Wednesday, February 22, 2023

No more remapping Amazon Fire TV remote buttons

If you have been trashing Roku and praising Amazon because of the ability to remap the buttons on the remote, you're about to lose your passion for the Fire TV. Amazon has an update out that has blocked users from doing exactly that, according to AFTV News:

That changed with the recent arrival of software update version 7.6.2.4 to the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. This update contains a more sophisticated method to detect whether the app being launched by the remote app buttons is the expected app or not. Trying to use Remapper to remap an app button results in the line "App [app name] is not trusted. Aborting launch." appearing in the Fire TV's log file.

So far, only the Fire TV Stick 4K Max has received this change, but I expect other Fire TV models to also eventually receive a similar update that prevents my Remapper app from working. As mentioned in my introductory post about the app, this was to be expected. It was a nice two years where we were able to crawl back a bit of control over how Fire TV remotes worked, but I don't expect a new workaround to be found to get Remapper to work again.

This is not unexpected, as the author said. Amazon, and Roku, both have buttons to certain apps on their remotes. They sell those to companies, and do their best to enforce the mappings so that they can justify the price they charge.

Both Amazon and Roku sell remotes that come with programmable buttons, allowing the user to add that customization to their device of choice, to make their Streaming Life easier.

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