This week, Amazon announced the upcoming launch of a new Fire TV Stick HD. The new model will run on Amazon’s Vega OS, rather than Android, so most streaming apps will be supported, but users won’t be add third party apps.
Now, on the product page to preorder the new Fire Stick, some Amazon customers are getting a message warning them that the new model won’t allow sideloading. Interestingly, not all customers are getting the message, whether signed in to an Amazon account or not.
The message, shown in a screenshot below, says For enhanced security, this device prevents sideloading or installing apps from unknown sources. Only apps from the Amazon Appstore are available for download.
We first learned that Amazon would be switching from Android OS to the company’s own OS, Vega, in April 2025. While the platform hadn’t officially been announced yet, the company was developing Vega and hiring engineers for a team built to “to design, develop, and maintain the core services that power application and service runtime management across all Vega-supported platforms.”
Several products were built to run on Vega, including the Echo Show 5, Echo Hub, and Echo Spot smart clock. Now, the next generation of Fire TV Sticks are following.
The Fire TV Stick Select, announced in September 2025, also runs on Vega and some customers will see the same message about sideloading on that product page.
When the Fire TV Select with Vega was announced, Amazon shared the following message on its Amazon Developer blog:
Today, we announced the new Fire TV Stick 4K Select, our most affordable 4K streaming stick and first to run Vega OS. Vega is a new operating system built specifically for our devices. It’s highly responsive with an efficient footprint, enabling fast app launches and smooth navigation. Our new Echo devices also run on Vega.
We adopted Linux components as our foundation. We built Vega to be scalable across a variety of devices, from small footprint devices, like a Fire TV Stick, to our most advanced devices with on-device AI processing, like our Echo Show.
That message to developers was followed by instructions for working with the new OS, along with a note reiterating that Vega won’t be replacing Fire OS completely. The FAQ says “We’ve always been a multi-OS company. We have launched and will continue to launch new devices on Fire OS.”
While Amazon continues to be a “multi-OS company,” we should expect that future Fire TV models will also be built with Vega OS, limiting the apps users can access with their streaming devices to those from the Amazon Appstore.
