This guide will take you step by step through the process of customizing the Home screen on your Amazon Fire tablet.
Somewhat surprisingly, there are quite a few ways you can customize the Fire. Here are a few –
Remove the “New Items” Section
Remove All of the Recommendations
Change the Wallpaper
Group the Apps
Remove the Search Bar
Group Notifications Together
Hide Specific Content
Make the Font Larger or Smaller
Additional Amazon Fire Tweaks
Remove the “New Items” Section
- If you’d prefer to have your main home screen a bit less cluttered, you can remove the New Items section entirely.
- Tap the Settings icon.
- Select Apps & Notifications
- Select Amazon App Settings
- Select Home Screens
- Switch the toggle next to Show New Items on the Home Page to OFF
- Now the main Home screen only has your App icon shortcuts.
Remove All of the Recommendations
- On the For You Home screen there are sections full of things Amazon thinks you might be interested in. Most of the time they feel a lot more like ads for stuff you don’t want to buy. Fortunately, you can remove them. Start by tapping the Settings icon.
- Select Apps & Notifications
- Select Amazon App Settings
- Select Home Screens
- Switch the toggle next to Recommendations to OFF
- Now return to your For You Home screen and check – a bunch of the sections have been removed and the screen is a bit less cluttered and more useful.
Change the Wallpaper
- Tap the Settings icon.
- Select Display from the list of Settings.
- Select Wallpaper
- Select the Wallpapers item.
- If you’ve saved a photo on your Amazon Fire that you’d like to use as the home screen background image/wallpaper, tap the Pick image icon and select that picture.
- Otherwise you can choose one of the included wallpapers – swipe from right to left to view them all. Select the wallpaper you want to use by tapping on it once and then the Set button.
Group the Apps
- Out of the box, before you even install any of your own Apps – the Amazon Fire has a pretty cluttered home screen/desktop. Here’s a quick way to organize it and tidy it up at the same time.
- You can group Apps into their own little box by dragging and dropping one of them onto another. Tap and hold one of the App icons, then drag-and-drop it onto another App icon.
- As soon as you let go, a window will appear asking you to give this new App ‘collection’ a name. You can name it anything you want, but something descriptive will be helpful.
- Continue to drag-and-drop other App icons into this newly created collection.
- Create different collections for different App types and before you know it your Amazon Fire home screen will be a lot less cluttered.
Remove the Search Bar
Note: several readers have mentioned that they don’t see the option to remove the Search Bar. The cost of the Amazon Fire is often discounted slightly on the condition that some features can’t be disabled – this is one of them. If the option to remove search isn’t available to you, it’s for this reason.
- I’m not sure about you but I’ve never grabbed my Amazon Fire and tried to search for something using that search bar on the Lock Screen. Here’s how to disable it:
- Tap the Settings icon.
- Scroll down and select Device Options
- Select Search Bar
- Toggle the Display search bar on lock screen setting to OFF
- That’s it. The search bar will now be gone from the Lock Screen.
Group Notifications Together
- You can keep the notification bar a bit more tidy by grouping all of the notifications into one. Here’s how –
- Tap the Settings icon.
- Select Apps & Notifications
- In the NOTIFICATIONS section locate the Collapse notifications item and switch the toggle to ON
- Now when there’s more than one pending notification they’ll group themselves into one.
Hide Specific Content
- Some of the items on the various home screens can be ‘hidden’. For example, if you tap one of the books in your Library and hold your finger down, a small menu will appear. Select Remove from Home and the book will be removed from the home screen. It hasn’t been deleted from your device, it just won’t show up on your home screen.
- The same holds true for the apps listed in the Recent Apps section. If you tap one of the icons and hold your finger down, a similar menu will appear. Select Remove from Home and the icon for that app will disappear. Again, the app itself hasn’t been deleted, it’s just not listed in the Recent Apps section.
- Try this with the other items on the various home screens. Some can be hidden, some can’t.
Make the Font Larger or Smaller
- You can increase or decrease the size of the font for most of the text on the Amazon Fire home screens. To do so, start by tapping the Settings icon.
- Select Accessibility
- Select Font size
- Use the slider at the bottom of the window to either increase or decrease the size of the font. The text on the screen will increase or decrease as you make the change to help you decide which setting is the right one for you.
- When you return to your Home screens you’ll find most of the text has resized based on your preference.
