The home screen has a traditional application grid and pages for content types, as opposed to the previous carousel interface.

In March 2016, after the removal was publicized and criticized in the wake of the FBI–Apple encryption dispute, Amazon announced it would restore the feature in a future patch.

[15][16] Based on Android 7.1.2 "Nougat", its main changes and additions include:[17] In early 2019, security exploits for six Fire Tablet models and one Fire TV model[18] were discovered that could allow temporary root access, permanent root access, and bootloader unlocking[a][19][20] due to security vulnerabilities in multiple MediaTek chipsets.

FireOS 8 incorporates changes from Android 10 and Android 11, such as TLS 1.3 support enabled by default, High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) support, Dark mode, One-time permissions, Sharing improvements, Device auto backups (user needs to opt-in to device backups), etc.

[25] Around November 2023, a report surfaced of Amazon's plans to migrate away from Android to a custom Linux-based operating system known as "Vega".