Summary Highlight

As many of you know, over the years I have been recommending the use of the Fire TV Stick devices as the main streaming platform of choice. There were many reasons for that preference.

• The overall cheap cost of the streaming device.
• The quality and stability of the device.
• Steady releases of OS updates by Amazon.
• The ease of getting a hold of one.
• The large community supporting the customization of these devices.

Unfortunately, Amazon has released several updates over the past couple of weeks (dated between Feb 23, 2022 to Mar 3, 2022) specifically targeted blocking of such customization...

Why would they do that?

The manufacturing cost of the Amazon devices along with the shipping and handling costs of it combined, does not really offer Amazon much profit. Neither does the Amazon Prime subscription, as most of the Prime subscribers join because of benefits is free and fast shipping services, not because of the Prime streaming content. Amazon makes most of its profit via targeted content and ads pushed to the end user through their default main Home Screen (their Stock Home Launcher). They are able to to promote specific streaming services content (Netflix, HBO Plus, Hulu, Disney+...) to which these streaming services pay a premium to Amazon. They also gather plenty of viewing habits analytics which then then leverage internally and sell to other vendors.

By replacing the the Default Stock Launcher, we are basically "killing" the profit margins for Amazon.

What has Amazon done to prevent that?

Amazon has rapidly deployed system updates to its Fire TV devices which perform two main functions:

1. Lock Amazon updates to be always on and prevent blocking these updates.
2. Force Amazon's Stock Home Launcher to be the main screen interface.

These updates are just the first updates that are specifically targeting users that are trying to leverage their own custom interface. Does it mean that non-Amazon certified apps are next on the chopping block? Honestly, I don't know.

What does all of this means?

The current implications mean that you will most likely lose the ability to leverage a customized main Home Screen, as I have been suggesting in my guide to implement. it does not (currently!) mean that you can't still leverage and enjoy all the apps you installed on it and view content through them.

Bottomline, you do not need to go out and replace your device just yet. They will continue to be good reliable streaming devices, even if the access to the apps is less convenient and there is more clutter in the default Amazon interface. Again, they may take an extra step to block these apps as well, but there is no indication of it at this point.

What should I do?

Honestly, nothing at this point. As mentioned above, the only difference may be that the default interface is back and you can no longer change it... You may have changed the option to block updates to FireOS some time in the past to block updates (I went through it in the guide). If you did, you are safe from this change on your Fire TV devices moving forward and you have no idea what the hell am I talking about because you have not seen any change happen on your Fire TV device :)

Any alternatives?

YES! As you guys may recall, Amazon's FireOS (Fire TV's operating system) is fully based on Google's Android TV. This is exactly why the guide goes through pretty much the same setup steps for both Fire TV and Android TV devices, with only a few variations due to Amazon's customizations.

Moving forward, I will no longer be recommending Amazon devices as the go to streaming device. I will recommend moving to Android TV based devices as the main alternative. The main Introduction page of the guide will have an updated list of recommended Android TV based devices, after I've had a chance to review some good, cheap alternative streaming devices.