FireStarter is a great way to easily access sideloaded apps like Kodi. Its killer feature is being able to accurately detect when you press or double-press the Fire TV remote’s Home button, allowing you to do things like launching any app with a double-press of the Home. It achieves this feat by establishing an internal ADB connection with the Fire TV, which allows it to monitor the system log file for Home button presses. Due to changes brought on by Fire OS 5, FireStarter can no longer immediately detect Home button presses. Here is how to temporarily restore FireStarter’s ability to detect Home button presses.

This is a temporary fix because you must perform these steps every time you restart your Fire TV. Big thanks to jocala, creator of a great Fire TV utility called adbFire, for figuring this out. The developer of FireStarter is waiting for the official release of Fire OS 5 on the 1st-gen Fire TV before he tries to figure out if this issue can be permanently fix.

Important: This fix causes ADB connections on your Fire TV to stop working. If you need to make an ADB connection to your Fire TV, like to sideload an app, you need to first force quit FireStarter. When you’re done using ADB, you can follow this guide to restore FireStarter functionality again.

Everytime you turn on your Fire TV, you need to…

Launch FireStarter manually from: Settings > Applications > Manage Installed Applications

Toggle ADB debugging off and then back on.

That’s it. FireStarter should be able to detect single and double Home button presses. It’s not perfect, but should help get you by for the time being. If you notice flickering when launching apps, try changing the “Jump Back Watchdog Time” setting in FireStarter to 0. (The default is 5,000.)

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