Amazon will restore Fire TV app sideloading after a bug
Amazon says a Fire TV Settings update emptied the “Install unknown apps” list on some devices, and a repair should roll out to affected hardware within a week.
Amazon has confirmed that the block on third-party app installs that appeared on some Fire TV devices was a bug rather than a deliberate crackdown, and says a fix is on the way.
The company told AFTV News: “There was a bug in a recent Fire TV Settings update that caused the ‘Install unknown apps’ list to appear incomplete or empty on some Fire TV devices. We have identified the cause and a fix will roll out in an upcoming Fire TV Settings update, installed automatically on affected devices over the coming week.”
The fault first surfaced in software patches pushed out late last year, when users found that sideloaded apps such as Downloader could no longer be granted permission to install other software. Because the symptom looked targeted, plenty of owners assumed Amazon had quietly turned sideloading off.
The repair should be just as quiet. AFTV News expects it to arrive as a silent system component update, which means the Fire TV OS version number may never change — affected users can simply check the setting under Settings, then My Fire TV.
Our opinion
Sideloading is the reason a cheap Fire TV Stick can become a media centre, a retro console or a dashboard for services Amazon would rather you did not use, and Amazon has never been entirely comfortable with that. Taking the company at its word, this one really was an accident, and a week is a reasonable window to fix it. The lesson worth remembering is how quickly a settings “improvement” can lock people out of their own hardware — and how little warning anyone gets when it does.