How to Delete Apps on Apple TV

Delete or hide apps you don't use from your TV screen

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Updated on February 12, 2021

What to Know

Hands-down easiest: Highlight the app, click and hold the touchpad, and click Play/Pause > Delete > Delete.
Next easiest: Go to Settings app > General > Manage Storage > app to delete > Delete.

This article explains how to delete or hide apps on the 4th Gen. Apple TV and Apple TV 4K running tvOS 11 later. In a few places, though, there are tips that apply to the earlier Apple TV models.

How to Delete Apps on Apple TV From the Home Screen

Deleting Apple TV apps from the Home Screen is simple. Just follow these steps:

Use the remote to highlight an app you want to delete.
Click and hold the touch pad on the remote until the app you highlighted starts to shake.
Click the Play/Pause button on the remote for Options.
In the menu that pops up on the Apple TV, use the remote to highlight the Delete option and then press the touch pad on the remote.
Confirm the deletion in the next screen by pressing Delete again.

The app is deleted from your Apple TV and any other Apple TVs in your home that uses the same ID if you opted for One Home Screen option.

How to Delete Apps on Apple TV From the Settings App

You can also delete apps from the Settings app on the Apple TV. You'll probably want to use this option if you're looking to free up space by deleting apps that use a lot of storage. To use delete apps this way, follow these steps:

Use the remote control to select the Settings app and click the remote control touch pad to open the app.
Click General.
Scroll down and click Manage Storage.
Scroll through the list of apps until you find the one you want to delete. Click on the trash can next to the app.
On the screen that pops up, select Delete.
The app is deleted from your Apple TV. If you turned on the One Home Screen feature to use iCloud home screen for multiple Apple TVs, it is deleted from all of them.

How to Hide Apps on Apple TV

If you want to keep an app but not see it on your home screen, hide the app in a folder instead. You do that in the same menu that you open to delete an app from the Home screen, but you click New Folder (or another category folder you made previously) instead.

The folder is named by the Apple TV according to category, and it appears on the Home screen filled with any apps you put in it.

On the 2nd Gen. and 3rd Gen. Apple TV models, you can only hide apps, not delete them, because users can't install their own apps on these models. Instead, follow all the steps for deleting apps from earlier, but select Hide instead of Delete in the last step. To unhide apps on those models, go to Settings > Main Menu.

How to Delete Apps on Multiple Apple TVs at Once

If you have more than one Apple TV (4th Gen. or 4K models only), you can set them to delete apps from all devices simultaneously. You turn on the One Home Screen feature, which makes sure all your Apple TVs have the same apps, arranged in the same way, on their home screens. To enable One Home Screen:

Open the Settings app.
Select Users and Accounts (or Accounts in earlier versions of the tvOS).
Select your user account.
Toggle the One Home Screen option to On.

Now, any time you make a change to the apps or layout on one of your Apple TVs, the others use iCloud to automatically update to match.

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