It seems that Google has already had enough with the constant blockages of Amazon to its products and has decided to press the button that starts the nuclear war between these two companies. From January 1 2018 the official Youtube app for Amazon devices such as FireTV will be no longer compatible and will cut off the monopoly of your video streaming service. Undoubtedly a key point when selecting your devices for domestic use, we will see if this has a solution before the day 1 an agreement.
The Amazon devices affected by this blocking of Youtube are the populars Fire TV devices, the Echo Show speakers and we assume that their SmartTV with FireOS integrated. Google has commented that this step is a response to the continuous blockages to their products in the Amazon sales channels where we can not find the Chromecast adapter or Nest security devices. Also keep in mind that Amazon has blocked Amazon Prime Video streaming on Chromecast and on some Android TV devices. Without a doubt a whole war of constant blockages between both giants.
How can I see YouTube on my FireTV if it is blocked by Google?
As always in these cases we like to delve into the subject and we have made several to find an alternative to the possible blocking of YouTube on Fire TV from December 1. In our tests on the Fire TV 3 that we are reviewing we have tried three methods but it is possible that using other alternative Youtube apps we have different results.
- Youtube application for Android TV
This application works well to play content and navigate the app but when performing a voice search Alexa interferes and is not compatible, if we wait to use the keyboard for start a search the app closes and we can not start our Google user session either.
- Youtube application for Android
With this app we have a message of incompatibility since Fire TV does not have Google Play Services, it does not matter if we install them via APK since it gives us the same error message. To use this app we need a connected mouse.
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Web browser
From a Web browser we can use YouTube without apparent problems but the searches are done from the keyboard and we need a mouse to move, besides the quality is not good if we do not activate the desktop mode which makes the environment is something weird.
Conclusions
As we have seen the move of Google against Amazon is strong, few correct alternatives we have against the native app for FireOS since the methods we have tested are either incompatible with the remote or incompatible with FireOS, if Amazon does not back down in blocking Google products will depend on the community to get some functional alternative patch for this service.
