Today, if you unbox a used 43W800C, you face a choice. Update to the final PKG6.407 and accept the slow death of app incompatibility, or disconnect it from the internet, plug in an Apple TV 4K or Roku Ultra via HDMI, and treat the TV as a glorified monitor. In doing so, you bypass the ghost entirely. Because the best firmware for a 2015 Android TV is no firmware at all—just a panel, a backlight, and a $50 streaming stick.

Inside the extracted contents, look for a file ending in .pkg (for example, sony_dtvxxxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxx.pkg ).

Sony released several major firmware revisions for this model. The most significant was the leap from v3.905 (Android 5.1) to PKG6.404.xxxx (Android 6.0.1).