I got an 8GB Amazon Fire 7 (7th gen) tablet years ago, I figured “It’s only $50! How bad could it be?”
Narrator’s voice: “It was pretty bad”.
Not at first, of course, it was… ok. Based on my searches I almost immediately added the Google libraries to it so I could install the Play store, then some tweaks and add-ons to make the screen slightly more usable. But FireOS. Oh my, so bad. They cram all sorts of Amazon apps on there so I literally only had the space to install 1 or 2 other apps. (I think I only installed Google Opinions and made back my $50 in Google credit).
Since it was almost e-waste, I decided to give it a go and root it, and install LineageOS. WOW what a difference! I wish I did this 5 years ago.
Whenever I try to mod or root something, I often wait until I’m not at risk of losing the advantages of the original device – in this case, there were none. I should have done this out of the box.
It wasn’t easy. I used these pages to help me along:
First, the overall guides. I won’t repeat what’s on these pages, they’re pretty good – sometimes a little too specific to a different tablet, but understand them before you continue:
- Installing LineageOS on a Fire 7 Tablet
- Hacking Amazon Fire 7 (5th and 7th gen) to run TWRP and LineageOS 12.1 (as I had the 7th gen – aka “austin” – I was able to have Lineage 14.1)
Next, the specifics. First, get the boot unlocker (TWRP)
Note – if you click on the link to get the zip file, it will give you a 404! Don’t click this. Scroll down and click the attachment to the post instead. Follow the instructions in this post and in the guides above.
Before continuing though, get the packages you’ll need later:
- XDA Forums – [ROM][unlocked][ford,austin] Lineage-14.1 (this is where to get the image). Download it from the link there. Also…
- Go to Open GApps and pick the right one. I chose ARM – 7.1 – nano, as stock was too big! I could have chosen pico, all I care about is installing the play store. Still.
I put those on a SD card and stuck it into the tablet before continuing. Once TWRP boots, you will want the SD card already mounted. There is a way to mount over USB and push it to the device but I couldn’t figure it out.
Now the hardware. Pry it open and disconnect the battery as described in the links above.
The pins to short out are HARD to find. I used a dental pick to get the VDD connector. Push the pick in (make sure you’re also touching the shield with it), run the script, and plug in the USB. Wait a few seconds. It should find the serial port, and begin. If you get the “Serial protocol mismatch” error, it didn’t work. I moved the pick over by a millimeter (or less) and did it again (in that order: short, script, plug). It seriously took me something like 30 tries to get it the first time. After I did it successfully, I actually did it a few times again, and got it within 2-3 tries.
If you did it, it tells you to remove the short and continue. Once you get to the fastboot stage, plug in the battery again and screw it down. This is the only way I got it to reboot so the fastboot to recognize it, then TWRP will come up!
Once it comes up, you have a nice interface on the tablet. First thing I would do is go into Wipe – Advanced wipe and also add “System”. This removes the OS so you need to add a new one before rebooting!
Hit back, then go into “Install” and go up one level, choose your “external sd” card. You should see the LineageOS and GApps zip files. I did them one at a time. I chose Lineage first, then unchecked “zip signature verification” (because it kept failing when I tried). I did not choose to reboot at this point, as I could do that later. When I proceeded, it did a force overwrite of the existing ROM (maybe I didn’t wipe System??) and came back with a success message.
You can hit back and install the GApps package now. I messed up and didn’t have the nano one ready, so the stock one failed. I shut down the tablet, pulled the card and put both nano and pico versions on there, just in case. To get into TWRP again, hold the down volume button while powering up (I did not know this at first, so I went through the painful short/script/usb sequence a few times). Go back into Install and pick that zip file, it should install for you as well. I think I unchecked “zip verification” for this one too. It worked
Now go back and reboot the device. You’ll see the Lineage splash screen instead of the Fire one, and soon you’ll be at the home screen!
After all this, do you get a fancy usable tablet? Umm… no. Well, it IS usable. It’s extremely slow, but you also have about 4GB of actual space you can share between data and apps. (This was probably more like 750MB for FireOS). And, as slow as it is, it’s still faster than the stock firmware, quite noticeably so. It may be my imagination, but I think the screen looks nicer, maybe the system font hinting is just that much better?
I might just use it for a Home Assistant dashboard or an audiobook player. Or use it to test out simple Android apps on an actual hardware device. At the very least, it’s not e-waste for a year or two at least.
FireOS. Not even once. Tell your friends.
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