[Fire TV Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] porkenhimer:
There is only one problem wiith set top boxes, and its the same problem that there is with all electronic devices these days, the consmer expects them to do more than they actually do. One thing that tells me this is this crazy idea that Android TV boxes are competing with and are in fact gaming consoles, but they in fact are not. When the company that provides the system calls android a platform for "casual gaming" then that should tell anyone how far away Android is from being a game console. Google is in the business of making money and thats why the sell mobile games, and the games are looked at as a casual time killer. Unless google makes a gaming system that uses Android for its operating system, Android will never be a gaming console. Not only will it never be a gaming console, but gaming wise it does not compare to the major gaming consoles. Sure you can play mobile games and games through an emulator, but that in no way makes android a gaming console. Just because you see post on ebay and elsewhere selling Android boxes and saying they are gaming consoles does not make them gaming consoles, they say that to get you to buy the box. I guarantee you will never see a legit company like amazon, Google etc sell their devices as a gaming console, cause thats not what they are. Even Nvidia doesn't call their device a gaming console, even though every picture of it on their site has a game being played on the screen, cause they too know that android devices are not gaming consoles. If you want a gaming console, get a Nintendo, ps4 or Xbox, but if you cannot afford that and will settle for playing some old games through an emulator and some mobile games then get a set top box. When I got my Fire TV I knew exactly what I was getting. I did not get it hoping the specs were wrong and could actually do more than advertised. And rooting a device is not a dealbreaker, and if it was why would you even get the device in the first place? That just proves the point that people want these devices to do more than they are intended to do. I see no advantage in rooting my Fire TV, cause it does what it was advertised to do. Sure my Android phone is rooted, but I see no need to root a Fire TV. I thought outside the box and installed third party app stores to get apps, use third party google apps to take the place of all the official google apps. I do not have to deal with market compatability issues, cause I can download anything from the app stores I have installed. So what I can't change my default launcher, it doesn't matter cause I installed dock4droid so I never have to use the launcher to change apps, I just click on a certain part of the screen and my recent apps or favorite apps popup and I can choose to open what I want. To me the fire TV is more than good enough. I know all apps are not usable, but I knew that before buying it, and I also know that there is not a device out there that can use every app made for Android, so all devices have compatability issues, which kinda makes it even out. I do not really think set top boxes have a problem at all, I think that people that buy them are the problem. They do not research before buying and even when they do they think somehow it will be different than they though. They also buy into the hype that android boxes are gaming consoles, which is the furthes from being true. They expect everything to just work when they know compatability issues with apps have always been around with android, cause there is not just one device like with Apple, there are so many android platforms in terms of hardware that a lot of things do no work from device to device. I praise Amazon for trying to get apps working on the Fire TV, but my one gripe is they should have been more prepared before releasing the Fire TV. I always expect things not to work, but with Amazon having other devices, it seems like they never really care about building their app store til they released the Fire TV, which seems kinda weird for a company to do. They just reached a thousand native apps so good for them, but if it took this long to get to a thousand how long will it take to get to two thousand? I guess I can't really gripe, cause they are acually beating samsung in terms of native apps, so I guess its not too bad. Hopefully Amazon will build on this device like apple has done with their devices and keep making the Fire TV bigger and better every year. The jump from the first iphone to the iphone 3 was like night and day so lets hope that Amazon does the same for the fire TV. Hopefully they do like Apple and give us a new device each year with some hardware upgrades and some software upgrades and just build on what they already have, if so the Fire TV will be without a doubt the best set top box in the next couple years.