yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Fire General] DB126:
Time will tell. Data points that span weeks vs years are relevant (albeit perhaps not in this instance...time will tell). As noted, it is good to have multiple ways to skin the cat and I'll likely mention both methods as each has pros/cons. If I were to acquire an unrooted Fire 7 today I would likely use 'your' method to suppress ads as it is more expeditious and I understand the limitations. For many the reassurance of a permanent upstream block is worth the time to pen a quick request to Amazon which has a high likelihood of being granted based on community reports (example).
[Fire General] supernet2Google:
Works

Worked for me, but added in it advertises sexual content on the advertising screen. Within 30 minutes the ad's were disabled.
[Fire General] DragonFire1024:
Lol I'm sure Amazon is aware of exactly what material is in their lock screen ads. With that said, no need to lie to them as it seems they're more than happy to disable them if asked. My guess is they suspected this to happen and don't mind the loss of 5 or 6 ads.
[Fire General] DB126:
Voice of rationality. Simple business decision given the small number of opt outs relative to the overall Fire 7 population.
[Fire General] supernet2Google:
Well the problem is they actually showed a few sex toy advertisements because thats all the ad's i been seeing since i browsed on over to questionable parts of the net. And given my child does sometimes use the tablet im sure they are well aware of my frusteration given i've continually had to remove the apk, reroot, and modify the launcher to move it out of my amazon fire tablet to begin with. So its not that i was lying its that it was getting on my nerves. Plus i got tired of needing to re-update the tablet under su disabling it on pc every few days. But hey it still worked for me, lol. Thats all that matters, also the block seems to pass on to my other 3 amazon fire tablets i own, 1 of 3 only showed advertising but the issue was applied to all 3 tablets.
[Fire General] DB126:
You're the 2nd or 3rd person to report this in recent weeks which is contrary to Amazon's previously stated position - or at least the explanation offered by some agents. Possible Amazon quietly altered their internal policies or agents have some flexibility on the scope of ad removal.
[Fire General] supernet2Google:
Probably I know my Amazon fire tablets the 3 I have are the 7" 5th gen fire tablet i don't think this matters but you never know
[Fire General] saulvg:
Thanks op. Worked for me. Saved me $15. Pretty much sent your message word by word.
[Fire General] yomiguy:
Thanks mate! It also worked for me writing them in Spanish and adding its difficult to see notifications with so many ads.

They removed the ads in less than 10 minutes, and told me it was an exception. In the future the my told me I should pay the bill lol

Enviado desde mi SM-N910F mediante Tapatalk
[Fire General] Bean13:
Thanks, worked for me within 20 minutes. Pretty much word for word from OP and they removed it. Only had this fire for a couple weeks at the time of writing this (New 2017 model) (New account)

They didn't even argue about price or anything.
[Fire General] tool2269:
thanks OP..had mine removed without any hassle or anything.
[Fire General] no24:
I tried today. A quick, polite reply came saying I had to pay. :(
[Fire General] DB126:
There are several technical alternatives to block ads each with caveats that you may not find appealing. Before going that route I would reach out to Amazon again, note the ads are unacceptable/inappropriate (perhaps cite a child's use) and request escalation to a supervisor. That should yield a prompt, positive response.
[Fire General] mrsoymilk:
Worked

Bought a new Fire HD 8 two days ago, just tried out your method. Got an email saying they will remove the ad's lol. Thanks! :good:
[Fire General] no24:
I got back in touch. Along with your guidance I also stated that nowhere in the description was there any comment about adverts taking over the screen. I offered to return it for a refund. It worked! Thank you.
[Fire General] madnlooney:
This just worked for me. Said the same as OP plus added there were inappropriate ads for my son.

They replied as below

​Hello,*

I understand that you wish to remove Special Offers (lock screen adverts) from your Kindle device.

To help you in this case, I have disabled Special Offers from your Kindle device.

Due to the circumstances, I have made a one-off exception to our normal policy and processed this request free of charge.

Please connect your Kindle to Wi-Fi in order to reflect the changes we made to the Special Offers.

