- Today I'm gonna show you
how to jailbreak your Fire Stick
or your Fire Stick 4K or your Fire TV Cube.
It works on all of them.
Jailbreaking
or sometimes you hear it called side loading,
basically just means
you are allowing your device to download apps
that aren't actually available
in the official app store.
And it's not nearly as intense
as it would be on other devices
like phones or tablets.
There are other things that you can jailbreak
but that involves going into the code
and changing actual code.
We're not doing anything like that.
It's a very simple process.
Basically, you just need to know
where a few of the settings are
to allow you to do that on your Fire TV device.
First, let's get into how you actually do this
and then we'll talk a little bit more
about what we're doing after I'm done.
All right, first things first,
when I open up my Fire TV,
I need a downloader app.
Well, there's a very convenient one
called, conveniently, Downloader.
So you can go over here to search
and you can type it in,
or if you've got a remote
with the voice search controls,
then you just press that button,
Downloader.
And that's exactly what we're looking for,
that orange one, it's Downloader.
Like I said, you can type that in
or you can just voice search it.
But we need to get Downloader.
Luckily it's free.
All right, so that will download while we're waiting.
Basically, this is the app
that will allow you to download the other apps,
like I said, apps that aren't available
in the Fire TV app store.
All right, now before we go there,
I'm gonna go back to my homepage
and head over to settings.
I come down here to my Fire TV
and I'm looking for developer options.
Now I don't see that here on my screen.
Okay, there's no developer options.
So I'm gonna click on about, here.
And in this case, I'm using my Fire TV Cube.
It might say Fire TV Stick for you,
whatever the device is that you're using.
I'm gonna click on that seven times.
Ah, you are already a developer.
Okay, it says you're already a developer.
And voila, I push the back button,
goes back here to developer options.
That has now shown up.
So we want to click on developer options.
We have ADB debugging, that's off.
We want to turn that on.
And what is ADB debugging?
Doesn't matter.
I'm gonna come down here to install unknown apps
and allow Downloader to do so.
Now, technically that's all we need to do
but you may want to also turn off any tracking
depending on what kind of activities you plan on doing
with your side loaded Fire Stick, okay?
So I'm gonna go back to my settings
and this time, go to preferences.
And down here on privacy settings,
I wanna make sure that my device usage data
and the collect app usage data is turned off.
And I'm gonna do the same thing down here
in data usage monitoring.
Make sure that that is off.
Basically, this just means
you're not sending your data back
to Amazon to analyze
and voila, that's pretty much it.
All right, so now I can go to my apps
and I've got the Downloader that I can pop into.
There it is.
And if any messages come up, you know,
make sure you give this app the permissions
that it needs to access your files,
that sort of thing.
Now, as far as what apps you may want to download,
that is outside the purview of this video.
This is just about how to get you this far.
Now, if there are apps that you want to add,
things like Kodi or a different browser
or game emulators, those sorts of things,
this is the app that will allow you to do that.
And so you can search for how to get those.
But this video is just about
how to get you this far.
But a word of caution.
I do wanna make sure that you're aware
that when you do this,
the reason that it's not automatically set
to allow you to do this
is because now you're allowing external apps
onto your Fire TV device
that Amazon has not approved.
There may be different reasons
they haven't approved of them.
Some of the apps are allowing you
to illegally download pirated content.
Some apps are,
well, they're not checked
by any development team at Amazon
so they may be carrying viruses
or malware, that sort of thing.
So there are definitely some words of caution
when it comes to doing something like this,
side loading on your Fire Stick.
But it is a powerful option
if there are apps out there
that you want to get,
things that you want your Fire Stick to be able to do
that it's not able to do straight out of the box.
So with that word of caution,
be careful, stay safe and have fun
with your side loadable Fire TV device
and I will see you next time.
(mid tempo electronic music)