It has responded, not by improving the basic Fire launcher as one would hope, but by trying to block people from changing it. It seems Amazon has finally taken notice of how dissatisfied people are with the default launcher. It doesn’t support widgets, or even have a separate app drawer of its own. The default Fire launcher is great if all you want to do is browse the various books, movies, music, and apps available to you through the store-but its usefulness for organizing and finding applications you install is distinctly second-rate. But it’s also easy to see why one would want to install a new launcher. The Google Play utilities are so much better than anything else (with the possible exception of the Fire’s Silk browser, which is really pretty good) that the reason to install them is obvious. Apparently the first thing many people do on getting a Fire is immediately figure out how to make it less Fire-like. Those posts are the ones explaining how to tweak Amazon’s inexpensive Fire tablets to work more like plain-vanilla Android tablets- adding the Google Play utilities and changing the launcher away from the Amazon-content-plugging default. On the WordPress control panel’s statistics display, a few particular TeleRead posts are, without fail, listed among the top-five most-visited day in and day out.