If you still see the special offers on your Kindle, please try restarting your Kindle.
[Fire General] Quadriflax:
Would this process work for their ad-enabled phones? Currently using a Moto G5+ with the hack to block ads, but recent reports show they've patched up the adb command to stop it from working, so it's only a matter of time before they come back (probably next update). Has anyone had success asking for intrusive/inappropriate ads to be removed from their phone?

EDIT: This method worked for me on Moto G5+ Amazon ad-phone. I emailed support from their website citing the same text/issues as others and, after a miscommunication where they tried to refer me to Motorola, they turned off ads with no problem. Wasn't as quick as some here (took just under 24 hours and multiple emails), but it saved me $45. YMMV, of course.
[Fire General] Jrhotrod:
Yes, should work. Contact them and let em know.
[Fire General] Overblownego:
Are there any benefits to having the ads disabled beyond not getting ads? I'm not trying to criticize anyone on the sly, just wondering if this maybe saves a noticeable amount of battery life or frees up the CPU or RAM to any noticeable degree.

I don't really use my Fire for anything more than playing old Final Fantasy games and having a portable youtube screen. So all my ads are for boring benign junk like headphones and kitchen utensils.
[Fire General] ch0mch0m:
Is there a special email address I can email them or do I need to do it from within the app? Bought a few for the kids and want to do one bulk request instead of doing it one by one if possible.
[Fire General] jonboehm:
Offers gone but screen keeps waking

No problem getting the offers to go away via an email. Getting them turned off happened really fast and I reboot afterwards.

However,

* My screen is still waking up every ~10mins for no apparent reason. Its not just to change the backdrop, I've selected a fixed background.

* I hear notification sounds when they come in but then it does not wake/light the screen when the notification comes in.

* While the number of notifications next to my name changes there is no banner with the notification visible when I manually wake the screen.

Do I need to do some kind of additional reset or something else?

Thanks
[Fire General] DB126:
Strange problem. Try a factory reset. If that doesn't work reload FireOS (same version you have now).
[Fire General] methman:
Worked perfect! Lockscreen ads removed within 10 minutes. My text:

"I would like to disable the intrusive and inappropriate ads on the lockscreen as some of them are adult in nature and my children use the Fire tablet. I would rather that they see a wallpaper. Thank you."
[Fire General] stuckinstandby:
Has this worked for anyone in the UK?

Trying to get them removed from my daughter's tablet and my message was similar to methman's. I got a lengthy reply explaining why I had to pay £10.

To make matters worse the tablet is about to install the latest software update (downloaded and will install when next powered up), which no doubt prevents any current alternative options for removing these ads. :mad:
[Fire General] DB126:
You can prevent the update from installing by booting into stock recovery and clearing cache. Without further steps the update will download again but the above steps may buy you some time while considering options.
[Fire General] krisesco:
Sweet!

Cool, I copied the text (typo and all), and they removed specials offers in under 5 mins! Thanks for the tip! :)
[Fire General] George Kersting:
Worked like you said. Thank you!
[Fire General] stuckinstandby:
After being asked to pay £10 first time round, I decided just to resend the message and see what happened.... It worked - they agreed to remove the ads. Also worked on second tablet. :)
[Fire General] leonicholson:
Will this continue to stop ads after Amazon updates?
[Fire General] DB126:
Yes - basically Amazon is doing the same thing as if you paid to 'buy out' of ads.
[Fire General] Cipher45:
It worked for me

Just to clarify, i'm in the UK. I filled in the email but corrected the typo.

I received an email back within 10 minutes.

"Please not that you've originally purchased a "With Special Offers" device you will be charged a one-time payment of 10.00GBP to unsubscribe from this service.

To help you in this, I've now disabled the Special Offers from your Kindle Fire for free of charge.

Turned the Kindle Fire off and on and they have gone.

Thanks OP
[Fire General] msm1965:
Amazon appears to be in a generous mood. I have sent them an email request to remove ads and they obliged.

