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Amazon's New Fire TV Sticks No Longer Support Sideloading (cordcuttersnews.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the heads-up dept.
Amazon's newest Fire TV Sticks are dropping support for normal sideloading, blocking apps from outside the Amazon Appstore unless the device is registered with developers. Cord Cutters News reports: This week, Amazon announced the upcoming launch of a new Fire TV Stick HD. The new model will run on Amazon's Vega OS, rather than Android, so most streaming apps will be supported, but users won't be add third party apps. Now, on the product page to preorder the new Fire Stick, some Amazon customers are getting a message warning them that the new model won't allow sideloading. Interestingly, not all customers are getting the message, whether signed in to an Amazon account or not.

The message, shown in a screenshot below, says: "For enhanced security, this device prevents sideloading or installing apps from unknown sources. Only apps from the Amazon Appstore are available for download." [...] The Fire TV Stick Select, announced in September 2025, also runs on Vega and some customers will see the same message about sideloading on that product page. [...] While Amazon continues to be a "multi-OS company," we should expect that future Fire TV models will also be built with Vega OS, limiting the apps users can access with their streaming devices to those from the Amazon Appstore.

Amazon's New Fire TV Sticks No Longer Support Sideloading More | Reply

Amazon's New Fire TV Sticks No Longer Support Sideloading

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  • Software bugs and backdoors could provide surprises.

    • Re:Maybe (Score:5, Informative)

      by Joe Jordan ( 453607 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:15PM (#66099024) Journal
      Or just don't fight it and get an NVIDIA Shield. It's a 10x better experience anyway.

      • Re: Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)

        by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:24PM (#66099042)
        You can buy a full pc for the price of a shield.
        • Okay, but that's not really helpful if you're looking for something comparable to a firestick but still want to sideload Android apps.

      • Re:Maybe (Score:5, Informative)

        by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:52PM (#66099086) Homepage
        The Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB runs LibreELEC just fine and was cheap pre-AI RAM pricing. Pair it with a cheap Chinese Bluetooth FireTV remote for control. Add a POE hat for power and you just need a HDMI cable to the TV/monitor and an Ethernet cable to your network. Set up PXE booting from the NAS your media is from so no need to worry about SD cards. I have been running 5 of them in this configuration for several years, super reliable and no enshitification to worry about.
        • Completely agree with your setup, but even on slashdot perhaps 10-20% of the readers could implement. In the real world, vanishingly small.

          That said, the Walmart house brand Onn has been a delightful surprise.

          • Re: Maybe (Score:4, Informative)

            by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Saturday April 18, 2026 @03:34AM (#66099706) Homepage

            That said, the Walmart house brand Onn has been a delightful surprise.

            This.

            I did the Raspberry Pi thing for awhile and they've got more than their share of annoyances. The big ones are:

            Wi-Fi reception sucks. Most people aren't using Ethernet at home and the Pi's built-in Wi-Fi antenna is marginal at best. Yeah, you can work around this by installing a USB Wi-Fi stick, but those alone can end up costing as much as Walmart's Onn streaming box.

            Last time I tried to get paid streaming services to work on a Raspberry Pi, it involved manually installing some DRM support that was extracted from Android to make streaming work through the browser, and I'm really stretching the definition of the word "work" here. I doubt the situation has improved much.

            Finally, Raspberry Pis are still prone to randomly shitting their SD cards. You basically have to keep spares around to re-image when the unlucky day comes along that it just decides it's time for a new SD card. This will most likely happen on an evening when you're exhausted from work, just put a plate of food on the coffee table and want to sit down for a meal and a movie.

            Walmart's Onn box on the other hand, is $25 (as of this posting) and you can just install Kodi from the Google Play Store. It also has clients for all the major paid streaming services, and those also just work without any headaches.

        • I'm assuming it won't play DRM content from Prime or other services, so it's not a direct replacement, notwithstanding the high technical threshold to set it up.

          I do have one Pi 3B+ running LibreElec to play 3D content from NAS on an old 3DTV. It's connected to a Wifi mesh network. I haven't tried PXE booting. Might slow the boot time significantly as the mesh manages about 150 Mbps. No POE in my case obviously.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ukoda ( 537183 )
            I have paid for content in the past but will not pay for DRM content. Since most of my viewing is anime I have a Crunchyroll subscription, effectively the same one I have for several years, back to when I was using FireTV and Android STB. I don't actually use Crunchyroll, I like the Kodi interface better, the subscription is purely to ensure content creators are getting income for their work. Actually same with manga and light novels, I prefer reading eBooks but as no one sells them any more, they only r

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by madbrain ( 11432 )

              My vision is failing to the point I can no longer read physical books. Inserting microSD cards is also a huge problem, as they are too small and I can't focus on them.

              SD cards are still faster than my mesh Wifi in terms of raw throughput. Theoretically about 320 Mbps. My mesh Wifi peaks around 200 Mbps, I think.

              My Pi 3B+ is actually not using the Wifi NIC. It's using the Ethernet NIC, and connected to a switch, with a Unifi AP acting as a Wifi bridge. So, I believe there is no technical obstacle to PXE boot

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by ukoda ( 537183 )
                You don't have to use a NAS of course, any decent Linux server will do the job. The services you need are:

                - A dhcp server so the RPi get an IP address and the info it needs for the PXE. This was the tricky one to get right, with option-128 and option-129 being needed.
                - A dns server, you might be able to get away without this one.
                - A tftp server to serve up the first Linux boot stage. It effectively has the contents of the SD card /boot or /boot/firmware directory with the cmdline.txt file modified. W

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by madbrain ( 11432 )

                  My pfSsense Proxmox router VM has the DHCP & DNS server parts covered.

