If your Fire TV storage is low, Amazon's got your back

Streaming devices don’t particularly come out with a ton of storage with most high-end offerings sporting 16GB. As such, maxing out a device’s storage isn’t a challenge, but Amazon’s got your back in case you start running low on GB’s. Amazon Fire TV has a new Auto Offload feature that will save you space.

How does the Fire TV Auto Offload feature work?

You should be familiar with this concept if you remember the Nextbit Robin. That phone had a feature where it would automatically upload data from apps that you haven’t used in a while to the cloud. Then, it would delete that app data, thus saving you space.

That concept hasn’t taken off in the mobile world, but it’s still a useful feature. Well, Amazon is going to bring its own take on it. Announced on Medium, Amazon has this new Auto Offload feature that will do as the name implies.

There are two steps to this feature. Firstly, if an app hasn’t been used in at least 30 days, then the software will delete that app’s cache. Secondly, if your device dips below 800MB of available space, then the software will delete apps that you haven’t used in 60 days.

This is a neat feature to have because it’s easy to forget about apps that we don’t use in a while. What’s the point of having them on the device if they’re not being used?

Now, if you rediscover your love for that app and want to use it again, the operating system will automatically sign you back into the app so you can pick up where you left off. This is to give the illusion that it wasn’t even deleted in the first place.

There are exceptions

This feature won’t apply to all of the apps on your device. There are some core Fire TV apps that won’t be deleted. As you can imagine, native Fire TV apps won’t be deleted. You can enable/disable this feature from the settings menu. So, if you don’t like it, you won’t need to have it on.

Amazon started rolling this feature out earlier this month, so there’s a chance that you’ll already have it. However, the rollout isn’t going to be complete until early November.