Remove apps from a Fire TV Stick, and make it stick.
Usually the reason is a child and a feed that never ends. Almost every guide tells you to uninstall the app; we measured what happened next on a real device, and Amazon put it back within two hours. Here is the one-word change that makes it permanent, and the complete set of steps around it, written for someone who has never opened a command line.
Uninstalling does not work.
On a Fire TV Stick 4K Max we removed the YouTube app with the usual pm uninstall command. It reported Success, and the app vanished from the home screen.
About two hours later it was back. Asking the device who installed it gave a straight answer: installerPackageName=com.amazon.venezia. The Amazon Appstore had quietly reinstalled it. Turning off "Automatic Updates" in the Appstore settings did not prevent this. That setting governs updates to apps you have; it does not stop Amazon re-pushing apps that shipped with the device.
So stop creating the gap. Instead of removing the app, disable it. The package stays on the device, so the Appstore sees nothing missing and has nothing to restore, but the app cannot launch and does not appear on your home screen. That is the method below.
Mostly, this is about kids.
A television used to be a finite thing. A programme ended, and the ending was the point: it handed the room back to you. Whatever else was wrong with it, the TV was the one screen in the house that did not scroll.
The feed apps have arrived on it. YouTube on a Fire Stick is a wall of thumbnails that autoplays the next one before the last has finished, Shorts included. The Silk browser opens the door to Instagram and everything like it. None of that was designed for a living room, and none of it was designed to be switched off.
The controls Amazon gives you do not really solve it. Parental Controls are a PIN over purchases and age ratings; they do not take an app off the home screen. Amazon Kids is a separate walled profile, which works well for a small child and not at all for a teenager who simply switches back to the main one. Either way the app is still sitting there, one click away, and a PIN is only ever as good as the number of times a child has watched you type it.
Disabling is a different kind of answer. There is no PIN to learn and no profile to leave. The app is not on the screen, and tapping where it used to be does nothing at all. It is reversible in one command whenever you decide otherwise, but until you do, it is genuinely gone.
The same steps work just as well for whatever you personally never asked for: shopping apps, promo rows, screensaver ads, the tutorial video you have already seen.
This takes about fifteen minutes. Your computer and your Fire Stick must be on the same Wi-Fi network. Nothing here roots the stick, installs anything on it, or voids your warranty, and a factory reset undoes all of it.
Turn on Developer Options
Do this on the TV itself, with your Fire TV remote.
- From the home screen go to Settings (the gear icon) → My Fire TV → About.
- Highlight the top line (the one naming your device, such as Fire TV Stick 4K Max) and press the select button (the round centre button) seven times. A small counter appears, ending with "You are now a developer."
- Press Back once. You are in My Fire TV again, and a new Developer Options entry has appeared.
- Open Developer Options and switch ADB Debugging to ON.
No Developer Options after seven presses? You were almost certainly highlighting the wrong row. It has to be the device-name row at the very top of About, not "Storage" or "Network".
Find your Fire Stick's IP address
Still on the TV, with the remote:
- Go to Settings → My Fire TV → About → Network.
- Read the IP ADDRESS shown on the right. It looks like
192.168.1.63: four numbers separated by dots. - Write it down. You will type it several times.
Everywhere you see 192.168.1.63 below, use your number instead.
Download the ADB tools onto your computer
ADB (the Android Debug Bridge) is a free, official tool from Google. You do not install it. You unzip it and run it out of that folder.
- Download platform-tools-latest-windows.zip. It saves to your Downloads folder.
- Open Downloads, right-click the file, choose Extract All…, then Extract.
- You now have a folder named
platform-tools-latest-windowswith another folder inside it calledplatform-tools. The inner one is what you want: it holdsadb.exe.
- Download platform-tools-latest-darwin.zip. It saves to your Downloads folder.
- Open Downloads in Finder and double-click the zip. macOS unpacks it into a folder called
platform-tools. - Inside is a file named simply
adb. That is the tool.
Open a command line in that folder
This is the step most guides skip, and it is where people get stuck. The command line has to be pointed inside the platform-tools folder, or it will not find the tool.
- Open the
platform-toolsfolder in File Explorer, so you can seeadb.exein the list. - Click once in the address bar at the top, the strip showing the folder path. It highlights in blue.
- Type
powershellstraight over it and press Enter.
A dark window opens, already pointed at the right folder. Its last line ends with \platform-tools>. That is your command line: type a command, press Enter, read what comes back.
On Windows, type .\adb.exe (with the dot and the backslash) rather than just adb. PowerShell refuses to run a program from the current folder without it.
- Open Terminal: press Cmd + Space, type
terminal, press Enter. - Type
cdfollowed by one space, but do not press Enter yet. - Drag the
platform-toolsfolder from Finder onto the Terminal window. It fills in the path for you. - Now press Enter.
That is your command line: type a command, press Enter, read what comes back.
On a Mac, type ./adb, with the dot and the slash. The first time you run it macOS may say the developer cannot be verified. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, click Allow Anyway, then run the command again.
