Cybersecurity firm Bitdefender has identified three security vulnerabilities in Fire TV devices that it says have been patched in Amazon’s recent software updates. The vulnerabilities were discovered and divulged to Amazon in December 2022 and were patched last month. Read more ›
Amazon has added another new tab to the navigation menu on Fire TV devices. The new addition this time around is a “Free” tab, denoted by an icon of a checkmark in a circle. As the name implies, the new tab lists rows of content that can be streamed for free, but there is a catch. Read more ›
Amazon seems to have a love-hate relationship with sideloading apps on its Fire TV devices. On one hand, sideloading is a necessary feature of any Android-based device to attract developers and the flexibility sideloading provides consumers is certainly attractive to advanced buyers that like to tinker with their devices. On the other hand, sideloading likely accounts for some unwanted percentage of customer service calls and it gives consumers more ways out of Amazon’s walled garden. While nothing has, thankfully, been changed to the functionality of sideloading on Fire TV devices, a recent update has changed the on-device messaging about the act to be far more severe. Read more ›
Amazon is pushing a new software update to the 3rd-gen Fire TV Cube that should make video and audiophiles happy. Software version 7.6.1.3 (PS7613/3686) is currently rolling out to devices with improvements to the Super Resolution Upscaling feature that should make non-4K content look even sharper. The update is also adding a feature that has long been requested by surround sound enthusiasts, which is support for DTS, DTS-HD, and Dolby True HD audio passthrough. Read more ›
Amazon announced in September that the Echo Show 15 would be receiving an update that turned it into a full-fledged Fire TV. With only a few weeks left in the year, the Fire TV update is now rolling out to Amazon’s largest Echo smart display, bringing the two product lines closer together than they’ve ever been. Read more ›
Every Fire TV owner knows you can place your six favorite apps in the Fire TV’s navigation menu for quick and easy access. To get to any of your other apps, you’ve had to select the Apps icon in the navigation bar to load up a grid view of all of your apps. Amazon has recently pushed a very welcomed software update to Fire TV devices that now lists all your apps in a horizontally scrollable list in the empty space below the Apps icon, eliminating the need to load the app grid. Read more ›
About a year ago, Amazon pushed an update to newer Fire TV models that made it possible to control the volume of Bluetooth headphones and/or speakers paired to a Fire TV with the Fire TV remote’s volume buttons. At the time, it seemed like only Fire OS 7 devices, like the 3rd-gen Fire TV Stick and 2nd-gen Fire TV Cube, received the new capability. Now it looks like Amazon is finally bringing it to older Fire TV devices running Fire OS 6. At the very least, the Fire TV Stick 4K can now control Bluetooth volume using the remote volume buttons, which was not possible a few weeks ago. Other Fire OS 6 Fire TV models may be gaining the capability as well, but I haven’t had a chance to check, so please let everyone know in the comments if it works for you and which Fire TV model you are using. Thanks to everyone that contacted me about this new update!
Netflix has finally added support for Frame Rate Matching on Amazon Fire TV devices. See here for a thorough explanation of the feature but, in short, this change now allows Fire TVs to change the refresh rate of your TV to exactly match the frame rate of the video being played through Netflix. The result is a perfectly smooth one-to-one correlation between the frames of a video and the frames being shown on the TV, which eliminates video judder artifacts. Read more ›
If you have a Fire TV devices running Fire OS 7, like the 3rd-gen Fire TV Stick or Fire TV Stick 4K Max, and you sideload many apps, you’ve probably experienced the annoying bug where the icons of some sideloaded apps appear as grayed out missing icons. This bug has been present since at least early 2020 and is a result of the Fire TV home screen launcher not checking all possible locations for an app to store its icon image file. After over 2 years of Fire TV owners living with this bug, Amazon has finally addressed it in a recent update where all sideloaded app icons are now being correctly displayed. Read more ›
Fire TV apps have gotten bigger and bigger over the years and the number of pre-installed apps from Amazon continues to grown each year, however, the internal storage of nearly all Fire TV models is still the same 8GB it was back in 2014 when the first Fire TV was released. This has made running out of free internal storage one of the biggest problems that Fire TV owners face. To help figure out which of your Fire TV apps is hogging the most of your precious space, Amazon has added the option to sort your app list by app size, making it a lot easier to know which apps you might want to delete first. Read more ›
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