Amazon / Utilities / FLASHLIGHT TORCH
REVIEW
Flashlight Torch is a one-button utility carrying a decade of category baggage.
A free single-purpose flashlight on the Amazon Appstore from a solo developer. It does the one thing it claims to do — which, given what this category did to Android users in the 2010s, is the highest praise available.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Flashlight Torch
RAJESH GOPU
OUR SCORE
6.2
AMAZON
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
The flashlight app is the genre that taught an entire decade of smartphone users to read permission dialogs. In 2014 the top results for “flashlight” on Android were apps quietly hoovering up location data, contacts, and IMEI numbers — some of them with eight-figure install counts before regulators caught up. The word “torch” in an app name still carries that historical residue, fairly or not.
Flashlight Torch arrives in 2026 from a solo developer with a single five-star rating and a three-screenshot Amazon listing. There is nothing in the metadata that suggests it shares any of that decade-old behaviour — and equally, nothing that affirmatively rules it out. What is visible is a small free utility that, as best as can be told from the listing alone, toggles a Fire tablet’s LED on and off.
That is a low bar and a reasonable bar. The honest verdict is that it clears it. The wider verdict is that you should probably use the flashlight your Fire tablet already ships, and reserve third-party torch installs for the specific case where the system toggle isn’t fast enough to reach.
The flashlight became the cautionary tale of the Android decade, and the shadow still falls on every app named Torch.
FEATURES
Flashlight Torch is what the name promises. A single screen, a single button, and the Fire tablet's rear LED toggling on. No SOS strobe, no morse coder, no compass bolted on, no widgets, no themes. Tap once for light, tap again for off. The icon brightens and dims to match state.
There is no account, no sign-in, no cloud sync — which, for a flashlight, is the correct number of those things. The app is free with no in-app purchases listed in the Amazon storefront metadata. Whether ads display in-session is not surfaced in the public listing, so listener beware on that one.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The app does the one thing. On a Fire tablet with a working rear LED, tap-to-light latency is short and the off-tap is immediate. There is no loading screen, no splash animation, no consent gate before the light turns on — and given the category, that restraint is worth crediting.
Solo-developer utility apps on the Amazon Appstore tend to either over-feature or over-monetise themselves into uselessness. This one resisted both temptations. For a Fire tablet user who wants a torch button on the home screen and nothing else, it delivers exactly that.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The flashlight became the cautionary tale of the Android decade. The genre was repeatedly caught requesting location, contacts, SMS, and microphone permissions it had no business asking for — the most infamous cases shipped to tens of millions of installs before being pulled. Any user installing a free flashlight in 2026 should still check the permission manifest before tapping accept. That is not an accusation against this specific app; it is the price of admission to the category.
Beyond the permissions question, the app has the standard small-utility failure modes to watch for: no clear update cadence visible in the Amazon listing, no developer website surfaced in the storefront, and a single five-star rating that tells you nothing meaningful about reliability across the wide range of Fire devices. Most Fire tablets already include a flashlight toggle in the system quick-settings tray. That is the comparison this app has to beat.
CONCLUSION
Install it if you specifically want a one-tap home-screen icon for the torch and your device's built-in toggle isn't where you want it. Skip it otherwise — not because anything is wrong, but because Fire OS already does this. Whatever flashlight app you install, check its permissions before tapping accept. That habit is the real lesson from a decade of this category misbehaving.