Amazon has removed a widely popular feature from some of their Fire Stick devices following a new update.
The software updates wiped the feature clean off of some older 1st-gen Fire TV Stick 4K and the current 2nd-gen Fire TV Stick Max this week.
A key gimmick of these streaming sticks is being able to access a raft of apps and, well, streaming services.
People worried about having a few too many Fire TV apps, however, have for five years been able to hide them from their homepages.
All people had to do was hit the menu button on an app and click ‘Hide from Your Apps’.
This didn’t uninstall the app or ‘offload’ it, which frees up storage while keeping the main app data.
The feature was rolled out as part of a new interface design that featured user profiles. So each streamer could keep their profiles neat and tidy.
Not anymore. The new updates have removed the ability to hide apps.
So, if you have multiple profiles, with each using different apps, all users will now have the same apps on their home screens.
For example, if your children use the Twitch app but you don’t even know what a ‘Twitcher’ is, you’re stuck navigating around the app on your profile.
Pre-installed apps that cannot be deleted like Prime Video, Fire TV Channels, and Amazon Live Shopping are now impossible to hide.
This even includes the Freevee app, a soon-to-be defunct streaming service.
Not being able to remove apps any more took some Reddit users completely by surprise.
‘I’ve restarted multiple times, and have no idea why it’s missing or why apps I had hidden (Amazon Music and Internet, for example) are now unhidden,’ one wrote.
Another added: ‘Welp, this makes Fire Sticks officially a dealbreaker, Amazon.
‘If I am unable to get rid of the useless Amazon bloatware icons I am done with Fire Sticks I will trade all but one which is a Fire Cube. I will have to hide them to the bottom which makes the list of apps too bloated.’
A third said: ‘My other sticks aren’t running this software version and haven’t lost this functionality. Crap like this adds up, and it has me really weighing Google TV.’
The updates only applied to Fire OS 6 for the 1st-gen Fire TV Stick 4K and Fire OS 8 for the 2nd-gen Fire TV Stick Max, AFTVNews reported.
All Fire TV models are forcibly updated by Amazon, hinting that this change may soon be applied to all devices.
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