Android TV remote control
Blog post from Tailscale
Elias Naur's guest post details the integration of Tailscale with Android TV, allowing users to connect to big screens without needing a desktop or mobile device, which is especially useful for accessing home media servers while traveling. The Tailscale Android app, now supporting Android TV and available on the Google Play Store, faced challenges due to its user interface being built with Gio, which initially lacked support for TV remote control navigation. This required enhancements to allow remote navigation using directional buttons and activation, alongside logical grid partitioning for widgets and off-screen focus management. Despite the challenges of developing a custom GUI toolkit from scratch, using Gio offers benefits such as compatibility with Go, portability across platforms, and simplified UI logic. The post encourages users to try the Tailscale app on Android TV by downloading it from the Play Store.