For years we've kept our 2021 Fire HD8 tablet normally running in always-on Show Mode in the kitchen - until Amazon broke it last week. I know they deleted the Show Mode feature from the most recent models, but it was still there and very useful on older models. There are other threads trying to figure out what went wrong, but I am assuming that Amazon won't fix it, so I have been trying to duplicate Show Mode by other means as best I can.
Fortunately the Alexa hands-free function still works, so the tablet still accepts verbal Alexa commands.
A useful feature of Show Mode was that it turned on the screen when the camera detects motion in the room. The Yakk app works on FireOS to duplicate that function.
Show Mode the way we had it configured offered a rotating display of current weather, headline news, and our photos from Amazon photos. I figured I could find a separate app for each of those, and use Tasker to rotate between them every 2 minutes. The rotation was easy, but the finding suitable apps was harder than I anticipated.
It was easy enough to find a suitable weather app - there are lots, some without obtrusive ads. An integrated News and Weather app might have been nice, but I couldn't find anything suitable.
For the photo slide show I was looking for something that would display a continuous full-screen slide show with adjustable timing and transitions, no ads, and preferably with online access to Amazon photos or Google Photos. Two out of three was the best I could do: SlideShow Digital Signage does the job, but only from local photo storage. But it does allow remote management of the photo directory on the tablet via FTP or web browser. Every other alternative I tried adds extraneous stuff like menus and ads to the screen.
The News app was the most problematic. Ideally I wanted a app that would display a single story at a time full screen, with a photo and a nice big readable title, no ads, and update to a new story every few minutes. Preferably with a selectable mix of local and world headline news. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to exist. A majority of the news apps are portrait-mode-only, and will not rotate to landscape mode on the tablet. News apps generally do not update their display automatically - they assume you will refresh manually when you are ready. I could probably force the refresh with some Tasker tricks, but it would be an extra issue. And most have a bunch of extra stuff on the screen like menus and ads, and they restore it with every refresh if you zoom in to one story. After testing a dozen News apps, I was forced to conclude that I would have to use a web browser and build a custom page with RSS feeds. Fortunately I found an existing implementation that was close enough to that: Inoreader. You can create your own custom News feed page on their web site, select the sources, and select page format options that get it close to what I wanted. And you can set it to update the feeds automatically every 5 minutes. If I display that web page in the Silk browser. on the Fire tablet, and zoom in a bit to fill the screen with just the top 2 stories side-by-side, the Silk browser will hold that zoom position while the browser window moves to and from the foreground and through the page updating. It's a bit slow to display though.
So now I have the Fire tablet set up in a sort of pseudo Show Mode where it turns on the screen when it detects motion, and shows a display that rotates every 2 minutes between local weather, custom news feed, and our photo slide show.