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The Fire TV Stick Is Kind of Terrible

The Fire TV Stick Is Kind of Terrible

Amazon's Fire TV Is Kind of Terrible

May 4, 2021

After several years of using Amazon Fire devices (including the Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Cube), it's time for me to admit the truth: Fire TV is vastly inferior to Roku. Amazon's Fire TV Stick device has some glaring issues which the company absolutely must work on if it wants to be an effective competitor in the TV-connected streaming device market.

Streamer's Spotlight: Fire TV vs Roku

I've been a long-time Fire TV users, mostly because I'm a long-time Amazon fan. My Amazon fandom led me to adopt the Fire TV Stick fairly early, and until my fire TV remote stopped working on me recently (

there's a fix for that

, FYI), I regularly apologized for its faults. That was my tipping point, however, and it led me to purchase a Roku device. After using Roku, I realize I was wrong to take so long to make the switch.

Netflix Fire TV Stick Is Too Slow

Let's start with the biggest and most glaring problem with the Fire TV Stick. It's incredibly slow, especially once you download more than a half a dozen apps. There are many reasons why the device lags, but it all comes down to processing power.

For comparison, the latest version of the Fire TV Stick has a 1.7GHz CPU and 1 GB of DDR4 RAM. The third-generation version is

50% faster

than the second-gen, which is great. Meanwhile, the Roku Express 4K has similar stats.

Still, the Roku device appears to run faster. Why? Much less clutter. Roku's UI design minimizes how much is on display on the home screen. Whereas Amazon Fire TV displays a ton of content, including images and video previews, Roku does no such thing. This ultimately makes the Roku run faster through its menu.

The Fire TV Remote Copied Roku's Design

The idea of putting quick app buttons on a remote is questionable, as that tends to not age well long-term. Still, it's a thing done for convenience at the moment, and Roku began doing it some time ago. With its third generation, Amazon decided to follow suit.

Again, Amazon's Fire TV UI Is Terrible

Sure, Amazon

recently improved its Fire TV UI

, which was much over-due and extremely needed. To be fair to Amazon, the new UI does look much better. But it's still emphasizes previewed content far too much, and it still has a somewhat cluttered feel to it compared to what Roku offers.

Perhaps the only big complaint with Roku? If you don't like purple, you're really going to hate opening it up. Nevertheless, I've found navigating around the device and getting to my desired apps in the Roku far more seamless.

You Need to Buy a New Fire TV to Take Advantage of the Updates

I get it. The Fire TV Stick is cheap. But the upgrade from 2nd generation to 3rd generation is great enough, combined with software updates, that anyone using the 2nd generation device is going to find it almost unusable at this point. The only alternative is to bite the bullet and purchase the third-generation version of the device.

Or...you could just go with a Roku.