                  I'll look at adding containers for TFTP and NFS.

                  No PoE for me - there is no wiring for it. And I don't have any managed or POE switches. But I can force power cycle the Pis with Wifi smartplugs. All 3 of my Pis have their own already. So, that should handle reboots / updates.

      • As an owner of both, you're very mistaken, the FireTV stick is much better considering its price, which is a fraction of the shield, and most people don't use anything else as their streaming/media apps on these things. But if you're into native gaming with better graphics, yeah, than the shield is better, but most don't use it for that.
  • I have jellyfin, but sideloading Kodi allowed me to play video directly from remote filesystem. Hope there is another app that does that available.

    • Re:kodi (Score:4, Informative)

      by HouseOfMisterE ( 659953 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:26PM (#66099044)

      Both the Google TV Streamer 4K and the Walmart Onn 4K Android streaming device have Google Play store and you can install Kodi directly from there without side loading, and there are other inexpensive devices that can do that.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ukoda ( 537183 )
        Kodi is not available thru Google Play here, if you have seen it there send the link as it may be region difference. All devices I have seen with it have installed it in the factory or side loaded afterward.

        I have sideloaded Kodi on smart TVs, Google Chromcasts and FireTVs and all of them deteriorated in usability over time and Google is hell bent on warning you about the dangers of sideloaded stuff and wanting to remove it. With smart TV and FireTVs Kodi became virtually unusable with every system sof

      • The Onn is an excellent device for the money and most questionable aspects can be disabled or piholed. Jellyfin and SmartTube and Projectivy are all fine.

        I should go see if LineageOS has added any new low-power devices in the past year. That's the best option but nothing supported was for sale when I last looked.

    • I used to use KODI. VLC allows this as well.

      • Does VLC work across ssh like Kodi did? Last time I used VLC on mobile it was pretty bad.
      • I just opened VLC on my phone. It seems to be searching for network shares but not finding any even though I have SMB shares. And I don't see anything for ssh. It seems like it can play a direct SFTP link but won't allow you to browse or anything like that.

  • They switched from Android (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:21PM (#66099032)
    A more fundamental reason is that they switched away from Android to Vega. It's a custom OS with a React.Native-based UI. There is literally no infrastructure in it for side-loaded apps.
    • Which makes it not really something you own.

      • Yes, $35 buys you a dongle with just enough of an OS to bootstrap renting 4K content.

        • I'm glad I have all the firesticks I need right now. I actually bought a bunch of the original model when I heard that they were making this change.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cyberax ( 705495 )
        Well, yeah. It's a dirt-cheap disposable device for content consumption.
        • ...as long as they allow you to the functionality. They could lock you out after a year and then there is nothing you can do with it. At least the old Firesticks were still an android you could run Jellyfin on etc.

      • In what way, exactly? They're not nerfing something you already have. They're offering a device and telling you in advance what it does and does not do. If you buy it, it's yours.

        I didn't not own my Miata because it didn't haul gravel.

        • But if they lock you out, now you have something useless. If they locked you out before, at least you still had an android box.

  • better off without Amazon (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @03:31PM (#66099056)
    Just use a laptop or sbc like raspberry pi and pirate movies to stream to your TV, users should quit making the rich richer

    • My setup is my 24-core Threadripper PC with 128gigs of RAM and a Titan X, connected to my dumb TV (Panasonic 42" plasma) with optical audio running to the surround system, there's also a VCR (Sony SLV-N51), blu-ray player, and an Apple TV (think it's the 2k version... no USB).

      If you know where to look, you don't need a subscription to anything.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xwin ( 848234 )
      After Amazon made so many ads in my paid subscription that it became unwatchable, I used one of the old laptops circa 2012. Installed windows 10 on it and firefox with UblockOrigin. It does not do 4K but who cares as I can't see it anyway. It works perfectly and there is NO ADS at all. Regret not doing it sooner. Interface is not remote friendly but wireless mouse does the trick. If they block Windows 10 as they did Windows 7 recently, I will install Linux on it and keep going. Next laptop will be recycled
    • Or do what dozens of us do and take advantage of the loss leader pricing for Amazon devices (esp on sale) that Just Work out of the box and have a remote ready to go, sideload Stremio, link it to Real Debrid and enjoy the ease of a great Netflix-style interface and zero fucking around with torrents or getting stuff from my PC to my TV or getting different bits of hardware to talk to each other. I very much doubt Bezos has made a cent off that particular transaction.

  • Better to build a thin client, and install Linux on it.
    That way, you're in control

  • I wonder if the timing of this is related to their recent forcing of developers to supply government issued ID to create apps for their app store. I got multiple warnings about this and when I looked at the process it was clear they want to 100% know who you really are. I couldn't even remember why I had a developer account, I'm guessing I created years ago when Alex was the hot new thing with the intent of customising my use if it. I ignored their demands and will continue ignoring their app store immed

  • Nobody has a reason to buy one now.

  • Just buy a walmart ONN box. Works better and can side load

  • No shortage of cheap alternatives if one is bothered by it.

    In my graveyard I've got a FireStick, two Rokus, two Nvidia Shields, a ChromeCast, 3 generic Kodi boxes, the guts of an HTPC, a couple mini computers (NuC and Lenovo)... over the years I've tried a lot of stuff. It's all decommissioned.

    Now I run two Apple TVs, with Infuse and VLC for my NAS library. Easily the best, easiest, most trouble free media devices I've ever owned.

  • But then, I stopped using the Fire Stick over 10 years ago...like the Roku !!

  • I load all my sticks into the side of my TV.

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