[Fire TV General] AFTVnews.com:
First off, thank you for posting this long and detailed criticism. Feedback, even negative feedback, is always welcome. I'll respond inline.

I did not say "probably." I said "one theory is." There's a distinct difference. At that point nobody knew why FireStarter wasn't working yet. I hadn't even received the software update yet (which I pointed out), but thought people would like to know sooner rather than later that the update was causing some unknown issue with FireStarter. I'd love to have weeks with an update to fully dissect it before posting anything about it, but by then it would be too late for many people to avoid the update if they suddenly want to.

The first thing I wrote about the 5.0.5.1 update was that sideloaded apps were added to the home screen and there was a quicker way to get to apps. That's what Amazon told us about the update so that's what I reported. Nobody had any idea apps were blacklisted at that point. I didn't first write about app banning and "then celebrate Amazon" like you say.

I assume you're referring to when people ask about why they should root in the Q&A portion of my podcast. That question comes up nearly every week and if I listed all the reasons why someone would root in every episode it would not be interesting to the listeners. Heck, if I listed and talked about just the things you mention above, which is still just a small portion of the reasons to root, it would take up the entire time I allocate to Q&A. If you want to compile a full list of all the reasons to root and keep it up to date with links to guides, I'd love to point people to it every single time this question comes up. But nobody, including myself, has created such a list because it would be very time consuming to create and maintain.

Other websites not covering the Fire TV more or not doing their own research is out of my control.

Holding me personally responsible for that is just plain stupid.

You over estimate how much influence I have over other tech blogs. Every time Amazon does something negative to Fire TV owners, I contact numerous tech blogs to let them know. They simply don't care. It's not newsworthy to them. The issue isn't that the headlines were "Great new feature," it's that there were no headlines at all outside of my site.

I'm sorry everything I write about isn't newsworthy to you. I write about what I find interesting. It's not that I think everything Amazon does is worth cheering about, it's that I don't write about things I don't think are interesting. It might be a shock to you, but a headline like "Amazon did a thing that you shouldn't care about" is not at the top of my list of articles to write.

I didn't "make" anyone do anything. My sideloading guide lists 7 methods. The ES File Explorer method is by the the preferred method by most for obvious reasons. The fact is ADB is confusing to many people. A GUI, even if limited, is usually preferred by most. Hence the popularity of utilities like adbFire before ES File Explorer was even an option.

If you're saying I deliberately push guides off the front page, that's just stupid. I cannot control when something newsworthy happens. If something happens that results in a bunch of posts right after I release a guide, that's out of my control. I'm not going to hold back news just because I wrote a guide.

If I didn't make money from the website through ads, it wouldn't exist. Not in the same capacity at least. The same way XDA wouldn't exists if it didn't have ads to make money off of device hacking. If you have an issue with me turning my hobby of tinkering into a means to support my family, then so be it.

I never took credit for discovering the blacklist. I said "XDA forum member jkchr1s has discovered that FireStarter is being explicitly disabled by name" in my post and linked to his XDA post. jkchr1s and I were going back and forth via XDA private messages trying to locate the, at the time, theoretical blacklist. He explicitly asked me to not credit him with certain things, so I left some things vague.

I am not "promoting" myself to be "the person we should look at" for anything. It's simply a fact that I'm in a position to be the first one to know if the blacklist has been updated, since I know where to look and I have several Fire TVs and Fire TV Sticks dedicated for the sole purpose of capturing the update package to pass along to rbox.

I agree that learning ADB is far superior to any GUI like ES File Explorer. The only guides where ES File Explorer comes up is when I write "no pc needed" guides for rooting and sideloading, since those two topics are the most popular types of guides. But for every "no pc needed" guide I have ever written, there was always first an equivalent guide posted that did everything with just ADB.

Despite what you think, I don't control the future of FireStarter, the actions Amazon has or will take, or where the Fire TV community stands.

I don't "take both sides on an issue", but I do try to explain both sides of an issue. When Amazon does something the community thinks is negative, I don't blindly defend their actions. I do give my opinion on why I think they chose to do what they did, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with it. There is a distinct difference.

I've hid my reply to the comments that were deleted to help clean up this thread.