Amazon has been hit with a class-action lawsuit over the death of its first-generation Fire TV products, devices that were released in the same era as Google’s original Chromecasts.
The New York Post picked up on a class action lawsuit (via FlatPanelsHD) filed against Amazon in which the company allegedly “bricked” first and second-generation Fire TV Sticks – but Amazon just ended software updates for these devices.
Amazon released these two Fire TV Sticks in 2014 and 2016, respectively, and ended software support in 2022 and 2023. The lawsuit cites users who bought this hardware and found that “failing software” left the remote broken and the device largely inoperable, forcing the purchase of a new device.
The lawsuit brings out that Amazon never set a timeline on Fire TV updates for these older devices, something the company has just started doing on newer models such as the latest Fire TV Stick HD, which is promised “at least” four years of updates starting from when Amazon stops selling the device.
Amazon now has a full support page detailing software update commitments for all of its modern Fire TV hardware.
Google released Chromecast devices around the same time as Amazon’s affected streamers, with the first-gen Chromecast having launched in 2013. Software support for the original Chromecast ended in 2023, a decade after launch. The second-gen model is technically still supported, 11 years after release.
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