I've got a kids kindle fire with their free time service for my 6 year old and couldn't agree more. The software and ui are terrible. Worse in some cases than their older fire devices. My son was trying to install a couple of apps yesterday and the progress bar got to 100% and then stalled. The little X on the icons to cancel the process didn't work and a reboot didn't help. The apps weren't in the list of installed apps or anywhere else. I ended up having to block them from his profile and then unblock them before they would reset in the UI. Then we downloaded them one at a time which seemed to work. I spent a good 20 minutes trying to find a way to do this. This is just one small example of the frustrations we've had with the device and all of them stem from the poor user experience and confusing choices they've made.

I'm also not impressed with the fire sticks. I don't own any myself but a friend bought four on a whim. He's called me at least a dozen times asking for help with figuring out why they've mysteriously stopped working. It's usually just that the wifi has dropped which happens all the time. Other times it's because his DSL from AT&T is terrible and has reset while he was streaming something and then the device is apparently locked out of any Amazon content most likely due to copyright protection restrictions but the error is just "Video player error this content is currently unavailable." If he swaps devices he can pick up where he left off but that one device is locked out of everything from Amazon for an unknown amount of time while other apps work perfectly.

I like AWS but most of their hardware and other software is terrible.