They refused few months back but this time they removed it.
[Fire General] jmhammond:
Help Phone/email Connection Error

When I tap Help > Phone / Email, I get a loading screen followed by the message "Connection Error. Sorry, information could not be downloaded due to an error. Please try again later."

I got the error last night, this morning, and afternoon. With three device reboots. It's weird because this is the first thing I tried doing after installing 5.6 right out of the box (bought it at 9pm last night...)

Edit: After chatting with customer service, I was told that "Upon checking that button was currently unable due to update, John. Nothing to worry with that. I assured you that it will works soon and I will forward this to our developers so that the update will be fix soon." So that's unfortunate.
[Fire General] c-hri-s:
I tried this twice today (UK, if it matters).

The first time I got told that any inappropriate adverts were caused by inappropriate things I'd bought, and to clear my 'suggestion' history.

The second time I tried the original post (corrected typo) word for word, and got sent a link to pay £10 to remove the ads.

I guess I'll live with it ...
[Fire General] sga999:
I emailed Amazon, and they removed the ads for my new Fire HD 10 within a few hours. Then a series of wallpapers (at least 5 different ones) displayed on the lock screen. I wanted to change the home screen wallpaper, and when I did that, it also changed the lock screen wallpaper to the same single one that I chose for the home screen.

I'm curious about what app (or something else?) was causing the series of wallpapers to display. Can someone point me to that app if they still see it on their Fire HD 8 or 10? I'm assuming the app did not get deleted when I changed the wallpaper, but it just somehow got deactivated.

(I hope this is not too far off the topic about getting rid of the ads).
[Fire General] DragonFire1024:
It's the Special Offers APK. When ads are removed, a series of Amazon Stock wallpapers are activated and are ordered to take over. When you change the wallpaper on the home screen, using the built in settings, it also changes the lock screen wallpaper. If you use a launcher like Nova, and long press home and add a home wallpaper using Nova instead of built in settings, it changes ONLY your home screen wallpaper and NOT the lockscreen. So you have to add the wallpaper you want on lockscreen through the settings > wallpaper, set it (yes it will set as home too), then use something like Nova to set the home wallpaper.
[Fire General] sga999:
Thanks. I understood everything you said about setting a lock screen wallpaper or home screen or both. But what I really wanted to know was how to get back the series of wallpapers that were displaying when ads were first removed. I'm not sure if a different lock screen wallpaper changed based on a timer or each time I turned the tablet on and off. But in any case, it was a different scene from settings, display, wallpaper. I certainly don't want to re-enable lock screen ads again. So is there a way to get that sequence of wallpapers to display on the lock screen again without having to subscribe to the special offers? Since I already had them removed once, I don't know if they would do that again.

I looked in the Play Store for an app that would do something similar. There were some promising apps, but I couldn't find one that would display a series of wallpapers on the lock screen.

EDIT: Do you know if a Factory Reset would cause the lock screen ads to come back?
[Fire General] DragonFire1024:
The ads are tied into the account or something they update to special offers in an OTA. If you reset, the ads will not come back, but I'm unsure about the wallpapers. The sequence and what not might be different now. I never kept Amazon's lock screen wallpapers, so I'm at a loss. But a reset surely wouldn't hurt, but you'll have to re install Google play and etc.
[Fire General] sga999:
Thanks! Just out of curiosity, I will probably try the reset to see what will happen with the lock screen wallpapers. Unfortunately, I'm not sure of the best way to backup some things up before I do that. I have other Android devices that are rooted, so I can use Titanium Backup, TWRP, etc. Do you have a recommendation for the best way to do this on this on this unrooted device? I have heard about ADB backup, and helium, but I have never tried those methods.
[Fire General] DragonFire1024:
I'm not sure if there is a reliable way. Without root, I relied a lot on Google Drive and Photos. Documents I keep in emails until I transfer them to my PC. I generally don't care about app data. I don't do online billing or banking either. So I generally don't back too much up otherwise.
[Fire General] DB126:
For personal data (files) cloud backup is probably the best choice. If looking to preserve entire data partition then you'll probably want to go with adb backup. Yeah, there are a ton of apps that claim to perform comprehensive backups on unrooted devices but most can't get permissions to perform a comprehensive job.
[Fire General] sga999:
Thank you to both Dragon and Davey. I'm experimenting right now with ADB backup. Some strange things occur if I backup both the APK and its data and then try to restore both. But restoring data with an APK already installed seems to be okay. Anyway, the data is the main thing I would need to backup anyway, so this might be the way to go. I guess I'm a little surprised that I don't see more on in the Fire tablet forum about backing up and restoring apps. Maybe most people are like Dragon and are not that interested in the apps.
[Fire General] Zooicidal:
Tried again this morning and they removed them on my HD 10 right away. It had the added bonus of removing them from my Kindle too so i guess it's an account wide thing.

