Hack his Amazon Fire Stick
Annoyed by the adverts and other clutter on its home screen, Robert Irvine attempts to...
One of my worst domestic habits, along with eating crisps in bed, is continuing to use things that badly need upgrading. My favourite mug is chipped around the rim, my bathroom scales only work when heavily jumped on and – until recently – I was streaming my entertainment using the original Google Chromecast.
Back in 2013, this HDMI dongle was undoubtedly groundbreaking, but eight years later, it was starting to feel cumbersome and slow. Rather than splash out on a smart TV, I treated myself to an Amazon Fire TV Stick, for the princely sum of £30, having been impressed with the device when writing Issue 605’s ‘Master Your TV Sticks’ Cover Feature.
Navigating to Netflix is like walking through a pre-covid Piccadilly Circus
This lightweight streaming device has proved perfect for my needs: easy to set up, quick to operate and with more TV, film and music apps than you could (literally) shake a stick at. There’s only one problem, which is that the Fire TV home screen is needlessly cluttered. Rather than offer big tiles for the services you use every day, six apps are squeezed into a narrow strip across the middle of the interface, with an ellipsis button you need to select to view the rest. Worst of all, the screen is dominated by adverts, ‘featured content’ and recommended apps that make navigating to Netflix like walking through a pre-covid Piccadilly Circus.
Looking online for a way to hack the screen, I discovered that I wasn’t the only Fire TV user who dislikes its appearance. The simplest suggested workaround was to hold down the Home button on the remote control to bring up the shortcuts screen, then select Apps to open the Apps Library. This displays your apps unencumbered by other junk, and would be ideal if it could be set as your default startup screen.
Sadly, it can’t, so my next step was to try and turn off the ads and trailers, or at least make them less irritating. After digging around in Settings, I eventually found options under Preferences, then Featured Content that let me disable autoplaying audio and video.
Tweaking these settings made the home screen less frenetic, but it still looked crowded. The only solution, apparently, was to install an alternative app launcher, which required sideloading an app from outside the Amazon Appstore. This isn’t as dodgy as it sounds, because Fire TV lets you install ‘unknown apps’, but it is a bit tricky.
I first installed a free app called Downloader from the Appstore ( www. snipca.com/37870) – the easiest way to find this was to ask Alexa: “find Downloader app”. I then used the app’s browser to access the download link of a much recommended app launcher called Wolf Launcher ( www.snipca. com/37868). I was warned that my TV didn’t allow apps from unknown sources, so I opened Settings when prompted to enable this permission for the Downloader app. I was then able to install and open Wolf Launcher, which presented my apps in a clean, colourful grid.
This looked great, but it didn’t replace the default Fire TV home screen. To achieve that, I was advised to go to Settings, My Fire TV, then Developer Options and turn on ADB Debugging, then use Downloader to install an app called Launcher Manager ( www.snipca. com/37867). This let me disable the standard Amazon launcher on my device, which was supposed to make Wolf Launcher open when I pressed the Home button on my remote. Instead, it only displayed a worrying black screen. Fortunately, I managed to get back into Launcher Manager to re-enable the stock launcher, and decided that perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all.
Further investigation revealed that Amazon is clamping down on third-party launchers, which may explain my failure, but at least I’ve removed the most annoying ads and haven’t broken my Fire Stick.
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