The Fire TV Sticks are getting more unusable with every update.
Isn’t a firestick basically a chromecast? I mean, google is a shitty company in matters about privacy or ethics, but amazon isn’t much better
They have been built onto android until now, but i read that they wanted to ditch that and make their own os from scratch
Why do people still use those?
I got a 4K Max one because it was only 35€. I want to upgrade to a shield pro successor which is overdue by now.
If you want to do this because of the full screen ads you may be too late.
Lol, damn.
You can easily change launchers on the Shield and remove all of Google’s nonsense through ADB as well though, unlike Amazon who locks down the OS very tight. Plus like another commenter said, you can just flat out install LineageOS and you’re good.
Thanks for the tip, I didn’t know that.
4k Max is so much faster than the Shield devices, i actually got upset that i invested so much money in two of them.
Interesting. I am not really happy with mine. Pretty laggy and it sometimes crashes. But good to know and makes the wait easier instead of getting that old tech instead.
That’s why piracy is back on the menu.
That has nothing to do with piracy or not. Its just a device to play media. You can use a firetv to 100% stream pirated content via kodi or plex and still have to see this shit.
I don’t see it. I have mine blocked from dialing home, receiving updates and autoplays have long been turned off.
Good for you. It does not change my point though that a device which can stream media having ads not really has anything to do with more piracy.
Sure it does. As a pirate I’ve chosen to disable the device’s ability to connect to Amazon to annoy me with ads, and pirate the content they’d usually serve me instead of subscribing to anything. Not that hard to understand. If I could find a way to uninstall all the Amazon apps, I would.
This here is the solution for what you want: https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/
You can disable whatever app you want until the system doesn’t work any more. Just install an alternative for what you want to disable (e.g. the launcher) and then disable the Amazon version.
until the system doesn’t work anymore
yeah that’s my worry… accidentally bricking the thing. Can you rollback changes if that happens?
edit:
so be sure you don’t disable anything absolutely critical (use your best judgment)
apparently not
I keep imagining a scenario where it cannot find something and just spins forever looking for it, or disable something that prevents startup entirely, etc.
edit: wait… you can install a new launcher on a fire tv? I need to look into that.
As long as it still boots, you can undo the change with a simple
adb pm enable [packagename].I wouldn’t recomment disableing system critical things like systemui. You can google each package together with “Can I disable X” and you should get decent infos.
Regarding the launcher:
I don’t have a Fire TV but I had a Fire Tablet. So if these two work the same, you can install another launcher without issues. But Amazon removed the setting for default launcher, so it will always pick the stock launcher when you press the home button.
To override that, there are two options.
- Install the Automate app by Llamalab and make a small flow that detects when the stock launcher is the currently active app and then automatically launches the new launcher. This option is completely safe.
- Disable the stock launcher. If Android doesn’t find it’s set default launcher, it will instead open the first launcher it finds. Worked good on the Fire Tablet, but I can’t verify that this doesn’t cause issues on a Fire TV. So this might be a bit risky.
