You would think that since Amazon owns Twitch, that they would at the very least show some love and get some priority updates for their products. And when I say products, I mean all of them and not some. Case in point, the Twitch app on the original Amazon Fire TV is a piece of crap, especially compared to the versions of the app on the Xbox and PlayStation, or even the iOS and Android (mobile) versions. You can’t sign in which means you can’t access your account or subscribed channels, you can’t search other than manually looking through the thousands of channels, so good luck if you’re looking for an obscure game. Oh, it gets better or worse I should say as you can’t even change video quality, which is a huge issue as most of the channels I’ve seen are a pixelated mess, meaning that I’m lucky to see any content at 720p or above. Even worse, the application has a random tendency to crash, which it has done during several DOTA2 and LOL matches I was watching at the time.
Now, you’re probably asking why am I so frustrated about this? Well it’s pretty simple. I’ve got a pretty nice setup in my office, where I do the majority of my game streams and work, which also has an Amazon Fire TV set-top box. This allows me to watch and work, it’s a huge advantage when writing articles and reporting on events. However when I need to find a specific channel quickly, it’s simply not possible and I typically have to resort to hooking up my Google Chromecast or just watching the stream on my PC. Which is fine, but for the way I setup my room and for the investment of the Amazon Fire TV, which I got on day one, I find this very inconvenient and annoying.
Hell at this point, i’d settle for the consoles versions being ported over, not that there’s anything wrong with them. I mean, at least you can search in their apps.
On that same token, I’m being told that Twitch did in fact update their Twitch app for the Fire TV, the newer Fire TV and not the original one. So I suppose until they decide to update the app for the original Fire TV, I would have to upgrade to a new device that really doesn’t have any major upgrades that I would need and there’s actually a whole amount of features that the OG version has over the newer one. So while this benefits users of the new Amazon Fire TV, us original owners are left out in the cold and there’s a large amount of us that are asking “where’s our update”. I can’t see any issues, technical mind you, that would restrict them from porting this over, unless there’s a limitation of the Fire OS on the older box. For those not in the know, Fire OS is Amazon’s Android based operating system. But I can’t see why you can get this running on Fire OS 4.4 vs Fire OS 5, which is running on the new box.
Or you know, Twitch and Amazon could officially come out and state that there will be no update for the original Fire TV or at least acknowledge the requests from it’s users and letting us know where we stand. Users are more receptive to a logical answer and reasoning, instead of dead silence.
I guess until we get an answer or reply, I’m off to see if I can side-load the new app. Wish me luck!
