You buy a Fire TV Stick, and you can watch Prime Video and YouTube. Anyone gets that far right away. The problem is what comes after: little frustrations build up, like “the remote feels sluggish”, “apps are slow to start” or “I’m doing the same thing by hand every time”.
This time, for people who have already done the basic setup, I’ve put together customizations that are unglamorous but effective. Many of them work on both the new 4K model and older ones, so pick out the ones that suit your setup.
1. Seriously make full use of the remote’s “custom buttons”
The remotes of the newer generations of Fire TV Stick have buttons that launch apps directly. Out of the box they’re assigned to things like Prime Video and Netflix, and for people who don’t use those, they’re just decoration. You can change these buttons’ assignments from the settings menu, so just swapping them for the app you open most (TVer or DAZN, whatever) cuts two taps from your daily routine. It quietly makes a difference.
If you miss the TV from home, Canal IPTV lets you watch your usual channels from anywhere.
It’s also worth reviewing the long-press shortcuts. Try everything once: does anything happen when you long-press the voice button, does long-pressing the home button bring up the app list? You’ll probably find at least one “hey, this is handy”.
2. Stop using the TV’s USB power and use the dedicated adapter
The more advanced the user, the more likely they are to overlook this, but if you power it from the TV’s USB port, the port’s output may not be enough and it can become unstable. The 4K models in particular use more power, so plugging the included power adapter directly into an outlet is the right answer. Restart loops, going to sleep on its own: most of those mysterious glitches are solved by fixing the power.
3. Enable ADB and control it from a PC
If you turn on ADB debugging from “Developer options” in “My Fire TV” in the settings, you can control the Fire TV Stick with commands from a PC on the same Wi-Fi. You can install APKs directly without an app, or send text input from your PC’s keyboard, which is pretty comfortable for people who find typing titles into the search box painful.
However, opening up ADB also means it can be accessed from outside, so turn it back off when you’re done. Please stick to this one rule. Quite a lot of people leave it on all the time without realizing.
4. Prioritize the 5GHz Wi-Fi band, but measure the speed regularly
Whether 2.4GHz or 5GHz is faster depends on things like microwaves and neighboring routers, so you can’t generalize. For 4K streaming, you’ll want at least 25Mbps measured. You can check the speed with the network diagnostics in the settings screen, without installing an app. If it feels slow, try reconnecting just once. Surprisingly often, that alone improves things.
5. Tidy up the home screen’s shortcut rows
If you edit those rows of “recommended” channels lined up near the top of the home screen and remove the ones you don’t need, the amount of scrolling feels like it’s halved. It’s a small thing, but over days it adds up to quite a time saving. The trick is to boldly remove genres you don’t watch.
6. Check storage regularly
When you look at storage usage in the settings, it’s sometimes filled up by cache more than you’d imagine. In the case of the Fire TV Stick, the internal storage isn’t very large, so just doing these two things once a month (deleting apps you don’t use and clearing the cache) makes it run lighter. For people with too many apps, boldly deleting them is quicker than external storage.
7. Review the screensaver and sleep settings
The screensaver kicks in by itself when you don’t do anything, right? You can extend the waiting time in the settings. That gets rid of little annoyances like pausing a movie and coming back to find it has gone to sleep. Conversely, if you tend to leave the TV on, setting it shorter is reassuring for your electricity bill too.
8. Get to know the quirks of voice search
With the voice remote, combinations like “genre + actor name” hit the mark more often than “saying the title”. Also, I feel recognition is more stable if you include the verb, like “play ○○”. That’s just my personal sense, but it’s worth trying.
9. Check for app updates manually
If you leave it to automatic updates, you can end up stuck on a buggy version for weeks without it moving on. If you get into the habit of opening the app list once a month and checking for updates, you’ll panic less over sudden glitches.
10. Pulling the power cord is the surest way to restart
Rather than restarting from the settings menu, unplugging the power cable for 10 seconds and plugging it back in works better in terms of clearing memory. This is purely a rule of thumb from experience, but it doesn’t hurt to remember it as a last resort when things are sluggish.
So, that’s it for today. With the Fire TV Stick, if you use it just as it came, it tends to end at “well, that’s what it is”, but just tweaking a few settings makes it so comfortable it feels like a different device. You don’t have to do all of these, so try them one at a time, starting with whatever annoys you. By the way, the new model, which has been slimmed down further, tends to trap heat, so it’s safer to avoid jamming it tightly into a narrow space behind the TV.
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