Additional Amazon Fire Tweaks
– Add the Weather to the Amazon Fire Status Bar
– Change the Default Search Engine on the Amazon Fire
And I already know how to collapse the notifications
Hi can you do how to change the home screen with a luncher
Hate losing BOOKS tab…. I see no advantage to the update….
Thanks for this. Just needed to know how to clean out the junk off the desktop.
Like others I wondered where the options at the top had gone. I thought my 4 year old son had done something. It now reads like it was a system update. Since this has happened it doesn’t appear to be functioning as it once did. It has made things more complicated!
Amazon “consolidating” the Tabs into only 3: For You – Home – Library is a poor development team decision. I JUST set my HD 8 10th Gen up last night. Had all the features and updated this morning automatically and now all my tabs are gone. Had only hours experiencing the Amazon Tablet experience. Now it performs like an entry-level stock android tablet. Makes me want to return it. One Amazon Dev team member does not speak for hundreds of thousands of users.
The tabs issue is now a feature – the “Games & Apps”, “Books” and “Video” tabs have all been consolidated into one “Library”. The change was made in Fire OS version 7.3.1.7. It’s here to stay… :(
(I’ll be updating the screenshots in this guide tomorrow)
have you found a solution?
If you get a chance could you go to:
Settings > Device Options > System updates
and let me know which version of Fire OS you’re using? It should be something like “Fire OS 7.3.1.7”
Thanks!
My Kindle did the same thing! Annoying, I can’t figure out how to get the tabs back. Did anyone do a factory reset? If so, did the tabs come back & stay? Thanks
Fully updated & like others no option to remove search bar. Grrr.
This is a replacement of an original KF for elderly relative & the less options the better. This bar is going to be a pain, hope fix comes soon…
Mine also is missing. I can’t figure out how to get it back.
Mine did the same thing! Searching for a solution also.
Thank you for the information! While we were sleeping our kindle 10 updates. Now there are only 3 options under the search bar (for you, home, and library). There’s also a new small icon at the bottom left to connect devices. The help at Amazon said to do a hard restart. Is there anyway to fix it so we have the options for games and video at the top?
It’s probably a glitch they’ll have to fix with an update.
Just bought a Kindle Fire 10 and can’t find how to remove the search bar… i think that option has been removed, sadly
Anyway to increase the icon size on Fire 8″ so it looks like Fire 7″? Anyway to get them to scroll horizontally instead of vertically?
Honestly the easiest way is probably to just restart your device…
I have a new Fire 10 Tablet. I was playing a casino game and the screen got enlarged to cover the entire screen. How do I either reduce the screen size or get back to the home screen?
Whatever settings I try, I can’t get my new magazines onto my home screen automatically. They are stuck in newsstand until I manually move them. Any help would be appreciated.
On my new kindle fire 10, I am missing some of the top tabs. It only shows: FOR YOU, HOME, LIBRARY. What happened to the others I.E., VIDEO, GAMES & APPS, SHOP, MUSIC, AUDIBLE, etc. The only thing I have done to this Kindle is slightly enlarging the font for easier reading for my husband. Any ideas?
My Fire tablet doesn’t have the option to hide the search bar.
Thanks, this guide is pretty useful. However something funny happens on my Fire HD 8 (2020 new model), I don’t have the item “Search bar” under the “Device Options” settings. Any idea as to why that could be happening?
How do you remove a Sample book from the Fire tablet?
Great tips! How can I change the HOME screen (Lock Screen) not the wallpaper? having tons of trouble. It won’t recognize Amazon Photos, even though I signed in and uploaded the photo I want. It just says “Loading Collections” but never does anything. ?
I’m going to guess you’re using Twitter via the web (ie. through a browser like Silk). If you use the actual Twitter app via the Amazon App Store, the font size adheres to the Kindle Fire settings. I tried out Twitter via Silk and the font was really small. The font settings within Twitter helped a bit, but even at its largest it’s still pretty small. My suggestion is to download the Twitter app from the App Store. Of course it’s free etc…
I’m charging my Fire now, I’ll reinstall Twitter and take a look.
Cannot resize Twitter font size either by adjusting Twitter settings or Kindle Fire settings. Twitter print is tiny and won’t adjust like other apps do after adjusting. Seems that font size for Twitter is the same size as Notification font size. Any ideas?
Glad to have found this. Trying to arrange pdf books under the Books tab on Kindle Fire 7 so that all books show in my Library regardless of file type.
Can see any book regardless of file type on my iphone Kindle app but not on Fire itself–requires I open Docs and I can’t organize books. Any ideas?