The Handy Feature You'll Activate If You Hold Your Amazon Fire TV Stick's Home Button
A large part of what makes Amazon's Fire TV such an intuitive smart TV interface is the remote. Most TVs sold these days are smart TVs, and the remotes that ship with them can often be cluttered with buttons, many of which you might never end up using. The Fire TV Stick keeps things simple with a minimalist remote. Whether you have the original Fire TV Stick remote or one of the newer Alexa Voice remotes, the primary way to navigate is using the circular click wheel.
You'll also find other buttons, including power, volume, mute, play/pause, fast forward, and rewind. The remote has a dedicated button to activate Alexa, and the newer Alexa Voice remotes even have preset buttons for apps like Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Music. Apart from this, you have the back, menu, and home buttons. These buttons are pretty standard and do what you'd expect them to, but the home button has another trick up its sleeve that you might not be aware of.
The Fire TV Stick's home button can open quick settings
The home button on the Fire TV Stick remote can bring up a hidden quick settings menu that doesn't appear anywhere else in the interface. To access it, all you have to do is press and hold the home button. Your TV will display a horizontal menu that displays five tiles: Profiles, Apps, Sleep, Mirroring, and Settings. The time and date are also displayed at the top. Cycle between the options and press the middle button on the remote to select one.
Once you know how to bring up quick settings, it's easy to bring up shortcuts like user profiles and settings from anywhere in the Fire TV interface. The shortcut appears even when you're inside an app, and if you open quick settings while watching a video, it will automatically pause playback until you exit the menu.
If you have a smart Fire TV, pressing and holding the home button might display different options that appear vertically stacked on the right-hand side of the screen. In this menu, the options displayed are Channel Guide, Inputs, Apps, Sleep Timer, Picture, and Sound.