Amazon / Utilities / QUICK TORCH
REVIEW
Quick Torch does one thing on a tablet that already has a flashlight.
A two-tap white-screen utility for Fire tablets, free and ad-free, in a category where the operating system already ships an answer.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
There is a specific kind of app that the Amazon Appstore preserves better than any other store on the planet: the small, single-function utility from the mid-2010s that was useful, did its one job, and then never needed to change. Quick Torch is one of those.
The pitch is two sentences long. Tap the icon, the screen goes white at full brightness, and that’s a flashlight. Tap again, it stops. There is no menu, no settings panel, no upsell to a pro tier, no banner ad for a VPN, no permission request to access your contacts. In 2026 that combination is rarer than it should be.
The catch is that Fire OS now does almost the same thing from the swipe-down quick-settings panel on every tablet sold in the last several years. The app’s audience is shrinking with every Fire 7 that gets replaced.
Quick Torch is the kind of single-purpose tool that earned five stars in 2015 and now competes with a swipe-down toggle.
FEATURES
Quick Torch turns the Fire tablet screen white at full brightness. That is the entire app. There is a button, a tap, and the screen becomes a panel of light bright enough to read a paperback by, find a dropped charger behind the couch, or fill in for a missing reading lamp on a hotel nightstand.
Older Fire tablet models without rear cameras — most of the cheaper Fire 7 line through the mid-2010s — never had a hardware LED to drive a true flashlight. Quick Torch sidesteps the missing LED by using the display itself, the way every iPad flashlight app did before Apple shipped one. It works offline, contains no in-app purchases, and the install footprint is negligible.
The app is free, has no ads in the version we tested, and asks for no permissions beyond what a launcher would. The developer, traceit, has not pushed an update in years; the version on the store is the version you get.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The honesty of the scope is the win. Quick Torch does not pretend to be a strobe-light party tool or a Morse code signaller or a colour-temperature lab — three categories of bloat that every "free flashlight" app on every store has historically drifted into. Open it, screen goes white, close it. That restraint is worth something.
For Fire tablets old enough that Amazon's own quick-settings panel does not include a flashlight tile, this is a reasonable thing to keep installed. The icon sits on the home screen and the function is one tap away, which is faster than digging through the settings app to find the brightness slider.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Modern Fire OS quick-settings panels include a brightness shortcut and, on tablets with a camera LED, a flashlight tile. On any device released after roughly 2018 the operating system already does this without an app. Quick Torch is competing with a feature the platform ships for free at the hardware level.
The interface has not been touched in years and looks it — generic system fonts, a flat coloured button, no dark mode, no shortcut from the lock screen or a widget on the home screen. A long-press launcher action or a Fire-tablet widget would make it materially more useful; neither exists. There is also no way to dim the output below maximum brightness, which matters at 3am when the goal is a glow, not a wall of light.
CONCLUSION
Quick Torch is a small, honest, free utility that was more useful five years ago than it is now. If you own an older Fire tablet without a built-in flashlight tile, install it and forget about it. If you own a current Fire HD or Fire Max, the quick-settings panel already covers this — there is no reason to add an app.