There’s a good reason to keep your old Amazon Fire TV sticks

The Fire TV Stick is Amazon’s main footprint in the streaming device market. The devices maintain a healthy presence alongside Roku and Apple TV, although much of their resistance lies in its primary smart TV operating system, the user-friendly Android-based Fire OS. Recently, Amazon has started rolling out newer versions of Fire Sticks and players with a new operating system, and because these new players don’t have some features of the old ones, your old Fire TV Stick may be more valuable than it once was.

The most recent iterations of Amazon Fire TV Sticks and Players, rather than running Fire OS, use the new Vega operating system. On the surface, these two operating systems are identical; if you only look at their respective home screens you may not be able to tell the difference, and for streaming and general use the differences are inconsequential. However, much of what made Fire Sticks so popular was the customization of the old Android-based operating system, and if that disappears with the advent of Vega OS, the remaining Android-based Fire Sticks could become highly sought after. This is something you’ll want to think about before purchasing your next Fire Stick.

The original Fire operating system found on Fire TV Stick devices is based on Android, which means it is designed to use Android APKs to load and run apps. A side benefit is that, thanks to the way Android devices work, apps from outside of Amazon’s official app store can be added to a Fire Stick running Fire OS, a process that Amazon doesn’t really like and is commonly referred to as “sideloading.” Sideloading is a popular feature in homebrew communities because it allows developers to create custom apps for specific purposes, such as playing locally stored media or accessing services otherwise unavailable in their country, and users to easily add these apps to their devices without requiring invasive processes like jailbreaking.

Unfortunately, the new Fire Stick operating system, Vega OS, is based on Linux rather than Android. This poses two problems: First, all Android-based apps designed for Fire OS no longer work and need to be rebuilt to work on Linux. Second, and perhaps more pressing, Vega OS doesn’t support sideloading, which means all those homebrew apps are out of reach. To be fair to Amazon, this move to a Linux OS was driven by bad actors using sideloading to add illegal or malicious software to Fire Sticks, so switching OS to avoid this is a pretty understandable move.

Still, if Amazon completely removes Fire OS Fire Sticks, any devices that still run it will become very valuable, whether you want to continue downloading apps yourself or know someone who does might be willing to buy it from you. Either way, if you own an older model Fire Stick, even if you don’t actively use it, you might want to keep it somewhere safe.