Connect to the Fire Stick
Type this with your own IP address, and press Enter:
.\adb.exe connect 192.168.1.63:5555./adb connect 192.168.1.63:5555Now look at your TV. A box asks "Allow USB debugging?" and shows a long string of letters and numbers. Tick "Always allow from this computer" and choose OK. You have only a few seconds before it disappears.
Run the same command again to confirm:
connected to 192.168.1.63:5555The prompt on the TV was not accepted, or it timed out. Run the connect command again, watch the TV, and accept it. This is by far the most common sticking point.
Find the app's package name
Every app has an internal name that looks like com.amazon.firetv.youtube. You need the exact one. This lists every app on your device:
.\adb.exe -s 192.168.1.63:5555 shell pm list packages./adb -s 192.168.1.63:5555 shell pm list packagesThat prints a few hundred lines, nearly 300 on the stick we tested. To search it for one app, say anything with "youtube" in the name:
.\adb.exe -s 192.168.1.63:5555 shell pm list packages | Select-String youtube./adb -s 192.168.1.63:5555 shell pm list packages | grep youtubepackage:com.amazon.firetv.youtubeThe part after package: is what you need. These are the ones people most often want gone, all verified present on a Fire TV Stick 4K Max:
| App | Package name |
|---|---|
| YouTube | com.amazon.firetv.youtube |
| Netflix | com.netflix.ninja |
| Hulu | com.hulu.plus |
| Silk Browser | com.amazon.cloud9 |
| Amazon Photos | com.amazon.bueller.photos |
| Amazon Music | com.amazon.bueller.music |
| Shop TV | com.amazon.shoptv.client |
| Early Access promos | com.amazon.tv.earlyaccess |
| "How to use your Fire TV" tutorials | com.amazon.tmm.tutorial |
| Screensaver | com.amazon.ftv.screensaver |
| Ad deep-linking | com.amazon.ftvads.deeplinking |
| Content recognition (identifies what is on screen) | com.amazon.tv.acr |
Disabling com.amazon.tv.launcher takes away your home screen and leaves you with a TV you cannot navigate. Leave com.amazon.tv.settings.v2 (Settings) alone too, along with anything beginning com.android.
If a package is not in the table above and you do not know what it does, leave it. The gain from removing a mystery background service is small. The cost of removing the wrong one is a stick you have to factory reset.
Disable the app
This is the command that actually holds. Use your IP and the package name you found:
.\adb.exe -s 192.168.1.63:5555 shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.amazon.firetv.youtube./adb -s 192.168.1.63:5555 shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.amazon.firetv.youtubePackage com.amazon.firetv.youtube new state: disabled-userLook at your TV. The app is gone from the home screen and cannot be opened. Run the command again for each app you want rid of, changing the package name each time.
When you have finished, disconnect:
.\adb.exe disconnect./adb disconnectReturn to Settings → My Fire TV → Developer Options and switch ADB Debugging to OFF. While it is on, any computer on your network can reach the stick. Switch it back on only when you want to change something.
Changed your mind?
None of this is permanent. To bring an app back, reconnect (steps 4 and 5) and run:
adb -s 192.168.1.63:5555 shell pm enable com.amazon.firetv.youtubePrefix it with .\ on Windows or ./ on a Mac, as before. And if anything at all goes wrong, a factory reset (Settings → My Fire TV → Reset to Factory Defaults) puts every app back exactly as it shipped.
When it doesn't work
"unauthorized"
The prompt on the TV was never accepted. Run the connect command again and watch the screen as you do.
"unable to connect", or it just hangs
Usually one of four things. The Fire Stick is asleep, so press a button on the remote to wake it. The IP address has changed, because routers reassign them; check step 2 again. Your computer is on a different network, such as a separate 5GHz band or a guest network. Or your router has "AP isolation" or "client isolation" turned on, which stops devices on the same Wi-Fi from seeing each other. That one is a setting in your router, not on the stick.
The app came back anyway
Check that you used disable-user and not uninstall. Uninstalling is precisely the thing that does not survive. If you had uninstalled the app earlier, the Appstore may restore it one more time. When it does, disable that copy and it will stay disabled.
"adb is not recognised" / "command not found"
Your command line is not pointed at the platform-tools folder, or you left off the .\ or ./ in front. Go back to step 4.
The phone is the harder one.
You have just taken back the one screen the whole family shares. The harder screen is the one nobody shares: already in a pocket, upstairs, and built to be far more difficult to put down than anything on a television.
Verboten blocks the apps you choose on iPhone and iPad, at the system level, so a blocked app cannot be opened at all. No command line, no PIN to watch someone type.
See how Verboten worksTested on a Fire TV Stick 4K Max (model AFTMA08C15) running Fire OS 8.1.8.2, in September 2026. The commands are standard Android and behave the same on other Fire TV models and Fire OS versions, but package names vary between device generations, which is why step 6 has you list the apps on your own device rather than trusting a copied list. Verboten is not affiliated with Amazon.