Interestingly, it varies tremendously from device to device. I have an original FireTV box (the one about the size and shape of a CD/DVD drive) that's pretty snappy, although I don't think I've gotten an update on it in a while. I have a much newer FireTV stick which, in theory, should be much faster, but as you describe, it seems to take forever for it to retrieve its info from the AWS servers. It is running a newer version of the FireTV app, though, than the old FireTV. This makes me think that the different versions may well be making different API call into the AWS cloud, and that the older ones were necessarily more streamlined and efficient. That's just a guess though - I could be wrong...<p>My second-gen Echo Dot works solidly, but the Echo Show 8 is a bloody trainwreck, and whoever designed and managed that POS should just be taken out back and shot. The Show 8 refuses to keep its display off at night - blazing out and waking us up. It's so bad that we just unplug it before bedtime, now. (You can tell it "Display Off" and that will work, but only until it randomly decides to turn it back on, or until you speak to it again (say to change station/playlist for music on a sleep timer)- then you have to tell it to turn the damn display off again! We mostly use it for a voice-controlled radio or Prime music player, but it can't even do that half as well as the Dot - it drops streams, plays the wrong thing, etc.<p>In fact, the Echo Show 8, which I'd really love to love (or at least, like) was the last straw - I'm tired of getting burned for that much money for a poorly performing device, so I'm never again buying Amazon devices, and I'm cutting Amazon out of the home automation platform (and keeping Apple and Google out) in favor of devices and solutions that do not rely on the cloud in any way.<p>BTW, why can't Amazon make the music playing capabilities of the Fire and Echo devices know about one another? e.g., Why can't I play the same, sync'ed music on both Echoes and a FireTV simultaneously? And why does Alexa still act like a <i>really</i> stupid AI, when people have been asking reasonable questions that it should pick up on for <i>years</i> now? Frustrating as hell...