How to Delete Apps on Fire Stick

If Fire TV is loading slowly, removing apps can speed things up

By
Jerri Ledford
Jerri Ledford
Jerri Ledford
Senior News Editor, Fact Checker
  • Western Kentucky University
  • Gulf Coast Community College
Jerri L. Ledford has been writing, editing, and fact-checking tech stories since 1994. Her work has appeared in Computerworld, PC Magazine, Information Today, and many others.
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Published on July 1, 2020

What to Know

This article explains how to delete apps from your Amazon Fire TV Stick because, if you added too many apps, the device may run sluggishly.

How to Uninstall Apps on FireStick

If you're experiencing issues with your Fire TV Stick, or you just have a ton of apps you've downloaded and no longer use (or never used), you can delete those apps to free up space for me. Here's how:

  1. Open your FireStick, and then select Settings in the top menu (you may have to scroll to the right to get to this option).

    To access the top navigation menu of your FireStick, press the Up button on your FireStick remote and then you can navigate to the right using the right arrow button.

    The Settings option on Amazon Fire TV Stick.

  2. In Settings press the Down button on the remote and then scroll to and select Applications.

    The Applications option on Amazon FireStick.

  3. In the Applications options that appear, highlight Manage Installed Applications. When you select this item, you'll be able to see how much internal storage space you have used and how much you have available.

    Select Manage Installed Applications.

    The Manage Installed Applications option on Amazon FireStick.

  4. Scroll through the list of apps installed on your device to find the one you want to uninstall. Select it, and then select Uninstall from the options that appear.

    The Uninstall option on an app on the Amazon Fire TV Stick.

  5. You'll be prompted to confirm that you want to uninstall the app. Click Uninstall and the app will be removed from your device.

    The deletion confirmation when removing an app from FireStick.

Not all apps can be deleted from your Amazon Fire TV Stick. Some pre-installed apps are used to ensure the functionality of your FireStick, so Amazon locks them so they cannot be removed.

Other Ways to Uninstall Apps from FireStick

While the method above is the easiest way to uninstall apps from your Fire TV Stick, you can also use a third-party file manager, such as ES File Explorer File Manager, X-plore File Manager, or File Commander to remove unwanted apps from your FireStick.

While all of these apps are available on Amazon, there are others you can use that are not. However, you may need to sideload those apps to your Fire TV Stick.

You'll need to install one of those apps and then select the files you want to remove from the app interface. One nice thing about these third-party apps is that you can usually delete multiple apps at one time, and you may even be able to recover apps that you didn't intend to delete. Some also have tools that will review your existing apps and make suggestions for which ones to delete.

Try Clearing the App Caches

If you don't want to delete apps from you FireStick, you can also try clearing app caches to free up some space. Some of the apps you install on your FireStick can store quite a bit of 'temporary' data in caches that eat away at your available storage space. To clear this out, you'll have to select each app (steps 1-3 above) and then choose Clear cache. This will clear out that temporary data.

When you highlight Clear cache before you select it, you should see some information on the right side of the screen that tell you data about the app you've selected, including the amount of space used to cache data for the app. That's where you'll see how quickly even small apps can store tons of data (especially when you take all those little bits of data together).

When All Else Fails, Reset Your Fire TV Stick

If you've deleted unused apps and cleared the cache for your remaining apps, but you're still experiencing slowdowns or even apps that won't load, then your next option will be to completely reset your Amazon Firest TV Stick. This is a drastic step, so you might want to write down the must-have apps on your list so you can reinstall them after you set the FireStick back up. Just be aware you'll lose any data associated with those apps.

Why Delete Apps from FireStick

Adding apps on your Amazon Fire TV Stick is a great way to increase the functionality of the device, but the device only has about 8GB of storage, so it's easy to run out of room for all those apps. When you do, you could encounter problems with using those apps or downloading apps, TV shows, and movies. The best way to fix this is to delete some of the old, unused apps on your device.

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