Glad I tried again as i was just going to leave it after the first reply :)
[Fire General] misterbbq:
they removed it from my hd10 via chat.. but then i had to replace the tablet due to a problem with the sd card reader. trying to get them to remove them from the replacement device... keeping fingers crossed that isn't really a 1 time only removal.
[Fire General] DragonFire1024:
Removal should be (well maybe used to be) effective across all Amazon tablets. At least when I had them removed, that was the case. They didn't even show up on my 8.9 when I had to log in with Amazon.
[Fire General] Zooicidal:
Maybe it only affects devices already on the account when they remove them.
[Fire General] misterbbq:
i sent the email and they removed it off the new 10.1 device. woot! the 7 and 8 that i have were already ad-free versions...
[Fire General] sga999:
Dragon and Davey, I thought I'd let you know what happened with this lock screen wallpaper issue. I did do a factory reset, and lo and behold, the sequence of wallpapers does occur! It is not on a timer.. it happens each time I press the power button off and back on. A new lock screen wallpaper appears each time. I think there are 7 of them.

I know you said it had to do with the special offers APK. But I'm not sure if that is in control now, once the ads were removed. So do you know any way for me to figure out how the tablet is doing this? I don't see any specific APK. Could it be something specifically tied to the power button that allows a new wallpaper to be chosen each time? I realize this is a very technical question, but I like to delve into these things. Let's say that I wanted to do this with a different set of wallpapers. Or maybe I want to do it on some other device. But I don't know how! Without root, I can't do any logcat to see what's going on. So if you can think of any way for me to figure this out, please let me know.

As far as getting the apps restored, the backup and restore feature of the device meant that the Amazon apps were restored when I went through the initialization after reset. And then the Google apps got restored like they normally do when you bring up the device again. Also, I figured out how to use helium, and it seemed to work well on a couple of apps that did not get restored. Of course, I did have to redo the 4 Google apks before the Google apps could be restored. And I had to go through the multiple launcher and widget steps.

Now for the sad news! I decided to put an SD card in. It was very tight, but I did manage to get it in. Then it was not recognized by the system when I powered on. So I tried to get it out by pressing with my fingernail and hoping that little spring-like mechanism would work. But no! It went in further and I cannot even see it. I talked to Amazon, and I can get a refund but not a replacement. But I got a great deal on this for Cyber Monday, so I don't want to send it back and buy another. So I think I'm going to just live with it stuck in there! Thank goodness it was just a backup SD card, and I don't mind that I have lost it. I guess it's possible that some shop could help me get it out of there, but I don't think they can because it's not even visible. Sad.
[Fire General] DB126:
- quality control is so-so on these devices; slot was probably misaligned; or you inserted card upside down ...

