Amazon doesn’t want its users to remap their remote control shortcuts, so it has implemented a patch to prevent it.

Amazon’s Fire TV Sticks are popular devices and more or less for all budgets. In Andro4all we already published at the time the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K reviewwhere we highlight its capabilities and its status as one of the best alternatives to Chromecast that can be found on the market.

This device has its higher-tier counterpart in the Fire TV Cube, which We also had the opportunity to analyze right here. However, one of the most interesting possibilities of both devices is brought by their remote controls, whose direct access buttons to applications could be remapped using a 3rd party solution.

Now Amazon seems to have decided for its users: it does not want them to be able to reconfigure the buttons on their remotes, and for this they have prepared a countermeasure.

This is Amazon’s plan to avoid remapping

As collected in Android PoliceAmazon has pushed a patch to Fire TV Stick 4k Max firmware version 7.6.24 that disable remapping options that facilitated the third-party utility that we talked about earlier. This utility is known as Remapperand it was used until now to reconfigure the shortcuts at the convenience of the user.

This utility worked “posing” as applications linked to the remote buttons. It basically kept the package name of the linked app, but launched another one chosen by the user. It was not a perfect solution, since if users wanted to use it, they had to uninstall the originally associated app to remap the button.