There's A Great Reason To Hold On To Your Old Amazon Fire TV Sticks

The Fire TV Stick makes up Amazon's major footprint in the streaming device market. The devices maintain a healthy presence alongside the likes of Roku and Apple TV, though a big portion of their staying power is its major smart TV OS, the Android-based, user-friendly Fire OS. Recently, Amazon has begun rolling out newer versions of Fire Sticks and Players with a new OS, and since these new players lack certain features of the old ones, your old Fire TV Stick may be more valuable than it once was.

The most recent iterations of Amazon Fire TV Sticks and Players, rather than running Fire OS, utilize the newly developed Vega OS. On the surface, these two operating systems are identical; if all you looked at was their respective home screens, you might not be able to tell the difference, and for general streaming and usage, the differences are immaterial. However, a big part of what made Fire Sticks so popular was the customizability of the old Android-based OS, and if that disappears with the advent of Vega OS, the remaining Android-based Fire Sticks could become highly sought-after. It's something you'll want to think about before buying your next Fire Stick.

The original Fire OS present on Fire TV Stick devices is Android-based, which means it's built to utilize Android APKs to load and run apps. A side benefit of this is that, thanks to how Android devices work, apps from outside of Amazon's official app store can be added to a Fire Stick running Fire OS, a process Amazon doesn't exactly love that is commonly known as "sideloading." Sideloading is a popular feature in homebrew communities, as it allows developers to create custom apps for specific purposes, such as playing locally stored media or accessing services otherwise unavailable in their country, and users to easily add those apps to their devices without requiring invasive processes like jailbreaking.

Unfortunately, the new Fire Stick OS, Vega OS, is Linux-based rather than Android-based. This presents two problems: first, all Android-based apps made for Fire OS no longer work and need to be rebuilt to function on Linux. Second, and perhaps more pressing, Vega OS doesn't support sideloading, which means all those homebrew apps are out of reach. In fairness to Amazon, this switch to a Linux OS was spurred on by bad actors using sideloading to add illegal or malicious software to Fire Sticks, so switching OSes to prevent this is a fairly understandable move.

All the same, if Amazon phases out Fire OS Fire Sticks entirely, any devices that still run it will become very valuable, whether you want to keep sideloading apps yourself or know someone who does that may be willing to buy it off of you. Either way, if you've got an older Fire Stick model lying around, even if you aren't actively using it, you might want to keep it somewhere safe.