To root or not to root?
I am digging my Kindle Fire. But it’d be cool to have my Android apps on it, like G reader and gmail. It can be done if you root the Kindle. Anyone done this? And is it worth it?
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
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April 3rd, 2012 at 10:30 am
you can install non-kindle blessed apps by going into settings and enabling installation of 3rd party apps.
you just need to get the APK files for them, which you can do by installing astro file manager on your phone, and archiving the apps you want.
you cant install the android market without rooting it, but if you know what apps you want its easy to just pull them from your phone and emailing the APKs to yourself, and you dont have to deal with the hassle of rooting
April 3rd, 2012 at 10:33 am
Two of my coworkers did it. It turned out awesome. If I had a Fire, I’d do it.
@joey: How is that less of a hassle than rooting your Kindle one time?
April 3rd, 2012 at 10:58 am
I just wish the kindle fire had swype or something similar.
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:12 am
I rooted mine after just two days with the Amazon ROM – couldn’t stand it. I have CM7 on it now and it’s great.
Just do it!
Papa
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:14 am
Boxty,
I have swype on my Kindle and it works fine. IIRC, it was a bit tricky getting the swype installer loaded, but it was standard swype install after that.
Papa
April 3rd, 2012 at 11:17 am
One last comment – while I’m an Amazon Prime member, I’ve never used the video service. I understand that the video service won’t run while rooted, but there’s an app to “un-root” temporarily so video will run.
April 3rd, 2012 at 12:42 pm
Ya’ll know that in Australia “rooted” means “to have had sex with” right? Sorry, I’m bilingual and computer illiterate so the discussion made me chuckle.
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:19 pm
I don’t have a Kindle, but I blew my B&N Nook away the day I got it because their quasi-Android OH SO PWESHUS crippleware made me want to vomit. I put CM7 on it, and will replace it with CM9 as soon as they get it done. Absolutely NO regrets.
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Funny, right-clicking CM9 and selecting “search” brought me this link: http://www.kahr.com/Pistols/Kahr-CM9.asp .
Now if that isn’t synchronicity . . .
April 3rd, 2012 at 2:13 pm
I think I might root mine soon too. It’s very functional with factory ROM, but it just doesn’t have all the features that it should.
April 3rd, 2012 at 9:58 pm
I’v rooted it the fire before for my bother in law – he put swype on it, i never asked how it worked out because i didn’t care.
I’m a tech guy and did not have any major issues rooting (had to be running as admin on my computer though).
some of the instructions did not work (command line ones), so i had to figure out some new ones.
also i have sorta written apps for the android (never finished) so i had a good base of the android command line tools and what the meant.
April 4th, 2012 at 7:12 am
There is a substitute app for Android Market. It was quite easy to find via a search engine. I loaded this onto my wife’s Kindle Fire so now she has her Kindle, Nook, Palm eReader and FBReader all on one device. I don’t believe this required root access.
April 4th, 2012 at 9:29 am
I’d do it for access to the market, whatever Google’s calling it these days. The google gmail client is significantly better than the one amazon supplies, and you’ll only get that from the big G directly. Of course, I’m running CM9 on my nook color, so my perspective is a little skewed.
Not sure how much more difficult a proposition this is on a fire; it’s dead simple on the NC, but was more involved on my Droid and Atrix phones. Wasn’t any harder than assembling an AR lower, though.
April 4th, 2012 at 4:00 pm
Keep in mind that as long as you can find and keep a copy of the stock ROM you can always flash it back if you need warranty service, which basically means no down side. A couple of Verizon techs basically told me that while most Android devices have a couple of software tricks that allow detection of previous rooting, they basically hardly ever check it, esp if it’s just simple HW failure. Presumably Amazon is the same.
Also, Nook SD card root FTW.