So you’ve installed the Google Play Store on your Amazon Fire tablet. What’s next? While you can’t yet root Amazon’s latest tablet or replace the operating system with a custom ROM, you can disable a bunch of Amazon apps and features.

Don’t need the Amazon Appstore, want to disable the Weather, Prime Video, or Kindle apps? Or maybe you want to prevent your tablet from automatically downloading and installing Fire OS updates.

Here’s how to do that. Note that the steps outlined in this guide have been tested with both the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2020) and Amazon Fire HD 10 (2019) tablet, but should work with most recent Amazon tablets.

Step 1: Enable Developer Options and USB Debugging

On your tablet, take the following steps:

  • Enable Developer Options by navigating to Settings -> Device Options -> About Fire Tablet and then tapping the serial number for your tablet 7 times.
  • Tap the back button to go back to Device Options.
  • Scroll down and select Developer Options.
  • Slide the toggle for Developer Options to “On.”
  • Scroll down until you find USB Debugging and slide the toggle to the on position.

Step 2: Disable Amazon apps and services

Now there are two methods for disabling apps: you can do it manually using the Android Debug Bridge (adb), which takes a little more work, but gives you a lot of control. Or Windows users can use a free utility called Fire Toolbox that automates the process

Option A: Disable Amazon apps using ADB

Step 1a: Set up adb (Android Debug Bridge)

  • Connect your tablet to a computer with a USB cable
  • On your computer, download the Android SDK Platform Tools from Google (available for Windows, Mac, or Linux)
  • Unzip the file you just loaded and make note of the directory where you’ve unzipped it.
  • Open a terminal or command prompt and navigate to that folder.
  • Type “adb devices” (without the quotation marks) to see if our computer detects your tablet. If it does, you’ll probably see a device number and the word “unauthorized” in the terminal window if this is the first time using adb to connect this tablet to this PC.
  • After that last step, a pop-up notification should appear on the tablet asking if you want to allow the USB debugging. Choose OK (and optionally check the box that says “Always allow from this computer” if you don’t want to be asked again.
  • Now if you type “adb devices” again, you should see the same ID for the tablet, but now instead of “unauthorized” you should see the word “device.”

Step 2a: Disable Amazon apps using adb (Android Debug Bridge)

Here’s the part where we can actually disable specific apps. Note that Amazon does not make it easy to completely uninstall or remove apps that come pre-installed on its tablets, so we’re going to disable them instead.

That means you won’t necessarily save any storage space on your device, but you won’t see these apps running on your device after running the following commands. You may also have to run through these steps again at some point in the future if the apps start running again after Amazon pushes a software update.

In a nutshell, you can disable an app by entering an adb command that looks something like this:

adb shell pm disable-user com.goodreads.kindle

That particular command will stop the Goodreads app from running on an Amazon Fire tablet. But you can customize the line to disable other apps or disable apps just for specific users.

Disabling specific apps

For example, com.amazon.kindle is the name of the app you’re disabling in the command above. If you know the package name of the app you want to affect, you can disable just about any app on your tablet by changing that part of the command.

Here are just a few of the apps you can disable:

  • Amazon Appstore: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.venezia
  • Goodreads: adb shell pm disable-user com.goodreads.kindle
  • Kindle: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.kindle
  • Legal Notices: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.legalsettings
  • Prime Video: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.avod
  • Silk web browser: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.cloud9
  • Special Offers: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.kindle.kso

That last command will remove ads from the tablet’s lock screen almost instantly. Here’s what it looks like when you execute that command while viewing the lock screen:

Again, keep in mind that the lock screen ads may re-appear at some point in the future if Amazon pushes an update. You can either run the same command to remove them again, or permanently remove them by paying Amazon $15 to $20 to officially remove “Special Offers.” On some (mostly older) Amazon Fire tablets you can also root the tablet or install a custom ROM that will permanently remove lock screen ads, but neither option is currently available for Amazon’s latest tablets.

Amazon’s Remove Special Offers option

You can find a longer list of apps that can be removed in a thread at the xda-developers forum. Note that you might have to disable multiple packages to fully disable some apps and features. For example, in order to disable the Weather app, you would run the following commands, one after the other:

  • adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.weather
  • adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.platform

How to disable the default Fire Launcher

I’m giving this one its own section, even though you can remove it with a simple command just like any of the apps listed above. The key thing to keep in mind is that you only want to disable the Fire Launcher after you’ve already installed a third-party launcher. Otherwise your tablet will get stuck at the loading screen when you turn it on.

