Amazon nowadays hides the Developer Options menu on the Fire TV, crucial for sideloading apps. Here’s how to get it back.
The majority of Amazon Fire TV owners will probably never need to touch the Developer Options settings. But would-be developers and anybody else who wants to sideload applications not found in Amazon’s store will need to. Until recently, these options were easy to locate in the Fire TV menus. However, an update from June 2022 hid the Developer Options menu. You could say this was a good move since keeping settings that many won’t know how to use out of sight will keep them from messing around. But it does make them harder to find when you want to.
Fortunately, Amazon hasn’t removed the menu entirely from the operating system. Given the fact that Amazon’s Fire OS is built on top of Android, it’s now actually more in line with how developer options are accessed on a regular Android phone or tablet. Here’s how to access it.
How to access Developer Options on Amazon Fire TV
The Developer Options menu is available on both Amazon and third-party Fire TV hardware platforms.
- Navigate to the About section in Settings.
- Hit the button on the remote seven times on the first item to reveal the now-hidden Developer Options menu.
There is a slight variation in the steps depending on whether you have an Amazon device, such as the Fire TV Stick, or a Fire OS-powered TV. Differences will be highlighted where they occur.
1. On your Fire TV’s home screen, select the gear icon to open Settings.
2. Select My Fire TV.
3. Select About.
4. Highlight the first option in the list. This should be a reference to your specific device, i.e. you can see your Fire TV device’s name under this section.
5. Press the remote as if you were selecting this item seven times.
6. If everything goes right, you should see a message confirming you’re already a developer.
7. Press the back button on the remote to go back to the previous menu.
If you’re using a Fire OS television, then step 2 may refer to Device & Software instead, but the rest of the steps are the same. On completing the steps you’ll now see the missing Developer Options menu.
Apart from the aforementioned developer options (which are vaguely reminiscent of the Android base of Fire OS), Amazon also ships a standalone developer tools menu with its Android fork. However, it’s primarily aimed at app developers, which means accessing the menu and tinkering with the options is not recommended unless you really know what you are doing.
To invoke this menu, pick one of the following methods:
- Press and hold the Center (aka Action) button on your remote for a second, then, while holding down the Center button, press the Down button on the directional ring. After 3–4 seconds, release both buttons and press the Menu button.
- If you have the Amazon Fire Game Controller, then press and hold the A and Y buttons simultaneously for 5 seconds. Next, release the buttons and press the controller’s Menu button.
- In case you have already configured ADB and your PC can communicate with the Fire TV, just run the following command:
adb shell am start com.amazon.ssm/com.amazon.ssm.ControlPanel
Provided everything goes smoothly, you should see the built-in Developer Tools menu of Fire TV.
As you can see, the menu offers a myriad of features compared to the barebone developer options. The System X-Ray and Advanced Options toggles, for example, can be used to show instantaneous system metrics on top of the screen as an overlay. On the other hand, the Developer Options entry here is meant for turning on recommendations from all third-party apps installed by the user. To know more, take a look at the Amazon Fire TV developer documentation.
That’s all you need to do to access the developer options on any Fire TV device. For most people, the primary reason to even access this menu is to sideload third-party apps from unknown sources. While a number of these install-helper tools are in Amazon’s store, you’ll need to enable the necessary option for unknown sources before you can actually install anything with it.