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David asked: “Wondering if you guys have figured out a common problem with Alexa. The remote stopped working about a year after I bought it. Now I’m on my second one. According to the Internet it’s a common problem that no one has a solution for.”
David, you’re right, this does seem to be a common problem.
So far we’ve only seen two solutions that seem to work for people.
Unfortunately, the big one is the big dreaded one: reset your Fire TV to factory settings. Obviously, no one likes to do this, it’s pain to get all your settings back to where they are, so you may want to make this the last resort.
Luckily there’s another, less destructive, option to try first. You can download Amazon’s remote app and use it to navigate the Fire TV’s menu to unpair the Alexa remote, and then pair it again.
This seems to solve the issue for a lot of people, so if you’re lucky it may be fix it for you too without having to restore your device to factory settings, or to wait for another remote.
If you think about it, you may have done just this when your second remote arrived, and that may be the reasons it’s worked this long, so it’s possible that this is all you have to do when it happens to make the issue go away.