If you’ve already installed a third-party launcher from Google Play, APKMirror, or another trusted source, then you can run the following line to disable the default Fire OS Launcher:

adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.firelauncher

If somethings goes wrong and you’re left without a working launcher at all, the tablet will get stuck at a loading screen. Fortunately, you can always re-enable any app you’ve disabled. See below.

Use adb to re-enable Amazon apps

Say you’ve disabled an app and discovered that you actually wanted or needed it? Here’s how to re-enable an app.

  • Connect your tablet to your computer with a USB cable.
  • Open a terminal or command prompt to your adb directory.
  • Type a command that looks something like this: “adb shell pm enable com.amazon.firelauncher” (without the quotes).

The example above will re-enable the default Fire OS Launcher app after it’s been disabled. But you can change the package name to any app that you’ve previously disabled. For example, if you disabled Goodreads using the command listed earlier in this post, then pasting this line into a terminal will re-enable Goodreads:

adb shell pm enable com.goodreads.kindle

Option B: Disable Amazon apps with Fire Toolbox

Don’t want to jump through all the hoops above which involving installing Google’s Android software development kit and running command-line utilities one at a time? Fire Toolbox is a Windows-only application that automates many of the most popular Amazon Fire tablet hacks.

You will still need to enable developer mode and USB debugging on your tablet before you can use Fire Toolbox, but rather than finding the exact command to remove a specific app, you can use the “Manage Amazon Apps” function to disable multiple Amazon apps at once, or use the Manul section to choose the specific apps you want to disable.

In the main Manage Amazon Apps section. you’ll find “standard debloat” and “complete debloat” commands that will disable some or most Amazon apps and services.

You can also manually select the specific apps you want to disable from a checklist.

Note that the “Simple” mode will show just the most common apps and services, while the “Advanced” option lets you disable just about everything, which can get you in trouble if you’re not careful. So read the descriptions carefully before deciding to disable apps using this method.

Note that you’ll find the option to disable “special offers” or “Lockscreen ads” in a separate section of the Fire Toolbox utility called “Lockscreen Management.”

This method attempts to permanently disable ads, but it does this partially by blocking the tablet from receiving over-the-air software updates from Amazon. I’m not really a fan of taking that step, since it means you won’t receive feature or security updates for your device, which could leave you open to potential vulnerabilities. But if you’d rather not have to run a command to disable the special offers app every few months and don’t want to spend money to have Amazon disable lock screen ads, then I suppose this is a way to do it.

Want to restore an app that you’ve disabled? Fire Toolbox has a “Restore Everything” option, or you can use use the Manual options to selectively choose the apps you’d want to restore. In the Simple UI, look for the “Restore Apps” tab. In Advanced, it’s called “Disabled/Hidden Apps.”

This article was originally published June 6, 2020 and last updated October 2, 2021. 

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29 replies on “Amazon Fire tablets: How to disable Amazon apps and features”

  1. After spending literal HOURS trying to get help from amazon and doing various forum searches to stop my 10 year old genius of a son from downloading the youtube app, I was frustrated and ready to just give up!!! I tried parent monitoring apps, I tried changing my DNS settings. None of this prevented the ability to download apps from the amazon appstore, even with the parental controls on the tablet!! But your method, in all it’s wonderful glory, WORKED! Thank you SOOOOO much for sharing this! My son is not happy, but he can now use the tablet on my profile and access all of his subscriptions that he couldn’t access on the child’s profile (ridiculous amazon methods) without having the ability to download youtube or anything else on the appstore. Seriously can’t thank you enough!! I bookmarked this page!

  2. Switching off the Fire launcher doesn’t work this way for me (“Cannot disable a protected package”). I have Fire 8 (10th gen) and Nova already installed as an alternative launcher.

    1. Try the command prompt method. It worked on my sons fire hd 8 tablet! It was a little extra work, but it worked beautifully !

  3. I’ve managed to get every app I don’t want off my Gen 10 (2020) Fire HD 8 except Amazon Kids. I even looked at the list of all apps using the command prompt, but I didn’t see anything I hadn’t already tried. Amnyone know what it’s called?

    1. I found it as com.amazon.tahoe if it still helps… (I know it’s an old comment)

  4. I tried the disable launcher command with this and Amazon toolbox. Can no longer disable the launcher.

  5. I have the Amazon Fire HD 8 Plus (2020). Sadly these steps didn’t work for it. Disappointed that I purchased this tablet because it is purely a piece of junk.

  6. Works on the HD 8 2020! I paid the $20 to get ads off but could not get RID of the Goodreads. Spent an hour on the phone with Amazon to no avail. THANK YOU.

  7. Instructions presented here are clear and fundamentally correct.

    Used ‘as is’, they enabled my desktop machine with openSUSE (Leap 15.2) to connect to a couple of devices operating under Android. However, there was failure to make connection to an Amazon Fire HD 8 (2020) despite the device being recognised.

