Amazon is now automatically playing fullscreen video ads on Fire TV(9to5google.com)

posted 10 months ago

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz

technology@beehaw.org

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kniescherz@feddit.de

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10 months ago

That has nothing to do with piracy or not. Its just a device to play media. You can use a firetv to 100% stream pirated content via kodi or plex and still have to see this shit.

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mateomaui@reddthat.com

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10 months ago

I don’t see it. I have mine blocked from dialing home, receiving updates and autoplays have long been turned off.

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kniescherz@feddit.de

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10 months ago

Good for you. It does not change my point though that a device which can stream media having ads not really has anything to do with more piracy.

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mateomaui@reddthat.com

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10 months ago

Sure it does. As a pirate I’ve chosen to disable the device’s ability to connect to Amazon to annoy me with ads, and pirate the content they’d usually serve me instead of subscribing to anything. Not that hard to understand. If I could find a way to uninstall all the Amazon apps, I would.

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Square Singer@feddit.de

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10 months ago

This here is the solution for what you want: https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/

You can disable whatever app you want until the system doesn’t work any more. Just install an alternative for what you want to disable (e.g. the launcher) and then disable the Amazon version.

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mateomaui@reddthat.com

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10 months ago

until the system doesn’t work anymore

yeah that’s my worry… accidentally bricking the thing. Can you rollback changes if that happens?

edit:

so be sure you don’t disable anything absolutely critical (use your best judgment)

apparently not

I keep imagining a scenario where it cannot find something and just spins forever looking for it, or disable something that prevents startup entirely, etc.

edit: wait… you can install a new launcher on a fire tv? I need to look into that.

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Square Singer@feddit.de

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10 months ago

As long as it still boots, you can undo the change with a simple adb pm enable [packagename].

I wouldn’t recomment disableing system critical things like systemui. You can google each package together with “Can I disable X” and you should get decent infos.

Regarding the launcher:

I don’t have a Fire TV but I had a Fire Tablet. So if these two work the same, you can install another launcher without issues. But Amazon removed the setting for default launcher, so it will always pick the stock launcher when you press the home button.

To override that, there are two options.

Install the Automate app by Llamalab and make a small flow that detects when the stock launcher is the currently active app and then automatically launches the new launcher. This option is completely safe.
Disable the stock launcher. If Android doesn’t find it’s set default launcher, it will instead open the first launcher it finds. Worked good on the Fire Tablet, but I can’t verify that this doesn’t cause issues on a Fire TV. So this might be a bit risky.

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