Adventures In Rooting: Running Jelly Bean On Last Year's Kindle Fire 41
concealment writes "Luckily, the Fire's low price and popularity relative to other Android tablets has made it a common target for Android's bustling open-source community, which has automated most of the sometimes-messy process of rooting and flashing your tablet. The Kindle Fire Utility boils the whole rooting process down to a couple of steps, and from there it's pretty easy to find pretty-stable Jelly Bean ROMs. A CyanogenMod-based version is actively maintained, but I prefer the older Hashcode ROM, which is very similar to the interface on the Nexus 7."
Re:Making the best of a bad situation (Score:2, Informative)
Personally I went from ICS back to the stock Kindle firmware. Once you root it and add Google services it's not bad. A little unstable, sure, but certainly not an abomination. I downgraded mostly because I like my devices to have a niche, and a 5" phone with JB would overlap a lot with a 7" ICS or JB tablet, leading to one falling into disuse.
The stock Otter launcher is content-oriented rather than app and widget oriented. It works great for movies, books, and documents which is kinda the point of buying a Fire over another Android tablet. You can't get Amazon Prime Video Streaming, or the Kindle Lending Library on stock Android, and going through your entire book/document/movie collection every time you want to resume something is going to be a pain after a while, if that's the primary use for your tablet.
If you want stock Android, go with a Nexus. If you want to consume Amazon content, go with a Fire. There's not much point in buying one and doing tons of hacks to make it behave like the other, unless you change your mind. Personally, I think the Fires have enough advantages to justify their purchase, but that's me.