Can't find YouTube on your Fire TV stick? Blame Google-Amazon rivalry

In the world of consumer technology, apps play an important role and decide the rise or demise of a particular platform. Google’s YouTube is currently the biggest source of video content on the web and every platform provides an app to access it — except for Amazon, whose Fire TV stick and Echo Show tablets are currently witnessing the withdrawal of the app.

The removal of the app is Google’s way of retaliating to Amazon’s refusal of selling Google’s products and services on their e-commerce platform. Google had been in talks with Amazon for reaching an agreement on selling their products on their marketplace while Google would make available Amazon’s content on their devices such as Chromecast and others. Google had also been looking forward to providing their apps on Amazon’s Fire TV platform. However, neither party could reach a conclusion, leading to the Search giant pulling off the support for YouTube from Amazon’s latest range of Echo smart devices.

In an interview to The Verge, YouTube said, “We’ve been trying to reach an agreement with Amazon to give consumers access to each other’s products and services. But Amazon doesn’t carry Google products like Chromecast, and Google Home doesn’t make Prime Video available for Google Cast users, and last month stopped selling some of Nest’s latest products. Given this lack of reciprocity, we are no longer supporting YouTube on Echo Show and FireTV. We hope we can reach an agreement to resolve these issues soon.”

Currently, Fire TV owners can access the website version of YouTube from browsers such as Firefox and Silk. Another way to keep using YouTube is to prevent updating the firmware so as to keep the app working.