Slow dashboard on Amazon Echo Show 8

[scarlet tree]

Hey folks -- I "hacked" one of my Amazon Echo Show 8ths (first gen) based on guides similar to this one: https://www.derekseaman.com/2025/11/home-assistant-hacking-your-echo-show-5-and-8.html. It works, using the HA companion app, but it's so-darn-slow ... I created a dashboard with just 4 buttons. Half the time pushing the buttons does nothing, and you have to hit them again from time to time. It also seems to restart itself (the app / dashboard) every few hours or so. Websites or other actions on the echo show are fast (as expected). Even browsing sites like cnn.com is pretty quick. Any thoughts what may be going on here? Browsing to the HA dashboard via the browser is also incredibly slow and unusable. No such issues on my Linux machine using Firefox or my iPhone. Thoughts?

[stone drift]

Have you tried using the web browser and navigating to your HA IP address and see how it runs without relying on the HA app? (For example, http://10.10.10.2:8123/)
I skimmed over the link you posted. The author mentions Fully Kiosk Browser. That's what I use on my Amazon Fire tablets so I'd suggest giving that a try, too. It is free to use; no advertisements or anything annoying. (There are Pro features that can be enabled which require a license. What's cool, though, is you can turn on Pro features and FKB will let you use them, but it puts a watermark on the screen. This way you can decide if the feature is worth purchasing a license or just not use the Pro feature. I think the only Pro feature I use is the Remote Administration.)
I also might give this a try in the near future because I'm pretty sure I have an Echo Show laying around somewhere.

[meager ocean]

I'm trying to jailbreak my Echo Show 8 gen 1 right now, but it won't update to the latest 6.5.7.0.

I can say that even the native FireOS touchscreen is similarly SLOW. Similar problem with pushing buttons, especially the device info slide-down.

[celest tangle]

I highly recommend using Fully Kiosk to display your HA dashboards, rather than using the companion app - I flashed my Echo Show 8 a few days ago, and it's by no means the smoothest, but performance has been more than adequate for me to toggle lights or switch music

(The clock card here is actually a swipe card hiding a Music Assistant instance, which probably slows down the initial load / refresh of the dashboard, but allows me to still use the device as a streaming music target for Spotify Connect, which was what I used my Echos for the most)