- Amazon offers a 30 day no-questions-asked return policy (which is likely extended over the year end holidays); you can snag a refurb from Amazon Warehouse close to the same price point; most are new units that were simply returned for whatever reason

- rotating wallpapers are controlled by the special offers apk which remains active even when ads are suppressed; will let [MENTION=8165603]DragonFire1024[/MENTION] explain further
[Fire General] DragonFire1024:
Lock screen wallpapers are tucked away in the framework, specifically framework-res.apk. when ads are disabled, these 7 wallpapers take over, preselected by Amazon. When the screen turns off, the system chooses one. Last I checked (months ago), it was randomized. You can only change the lockscreen wallpaper using the methods I explained earlier. However yours will not rotate with the stock Amazon wallpapers and you can't choose the option to rotate your own with others you want. Also, even changing the home screen wallpaper irritates the system sometimes and kicks you back to a low res stock image. This happens even when changing them through the settings menu. My HD 8 does that sometimes. Amazon butchered a lot of the wallpaper settings unfortunately. You can't even use live wallpapers from their own app store.
[Fire General] sga999:
Davey, I think I put the SD card in properly. I had the tablet facing me, the side of the card with the little metal connectors was positioned toward the back of the tablet, and the side of the card with little notches was on the top. That meant the writing on the card was facing me and upside down. Maybe you're right that it was just made a little bit off.

I only see older generation models in the warehouse right now. You are right that they may come soon. But the labels they gave me to send it back have to be used within a week. I suppose I could tell them I was going to wait longer, and they'd send me more later. That way I could wait and see what's available. But I have a feeling that I will just not worry about it. I really have enough space internally that I didn't have to put that card in. But I wanted to try everything!

Dragon, I checked again and I have 7 wallpapers that are cycled through on the lock screen (power button, not timer). For me, they are not random. They go in a specific order and then loop back to the beginning. (I can't find it now, but a couple of days ago, I had seen the ones for the Fire HD 8 somewhere online, and there were 9 of them, and 7 of those were the same as the Fire HD 10) . I did a force stop on the special offers APK. But it did not change anything about the lock screen wallpaper behavior. I'm assuming you are saying that the "system" is doing it, so it doesn't matter what I do to the APK. Well, if I uninstalled the APK, maybe you are saying the behavior of the cycling wallpapers would stop? I understand that setting my own lock screen wallpaper will stop that cycling. That's what caused me to ask all these questions...I was wondering how to get the cycling behavior back. I guess I'm beating a dead horse here and am about through with my questions! It seems like I'd be able to find something comparable to that feature in an app in the Play Store. I do see various things about the lock screen but nothing like this.

Thanks to both of you for your help.
[Fire General] sga999:
I know this isn't the right place for this question. But I've never started a thread and thought I could just ask here since we've been "talking". I have a symbol on my status bar next to the wifi symbol, and I don't know what it means. It looks like the side of a face with an X next to it, kind of implying no voice input. But I have not done anything to turn that off, and it's all working fine when I speak. I searched online and cannot find this symbol anywhere. I am attaching a screenshot. Thanks.

EDIT: Answer - Somehow I had turned off hands-free mode for Alexa!
[Fire General] DragonFire1024:
Once the cycle stops rotation, as far as I know you can't reset back to the rotating wallpapers unless you factory reset. Uninstalling the special offers APK would've stopped ads if you still had them. That can only be done on FireOS 5.4.0.0 or earlier.
[Fire General] Blandroid:
I tried this method and got sent the link to the paid method twice, even though I complained about inappropriate ads in my second email. I'm wondering if those reporting success stories are Amazon US customers? No luck so far here in the UK :(
[Fire General] DB126:
I only own early release 5th gen models but on those the card orientation is as you describe. The backs pop off pretty easy on these pups exposing the internals. You might be able to release the stuck card using a nonmetallic tool such as a toothpick or spudger. Good luck.
[Fire General] sga999:
I wonder if your older model is put together a little differently than this new one. It really does not look easy to get the back off. Other devices that I have have seem to have a delineation where you can put your fingernail or small tool and pry the back off. This looks very smooth all the way until it gets right to the screen. And it looks quite tight. I wonder if they changed the design some just to discourage people from trying to take them apart.
[Fire General] DB126:
Discounting button/port location I believe the case construction is largely the same between 5th and 7th gen models. See here for a teardown detail. As an aside, iFixit is a great resource. Toss them a little business if you decide to snag some tools and it makes sense financially/logistically.