Your DualSense buttons are scrambled on Fire TV. It isn't your controller.

A short write-up on a Fire OS bug that breaks Remote Play controllers, and what actually fixes it.

You pair a DualSense to a Fire TV Stick, open a Remote Play app, and the buttons are all over the place. L1 and R1 behave like the triggers. The Options and Create buttons do nothing at all. Half the games are unplayable and it feels like the controller is broken.

It isn't. Your DualSense is fine. This is a bug in Fire OS, and once you know what's happening it makes a lot more sense.

What's actually going on

Android decides what each gamepad button means using a "key layout" file that ships with the system. For the DualSense (it shows up as vendor 054c, product 0ce6), the file Amazon ships on recent Fire OS builds maps the buttons to the wrong Android key codes. The shoulder buttons land where the triggers should be, the trigger axes end up on the wrong analog channels, and Create/Options get dropped.

Any Remote Play client that just forwards whatever Android hands it inherits that scramble. There's nothing the app can do about it unless it goes out of its way to undo the mapping. The original Chiaki was archived back in 2021 and never touched it. chiaki-ng, the actively-maintained fork, is built around desktop and the Steam Deck, where this particular bug doesn't exist. So on Fire TV, it just never got fixed.

The fix

akichi watches for a DualSense on a Fire OS device and rewrites the input back to what it should be before it ever reaches your PS5. L1 is L1, the triggers go back to being analog triggers, and Create/Options work again. It's turned on by default on Fire TV and it's a no-op everywhere else, so there's nothing to set up. Plug in the controller and it just works.

akichi is a free, open-source Remote Play client built specifically for Fire TV and Android TV. Besides the controller fix it handles the things a TV remote needs: you navigate the whole app with the D-pad, consoles show up on their own when they're on the same network, and you sign in to PSN with one button instead of hunting down an account ID.

Not affiliated with Sony. If you want the technical side, there's a write-up of the Fire OS keylayout bug and how it's corrected, and the code is on GitHub.