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Amazon has announced that future updates to its Fire TV devices will allow sideloading of Android apps, following a recent update that inadvertently disabled the feature. This occurs after Amazon rolled out a series of software patches in late 2022, which initially contained security patches and performance updates for the streaming hardware.

However, the update was later discovered to disable sideloading on certain Fire TV devices, preventing third-party apps from being installed if they weren't part of certified app stores.

Amazon admitted that the sideload prevention was a bug in the update, not an intentional feature. When users tried to install a third-party app, the Fire TV device displayed an error message and blocked the process. Although it appeared to affect many Fire TV devices, Amazon maintained that the issue was not intentional. The problem was traced back to a bug in a recent Fire TV Settings update, which caused the "Install unknown apps" list to appear incomplete or empty on some devices.

Amazon has since identified the cause of the problem and assured that a fix will be rolled out in an upcoming Fire TV Settings update, which will be automatically installed on affected devices within the coming week.

This development follows Amazon's announcement of its latest Fire TV Stick, which now runs on Vega OS, a non-Android Linux-based software. Amazon plans to use Linux-based software for all future Fire TV Stick devices to improve performance and power efficiency. Despite this, existing Fire TV devices will be able to sideload apps again thanks to the upcoming update. However, it is likely that future Fire TV devices launched by Amazon will not support this feature.