[Fire TV General] harlekinwashere:
But they can hide it. Make sure people don't stumble upon the sideload apk portion of their boxes. Ever.

Now, this is what they are doing. This is what the product blogger allows them to do without even letting it become a story anymore. He shuts it down for them. Cool. Probably get more exclusive Echo scoops that way...

Also - I've laid this out in my first posting, this is another tldr; version.

I cant stand it, that Amazon is allowed to take away normal user rights a slice at a time, and if you are not letting it fly - you are attacked by superfans, doubling down on personal attacks, because - who needs a rational argument, on the internet. Ever. Isn't that what 9gag taught us?

They can't take it away entirely. Great.. But as always - whats possible doesnt matter. What matters is stuff thats easy enough for actual people to use.

Are you now doing remote control acrobatics, everytime you have to restart the adb service, to even get the menu with the toggle to appear? Remember when people dismissed Amazon only allowing one adb connection into the device wasn't a big deal?

Remember what happened next? We all of a sudden had to support a slew of people that came in with blanket statements that "stuff or tutorials would not work anymore". And what was the result? We had to shrug and explain, that people would have to learn how this works - because we could not get it opened up again to work - always as expected and easy.

We'll decide if it is a big deal, once we know how its implemented, how about that?

But I am certainly not taking their PR departments word for it, and I am sure enough not following the product bloggers line, who couldn't jump fast enough to burry this story because of stuff that sources he wasn't able to disclose or quote, told him.

Because where are we right now?

- Using FIrestarter is not something new users can do

All we have to offer is telling people that they wouldn't need it now, and thats essentially not true.

- Banning apps from being sideloaded - just because the company doesn't like them, or would rather steal its featureset, is the new normal.

As a result there is hardly any original development for this device anymore - that takes place outside the "Amazon app store" ecosystem.

That stuff was all possible without making that stuff impossible. They just made it impossible to scale, or to be easily supported, or to work reliably - and they smashed Firestarter to pieces for essentially daring to be a popular piece of software that was distributed outside their official ecosystem.

With Kodi, they just badmouthed its name and kicked it out of distribution - but same thing.

So if the fist thing that comes to your mind after all of this is "yeah - but Alexa is great - right?" or "yeah - but devs can still test code on the device to later sell it in the Amazon Market" - suggest for a minute, that none of it matters very much, if you come at it from an "educated consumer wants to use a an android box for his on purposes - not the stuff Amazon can come up with - he should use" perspective.

And that I am getting extremely irritated if now it seems, that the product blogger does Amazons PR tasks for them, but people discussing the changes Amazon implements regarding accessing the few remaining APIs on the system - shouldn't be allowed anymore one the basis that "they can't take it away 100%".