One of the issues with most streaming devices is that they don’t particularly come with a ton of storage. Even the most high-end offerings max out at 16GB. And if you install a couple of essential apps and some games on them, you might see a low storage notification. Well, the Amazon Fire TV devices have a solution for this.
There’s a new feature for the Amazon Fire TV streaming devices. It’s called Auto Offload. It will come into action when you are running out of internal storage, resulting in an enhanced streaming experience on these devices.
How Does the Amazon Fire TV Auto Offload Feature Work
You might be familiar with the Auto Offload feature if you remember the Nextbit Robin phone. With this feature, the phone automatically uploads the data from the apps you installed on the device to the cloud. After the upload, it would delete the app data from the local storage, freeing up internal storage space. Amazon’s solution for Fire TV devices revolves around the same concept.
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Amazon Fire TV does this offloading in two steps. First, it will scan all the installed apps and select the ones that you have not used or used the least in the past 30 days. Then, the software of the streaming device will delete that app’s cache.
Secondly, the Amazon Fire TV will check if the storage space is below 800MB. In such cases, the software of the streaming device will delete the apps that you haven’t used in the past 60 days.
But there are a few exceptions. Amazon Fire TV won’t apply the Auto Offload technique to the core apps. That includes the native Fire TV apps such as the Silk Browser. Also, you can disable this feature if you don’t want the installed apps to be automatically uninstalled by the software.
That said, Amazon has already started to roll out the feature starting from this month. And a good number of Fire TV devices already have. But the rollout isn’t complete yet. Amazon said that all devices should have it in early November.
I think the automatic offload helped for awhile, but lately I get storage warnings a lot on my Insignia FireTV. What occurs to me is that the FireTV tech has the same issue that Amazon tablets do. On both my tablet and my TV, I have a huge amount of external storage connected and most of it is not used. For example, on the TV when I check the USB drive, it has 229 GB out of 230 GB free. It is formatted for storage of apps! But the TV gives no option to move apps to ext storage. So, like the tablet, the warning goes that the internal storage is out of space, But my tablet has a 512 GB SD card installed and like 511 GB is free on the card. Amazon techs do not know how to program their tech for proper use of space! On the TV, the warning gets bad enough, it will NOT let me get away from the warning screen. Even if I wanted to reset to factory defaults or restart the TV, the warning screen will not let me get away from it! and you can’t shut off the TV if you can’t to settings (to tell it to sleep).