Kindle Fire 7 Android Tweaks
From falz.net
The Kindle Fire 7 is a very reasonably priced device. A++ would recommend LQQk.
It's launcher however is kind of balls and could use the google tools if you're living in that ecosystem. Here lies some notes on how to get it back to be more of a stock-ish android feel without installing a custom ROM.
It seems to be the norm lately to have instructions-as-youtube-videos. This is just the worst, so here lies some text and good old fashioned hyperlinks. To get everything working nicely you will need to do some things that requires many reboots. You will eventually end up with a device with a nice stock launcher, rooted, and maybe even ad blocking if you want.
Rooting
- Enable developer options on your kindle by going to Settings-> Device Options. Click on 'Serial Number' a bunch of times until it shows a new 'Developer Options' item. Choose that, then toggle 'Enable ADB'.
- Get a tool called Root Junky Super Tool. I downloaded "AmazonFire5thGenSuperTool.zip" which was about 153mb at the time of writing (May 2016). It has wrapper scripts to attempt to make it easy for Linux and allegedly OSX and Windows (didn't test).
- Unzip it and cd to the directory.
- My laptop is Linux, so I ran '3-Amazon-Fire-5th-gen-linux-mac.sh' as your standard user (if it needs root it will sudo and ask for password). This tool seems to come with all binaries you require (adb and whatnot). It would be really nice if each item it did were separately documented to ensure it wasn't doing dumb stuff to your machine. Details of that are in the script I suppose. When you run it, you will get something like this:
$ ./3-Amazon-Fire-5th-gen-linux-mac.sh
___ ____ ____ _____ ____ ___ ____ ____ __ ________ _ _
/ _ \/ _ \/ _ \/_ _/_ / / / / / \/ / //_/\ \/ / / __/ _ \/ \/ \
/ , _/ |_| / |_| / / / / // / /_/ / / < \ /_/ /_/ |_| / , , \
/_/|_|\____/\____/ /_/ \___/\____/_/\_/_/\_/ /_/_/___/\____/_/ \/ \_\
[*] RootJunkys
[*] Amazon Fire 5th gen tablet supertool Fire OS 5.1.2
[*] Linux / OSX Version
[*] Remember to chmod +x this script
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Google Play Store 1 5) Nova Launcher Install 5
2) Root Device 2 6) FlashFire App Install 6
3) Block OTA Updates 3 7) Xposed Framework Install 7
4) Remove Lock Screen Ads 4 8) Quit 8
Please enter your choice number:
Change Launcher I like Nova Launcher. You can install it now that you have Google Play enabled. However, as of FireOS 5.1.1 you can no longer change the deafult launcher from the GUI. You have to do it via a root shell.
adb shell
- pm enable com.teslacoilsw.launcher
Package com.teslacoilsw.launcher new state: enabled # pm disable com.amazon.firelauncher Package com.amazon.firelauncher new state: disabled
So we've enabled Nova (com.teslacoilsw.launcher) and disabled Amazon's (com.amazon.firelauncher). This probably works with other launchers too, I only tried with this one.