[mrandish]

Amazon rolling their own OS for TV add-on devices instead of the re-skinned Android TV OS they've been using until now basically means I won't consider their devices any more. The last thing I need is yet another non-standard moving target to support in my house. Which is unfortunate because I bought their catchily-named "Fire TV Stick 4k Max (2nd Gen)" and, once you de-cruft the advertising riddled OS and sideload standard Android TV apps (eg SmartTube, Plex), the hardware is decent at a fair price (~$50). IMHO, all the broadly available TV streaming devices from major manufacturers are under-powered but the more recent, higher-end ones like the Fire TV 4K Max and Google Chromecast (aka "4K Streamer") can be basically usable once de-crufted.

Unfortunately, the only more powerful alternatives are from offshore manufacturers and thus have spotty Android TV support and may not be "authorized" (ie whitelisted) by all encrypted streaming apps (Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, etc). It's bizarre that the most powerful dedicated TV streaming device available today is by far still the NVidia Shield which is essentially a 2015 era design (it got a very minor refresh in 2019 https://androidtvnews.com/nvidia-shield-differences/). It sucks because there are a lot of useful things a TV streaming device could do if it had a little more CPU/GPU headroom (AI upscaling, de-mosaicing, casual and retro-gaming).