The home button on your Amazon Fire TV Stick remote hides a useful feature in plain sight

We live in an age of consumer technology that favors cosmetic minimalism (generally speaking), which is part of the reason why remote controls continue to have fewer and fewer real buttons. Fortunately, brands like Amazon took this into account when designing its Fire TV Stick, one of the top 12 streaming devices on the market. If you own one of these gadgets, Amazon has hidden an entire section of its user interface behind a single button: just press and hold to unearth it.

We’re referring to the Quick Settings menu, which you can bring up by pressing and holding the Home button on your Fire TV remote. After a few seconds, the Quick Settings interface should load at the top of your current screen and automatically pause the movie or show you’re currently streaming. Menu options include the ability to move between user profiles, open downloaded apps, access device settings, use a sleep timer, and much more.

This is definitely one of the most useful Fire TV Stick remote shortcuts, especially if you’re the type of person who likes to change picture settings to best support the media you’re watching. For those people, you can hold down the Up and Rewind buttons at the same time to manually select a resolution.

Hidden menus and hidden controls are commonplace when it comes to most streaming devices and smart TVs these days. For example, there are a handful of secret menus built into the Roku operating system (accessible once Developer Mode is enabled), as well as a set of hidden features built into the Apple TV. The latter even has hidden button controls for its Siri Remote, like the ability to quickly switch between apps by double-tapping the TV/Control Center button.

Depending on the device, access to shortcuts may be well documented by the manufacturer or require further analysis, such as with Roku’s Developer Mode. No matter who has access and why, these hidden command centers can make adjusting settings simpler and more convenient. That said, if you do end up investing in a universal remote, you need to make sure it’s a model that you can program unique commands into; otherwise, you may no longer access Amazon’s quick settings interface.