Your Amazon Fire TV Stick Remote’s Home Button Is Hiding A Useful Feature In Plain Sight

We reside in a client tech period that favors beauty minimalism (typically talking), which is a part of the explanation why remotes proceed to characteristic fewer and fewer precise buttons. Fortunately, manufacturers like Amazon thought of this when designing its Fire TV stick, one of many 12 main streaming units in the marketplace. If you personal one in every of these devices, Amazon hid a whole part of its consumer interface behind a single button — you will simply want a protracted press to unearth it.

We’re referring to the Quick Settings menu, which you’ll be able to pull up by urgent and holding the Home button in your Fire TV distant. After just a few seconds, the Quick Settings interface ought to load on prime of your present display and robotically pause the film or present you are at the moment streaming. Menu choices embrace the flexibility to maneuver between consumer profiles, open downloaded apps, dip into system settings, use a sleep timer, and extra.

It’s positively probably the most helpful Fire TV Stick distant shortcuts, particularly should you’re the sort of one who likes to tweak image settings to finest assist the media you are watching. For these people, you possibly can press and maintain the Up and Rewind buttons concurrently to manually choose a decision.

Hidden menus and tucked-away instructions are par for the course with regards to most streaming units and good TVs as of late. For instance, there are a handful of secret menus constructed into Roku OS (which may be accessed as soon as developer mode is enabled), in addition to a bunch of hidden options baked into Apple TV. The latter even has hidden button instructions for its Siri distant, comparable to the flexibility to shortly toggle apps by urgent the TV/Control Center button twice.

Depending on the system, entry to shortcuts could also be nicely documented by the producer or may require a deeper dive, like with Roku’s developer mode. Regardless of who has entry and why, these hidden command facilities could make adjusting settings easier and extra handy. That mentioned, if you find yourself investing in a common distant, you will wish to ensure that it is a mannequin you possibly can program distinctive instructions to; in any other case, you might be locked out of Amazon’s Quick Settings interface.