Ask HN: Do your Amazon products/apps get slower over time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do your Amazon products/apps get slower over time?

17 pointsdonpott11 comments

The Amazon Video App in my smart TV has gotten noticeably laggy with every passing update for years, now taking over 20 seconds just to load the catalog. Browsing and pausing streams also seem to be annoyingly slow.

To add to this, my Kindle reader received an OTA update last week, and now it takes literal seconds to perform basic functions eg. to look up a word in a dictionary.

Have you also noticed your own Amazon apps/devices getting worse and worse performance over time? If so, why do you think that is? Do they simply not care about performance as part of their testing cycles? Is it a conscious effort at Planned Obsolescence?

View on HN

I recently started watching a bit of content on Prime Video using my Roku TV and found the buffering and scrub (FF/RW/seek) performance to be atrocious. This is in spite of the fact that my device has a hardwired gigabit Ethernet connection, a 900/20 Mbit internet connection through Comcast, and good to excellent Bufferbloat numbers. I'd initially chalked it up to the Roku implementation and the fact that I, like many of the people here, tend to be pretty sensitive to poor UX but over the holidays totally unprompted my father-in-law mentioned that he can't stand watching content on Prime Video using either his Roku or his Android TV devices because the buffering is so terrible (one wired, one wifi, both via Ziply gigabit fiber).

This is in stark contrast to the buttery smooth performance I see when using Netflix, hell, even YouTube bests Prime. Netflix even degrades gracefully when encountering network contention. I know Netflix has been around a lot longer but it's not like Amazon is some type of startup trying its best with the the few engineers it can afford.

Interestingly, it varies tremendously from device to device. I have an original FireTV box (the one about the size and shape of a CD/DVD drive) that's pretty snappy, although I don't think I've gotten an update on it in a while. I have a much newer FireTV stick which, in theory, should be much faster, but as you describe, it seems to take forever for it to retrieve its info from the AWS servers. It is running a newer version of the FireTV app, though, than the old FireTV. This makes me think that the different versions may well be making different API call into the AWS cloud, and that the older ones were necessarily more streamlined and efficient. That's just a guess though - I could be wrong...

My second-gen Echo Dot works solidly, but the Echo Show 8 is a bloody trainwreck, and whoever designed and managed that POS should just be taken out back and shot. The Show 8 refuses to keep its display off at night - blazing out and waking us up. It's so bad that we just unplug it before bedtime, now. (You can tell it "Display Off" and that will work, but only until it randomly decides to turn it back on, or until you speak to it again (say to change station/playlist for music on a sleep timer)- then you have to tell it to turn the damn display off again! We mostly use it for a voice-controlled radio or Prime music player, but it can't even do that half as well as the Dot - it drops streams, plays the wrong thing, etc.

In fact, the Echo Show 8, which I'd really love to love (or at least, like) was the last straw - I'm tired of getting burned for that much money for a poorly performing device, so I'm never again buying Amazon devices, and I'm cutting Amazon out of the home automation platform (and keeping Apple and Google out) in favor of devices and solutions that do not rely on the cloud in any way.

BTW, why can't Amazon make the music playing capabilities of the Fire and Echo devices know about one another? e.g., Why can't I play the same, sync'ed music on both Echoes and a FireTV simultaneously? And why does Alexa still act like a really stupid AI, when people have been asking reasonable questions that it should pick up on for years now? Frustrating as hell...

Yes, I have noticed my TV slowing and I'm likely going to go back to my Roku for it now that the kids are old enough and don't need to use Alexa to do everything.

On the performance note: they do care about performance, but like Apple, are tailoring their software updates toward the latest and greatest available hardware, not what you bought years ago. Is planned obsolescence at the heart of their decision making? Probably not, but it's a definite side benefit I'm positive.

I severely dislike Amazon and try to avoid supporting them, but, I do have the original echo with the video screen and it's better now than when I bought it.

At some point they even added the ability to control my Phillips Hue lights, whereas when I bought it, it didn't have whatever smart hub capabilities were needed for this to work and I was told I needed to upgrade to a newer device.

Instead over time they also found a way to bring the feature to me, which I appreciate.

Yes, my Amazon Fire is basically unusable after 5 years in now, takes 10's of seconds to load anything.

I bought the second generation Fire TV around January 2020 and at the time it was decent. Last year when the UI update came it became very laggy. It would take ten seconds or more to play a movie in Netflix, when on a PC it would load instantly. It became worse gradually until I gave up.

Yep, my fire cube was great when I bought it. Six months in, it's a piece of garbage and all my videos lag. I'm going to dig up my rokus again. I only switched to Fire Cube because I could install random APKs like stremio but this performance aint worth it.

No. I never connected my kindle to wifi. It works exactly the way it worked on day 1.

Genuine follow-up question, do you read many Amazon-bought kindle ebooks on your kindle? If so, how do you load them to your reader? Do you download them somehow and then use Calibre?

Asking because in my case, something like 95% of the ebooks I read are bought in the Kindle Store, and then downloaded OTA to the reader.

Not OP but same usage.

I either buy the books directly or use Libgen and then, yes, Calibre them over to the Kindle.

Every Firestick I've ever owned has become glacially slow over time and I decided that any Amazon device I purchased would not connect to the internet where possible.

I do the same thing. And since I never connect my kindle to wifi, I don’t even see ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com