[Fire TV Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] harlekinrains:
Heck - on Android 5.1 you even have problems navigating with a remote, a mouse emulator on a cellphone near by AND a fully fledged PC that is remapped (as suggested above) to send adb keyinputs - when you are just a few feet away from the system.

Why?

Well

- Wukong (mouse emulator) uses a adb command to perform the actual click action - and with Android 5.1 in one out of three cases that doesnt work without toggling off/on "enable adb" on the device via remote first. Of course this option is meant to be hidden in a submenu of the system settings. Because we dont want anyone to actually use it.

- Even with a real mouse attached - you frequently get missing courser syndrome - or are remindend that Android often depends on multi touch - and no one thought to support that with the mouse interface. So - you often stumble from "works fine" to "entirely unusable" scenarios - because f.e. swipe left would be needed.

- Key input commands via adb have a huge lag - that is caused by how adb handles them. Google itself has acknowledged in the past, that its bad.

- TV Remote based interfaces on Android are a somewhat new thing for everyone involved - after playing a bit with the Fire TV and the google leanback interfaces - its obvious that neither has found a design laguage that would actually work for complex workflows. Its almost shocking how "vanilla" and simple googles own leanback interfaces are - or have to be for their prototypical consumer.

- Most Apps expect touch. Cursor navigation is about as fluent as a medicore accessibility implementation (hit and miss, multiple times within one app).

- On screen keyboards from time to time can even prevent you from editing an screen text - because Amazons keyboard f.e. only knows lines - and refuses to touch anything with paragraphs.

- Controller navigation - something consoles nailed for about a century by now - and more recently even gets to be kind of a working standard even on more PC "like" plattforms - on Android is still horribly broken. Developers often fall back to the "emulate touch behavior with your controller" scheme of thinking - which leads to gems like "dont just press accept (A), select in row, then press down to select accept button (BIIIG because its a touch target), then press accept (A) on it.

- The Input lag on all Fire TV devices is just horrible. Most Action Games are bordering on being unplayable. But no one cares - because what people really want to talk about is which one of the 100 Bluetooth controllers to buy.

And on top of that you want to introduce Teamviewer Style remote support? From what? Another Fire TV, a PC with a mouse and keyboard interface?

When that industry just went through educating their customers, that you use iPads to control your Windows PC? How should they advertise that some people would want it the other way around? From my point of view its entirely impossible to differentiate and reeducate the consumer for this usecase - it will never happen.

-

Touch from the beginning was a horrible concept. But we made it work - using a very strict form language and an entire backpack of conventions. Now we find out, that the "second screen experience" to control another screen is something that is dead in the water. Although it shouldnt have played out this way as far as google is concerned (Chromecast).

We find more and more that Android might be unable to overcome everything being so tightly focused on touch conventions - because there is no convention on how to replace each aspect of navigation with non touch based inputs.

Consoles had the form language - but turned out to be too expensive for what the mass market needs.

So in the end we go all in on voice once more - in a way where complex prompts must be understood and "insta surface" the right result - because everything else is o broken.

And to top it off - google restricts adb to "one connection active at any time" in Android 5, because when you make sure that command line suddenly is the fastest way to get things done again - it surely had to be enhanced by getting into a submenu via your TV remote first - as the only way to tell the Android device that something using this "connection" should have timed out 20 minutes ago, opening the "port" again - but didnt.

User experience on everything BUT Kodi - is horrible in this eco system. (Kodi can be controlled by Mouse, Keyboard, Controller or TV Remote just fine - ).

With no obvious way out of it. Good Interface design costs real money - an no one is interested. Least of all the vendors in the west that want to push their three apps and their subscription model on top of the cheapest smartphone based hardware ecosystem they could get their hands on in the east.

edit: A few more examples needed? The google play store lean back experience makes sure you cant have any settings layer that isnt created for nested intent (if user wants to buy - make him click on buy, then lead him down those steps). The entire store interface cant have more than two settings options. One of them is parental control.

The leanback interface of google Music lacks every single one of the settings the phone app has. When you are listening to a song you cant even decide to have the progress and songtitle displayed - thats a "surface on single click, then unsurface after three seconds - part of the the only interface there is - main navigation".

You cant chose between a stock photo of the artist, or an Album cover. You cant disable that folders on the device are being integrated into your Albums category (not even .nomedia works)...

So while it is appealing on first glance - it really, really isnt after you get to know it. Dumbed down to were its just barely working for what its made up to be. And at the same time - straight up, a functional mess.

---------- Post added at 09:25 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:46 PM ----------

But in the problem solving horizon of the "smartphone generation user" -- the question asked in here of course again turns out to be -

"What app should I install to fix this?"

I think Apple should finally have someone else creating a "world peace" app, then cut into their revenue stream with 30%. I would buy that. And google for sure would copy it!

Footnote: "Some say it's the silicon valley way of problem solving."