Kindle Fire HD’s Carousel – removed

Well, this is annoying. Today I finally ‘Factory Reset’ my Kindle Fire HD 10″ (2017).

All works fine, but… there’s now no “Carousel” on the Home tab at all. I’m talking about the “newly arrived items” Carousel, not the “currently opened apps” Carousel.

It appears that Amazon has completely removed the new-items “Carousel” in some recent Android OS update. Adding “Favorites” for Books also appears to be long gone.

So after several hours of trying to fix the problem it seems it can’t be fixed. The Kindle Fire KD is now just another Android tablet. Since no newly delivered / purchased / sent-to-Kindle items can show up on the Home tab. They arrive fine, but they don’t appear on Home.

To find my ‘newly arrived items’, sent through as a test, I had to dig down into the file system via the file reader in either the MReader (.ePubs) or PDF Reader (.PDFs) apps. Or, for purchased and newly re-downloaded books, the Books tab. Hardly ideal.

There seems to be no replacement. The Amazon kindle app store has turned into even more of a wasteland than it was before, if such a thing is possible. Thus nothing useful can be found there under searches such as “launcher”, “new documents”, “recent documents”, “new files”, “carousel” etc.

Nor does a Google Search for android “recent documents” carousel discover anything, amazingly. The same is true of Google Play. Is there really no “show newly arrived / recent documents” .APK which also shows cover thumbnails in a nice carousel?

I then searched intensively for two hours. The lack of even one single valid result suggests that nothing exists. How can such a vital thing be missing from the overcrowded world of Android apps? I guess ‘recent files + carousel + cover thumbnails’ simply can’t be technically done on Android, or else someone would have made a small fortune from such an app.

Still, I guess having no Carousel on the Fire means no Amazon ads on the Home tab either. So maybe that’s a bonus.

Thankfully we don’t have to put up with Android on a 10″ any more, and the Microsoft Surface 3 Intel Atom x7-Z8700 can now be had for around £240 and runs good old Windows. My next 10″ tablet may not be a Kindle.