    The problem, for which I offer solution, boiled down to Linux instructions on https://developer.android.com/studio/run/device, to which I was referred, being specifically for Ubuntu.

    Failure to connect with the ‘Fire’ was through lack of access to android-sdk-platform-tools-common. This software is a community supported ‘catalogue’ of Android devices; presumably it is updated frequently. It supplements the catalogue implicit within Google’s Android Studio.

    Means via Ubuntu offered to access the tool do not carry forth directly to openSUSE.

    Steps are as follows.

    Explicitly create a ‘plugdev’ group using Yast. The proffered command line for Ubuntu doesn’t work as intended for openSUSE.
    Make your user ID a member of plugdev.
    Install the Android Tools from the openSUSE ‘unofficial’ community resource at https://software.opensuse.org/package/android-tools
    Logout and back in. Thereafter, the Fire HD 8 (2020) device is accessible using instructions under the heading ‘Set up adb (Android Debug Bridge)’ in this article.

    These instructions ought apply to other supported openSUSE versions.

  8. Sadly Amazon have forced out a fire 7 os (android 9) on the 2018 fire 8hd.

    Alexa is now like a robot and slightly slower, the speakers are 25% lower (like they say the 2020 8plus is) for all but alexa, you can not see tasks so can’t use task killer and you can’t see the CPU now

    tinycore won’t work so you can’t find apps that slow your fire like “my clock”

    It’s bad, I use Alexa to read ww2 books and now its like android assistant and music is too low.
    I hope there’s a way to block this update or roll it back

    Can I get my old fire 8 2018 back with a reset?
    Also can I block the update URLs or better disable the ota app/service

    1. I read and collect WW2 books, mainly the European Theatre as my dad served there.

  9. Can not disable apps – message permission denied

    C:\Users\henry\Documents\Programs\Computer Utilities\Android\platform-tools>adb shell pm disable-user com.goodreads.kindle
    Error: java.lang.SecurityException: Permission Denial: attempt to change component state from pid=8432, uid=2000, package uid=32145

    1. I got the same error when trying to disable the app. Don’t know how to solve this

  10. On trying to disable i see ” java.lang.SecurityException: Permission Denial: attempt to change component state” any idea what i could possibly try ? (kindle 7th)

  11. Thank you SO MUCH for this article! It made disabling the AppStore so easy and now I love my Fire Tablet so much more.

  12. I installed intune [ microsoft endpoint manager ] company portal app in an effort to enable work profile and apps that would allow me to connect to work microsoft 365 email in outlook, onedrive for business and sharepoint team site content. The company portal app throws an error when attempting to create a “Work” profile within the android system to complement the default “Personal” profile. Any thoughts on how you could pre-provision that “Work” profile so that the app setup of work apps and policies under that profile might succeed?

  13. I installed the microsoft launcher but there seems to be issues enabling it as the settings “default apps” view doesn’t have an entry for “home app”. Is there a way to enable microsoft launcer [ or other launcher ] as default home app without removing amazon fire launcher?

  14. Sadly, all I’m getting is errors.

    When I try and disable an app/service, let’s use the weather (as listed above), all I get is:

    C:\Users\*****\Downloads\SDK\platform-tools_r30.0.2-windows>adb shell pm disable-user -user 0 com.amazon.weather

    Exception occurred while executing (followed by various error messages)

    You should really do a YouTube video like the one you did with installing Google services and Google Play.

      1. Weird. I’m getting the same thing today (these steps worked on Saturday). The good news is there’s an easy fix. I’ll update the article momentarily, but just try this syntax instead: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.weather

        EDIT: Updated to fix the command line.

        1. Sadly, adb shell pm disable-user –user 0 com.amazon.weather, that syntax didn’t work either and produced the same error as I have already mentioned.

          “Exception occurred while executing:
          java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unknown package: ser”

        2. Just a wee update to my last reply. I see you’ve edited the syntax in the article. When I copy and paste adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.kindle.kso into cmd prompt I no longer get an error and I do get the following: Package com.amazon.kindle.kso new state: disabled-user. Which seems to work. So for future reference: adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.kindle.kso or any syntax without the -user 0 should work fine. I hope that makes sense, lol.

          1. I did not have any issues with using the user flag – I notice here that the comments are for -user when the correct flag is --user so the command should be pm disable-user --user 0 com.amazon.kindle.kso

    1. As I mentioned in the previous post, Amazon Fire Toolbox version 7.1 does not yet support the 10th-gen Fire HD 8. It probably will be updated soon, but for now the best way to disable Amazon apps is to do so manually.

Comments are closed.