options if you’ve enabled them), and use the “Export” function of the built-in backup utility. Make sure you select “All apps and all files,” then choose the “My Playlists” category and export the contents to a USB stick or a network share. For devices that lack a native export, open a browser and visit the CleanYourTV support site for your region, download the Small Business JSON dump tool, and run a collection pass against the local cache at /data/user/0/com.cleanyourtv.1/. The export format is simple: a list of item IDs mapped to title strings plus a boolean flag for whether the entry is pinned.

If your firmware update forces a reset of the TV (a common side effect when the base image checksum fails), do not let it happen until after the export completes. A failed update plus a partial backup is the most common reason users lose their playlists entirely.

Step-by-Step: Importing Into the New Launcher

Once the firmware has finished updating and your Google account signs back in, you need to load the exported bundle. If you performed the export via the CleanYourTV web tool, log in with the same account you created during the setup of the previous launcher. Open the CleanYourTV app from the new launcher (it may appear under a different icon name, such as “Personalized Home” — treat it as the same product, just reinstalled). Use the Import function, upload the JSON you exported earlier, and confirm the path. The app will parse the ID list, match each entry to its title, and recreate the watchlist in the new layout.

For the stock launcher itself, the import path is usually Settings > Home > Show Lists > Import List, where you paste the JSON string or select the file from a USB drive. In practice, the stock launcher doesn’t understand playlists—only the CleanYourTV overlay does—so the final playlist will live inside the CleanYourTV panel, accessible via the on-screen menu. If the stock launcher offers a “Favorites” feature, you can manually add the titles from the JSON list, but that’s a tedious fallback.

Trade-offs: What You Gain, What You Lose

The migration is safe when you keep the original export file intact. The advantage is complete fidelity: every series tag, episode count, and custom order you set up over months is preserved, and the reload process takes less than ten minutes on a modern TV. The downside is that the overlay’s UI layout is not identical to the old launcher’s—some color themes disappear, and third-party integrations like smart-home voice search lose their deep links to the playlist items. Also, certain premium subscriptions (like certain cooking channels bundled with CleanYourTV) store their own watchlists separately; those won’t migrate automatically, and you’ll need to re-subscribe and re-attach via the web dashboard.

Another subtle loss: the old launcher’s “Recently Watched” queue, which some people rely on for a quick restart, gets wiped during the factory reset and only reappears after the new home screen finishes loading. That cycle takes a few days of normal use before it looks familiar again.

Tips and Shortcuts for Common Mistakes

A frequent beginner error is re-importing the JSON twice, which duplicates every playlist and confuses the launcher’s deduplication logic. To avoid it, delete the first playlist panel from the old launcher completely before importing. Another mistake is assuming the firmware update restored all your data—sometimes the update applies a patch that disables the old launcher package, so the device won’t open unless you remove it from the boot image and re-flash the stock image from a trusted source. When in doubt, the CleanYourTV support team offers a dedicated “Migration Hotline” (operating hours listed on the support page) to walk you through the JSON format. Keep a running list of the exact firmware version number and the package name, because two sequential updates from the Google Play Store can have overwritten the local install metadata in ways that only show up when you get stuck.

How to Verify Everything Worked After the Move

Launch the CleanYourTV overlay and navigate to the main menu. Check that the “My Shows” section is populated with the correct titles in the original order—this is the fastest visual confirmation. Next, open one show and verify the season/episode navigation works, because the overlay injects the play state. If a single entry is missing, compare the JSON export against the on-screen list; missing entries usually indicate a character encoding issue (smart quotes vs. straight quotes) during the export. Finally, test the integration with any voice assistant or remote you used during the old setup: ask it to “play the next episode from my saved list,” and confirm it resolves to the correct episode. If the voice command fails, clear the CleanYourTV cache from Settings > System > Cache, reboot, and re-import once more. Once those checks pass, your migrated playlist behaves identically to the original.

Conclusion: A One-Time Effort With Long-Term Payoff

Migrating saved playlists across launchers after a firmware update is a chore, but it takes about fifteen minutes total if you follow the export-first habit and use the official CleanYourTV tools. The real benefit is that your personalized watchlist survives the refresh, and you don’t have to rebuild it by hand from a spreadsheet. Even though the preview UI changes slightly and a few voice-assistant links need a re-link, the majority of users end up with a fully functional system that feels as custom as the one they had before. Keep your backups current, label your export files clearly, and check the official migration guide on the CleanYourTV site whenever a firmware version change lands.

Related reading: more Android TV notes