With the advent of bootloader unlocking and kernel menus, getting a new Fire TV rooted and running the latest pre-rooted software is more complicated than ever. That’s why I’ve created my new Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick rooting starters guide at AFTVnews.com/Start. This page will serve as the best place to go to get a new Fire TV setup, rooted, and running the latest ROM. I will continue to keep it updated as Fire TV and Fire TV Stick development evolves.
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Great job as always.
Now, if you could write a guide on which un-needed files to remove after the different process, you would forever be the hero
I’ll try to work that in soon.
Thanks a lot for these and the blog in general. Keeping my FireTV vanilla to see how Amazon continues to handle the platform, but my FireStick due in the mailbox Friday is a whole other story :)
Great walkthrough!
This is great. Reminds me of the Choose Your Own Adventure children’s book series, in a way.
Yeah it kind of does. I enjoyed those books a lot. RIP R.A. Montgomery
I appreciate the work on the starter guide. Personally, I have two Fire TVs on the latest pre-rooted firmware using USB drives as internal storage and one Fire TV Stick which I am allowing to stay updated by Amazon. I have another Stick on order — not sure whether I will leave it alone or block updates and hope for software root.
Thanks for all the great works. One question, do i need to reinstall all my apps after i install the pre-rooted rom?
No, you do not need to reinstall all your apps. Installing the pre-rooted ROM is like installing a system update.
What Bruce said. Your apps and settings will still be there when you’re done.
Is there a way to do this using the FTV Utility App?
Thanks very much for the guides–I never would have been able to successfully root without them. However, I should point out that they were quite confusing, due to having to go back and forth between various guides at various points. At one point I had like four windows open, switching back and forth between sub-guides. It would be great if there was “one guide to rule them all”, that takes you from start to finish.
One other note–the Android SDK download for Mac mentioned in one of the guides (I can’t remember which guide it is, there are so many) is no longer valid. It now points you to download Android Studio. I had to go find the original SDK download–it’s the one that is dated March 21, 2014 (20140321). I eventually found it here: https://dl.google.com/android/adt/22.6.2/adt-bundle-mac-x86_64-20140321.zip
Thanks for the feedback. I opted to do it this way with sub-guides because it’s significantly easier to maintain and keep things updated this way. When I created this starters guide, all of the sub-guides already existed. If I copied them all into one guide then I would have two copies of everything which makes keeping things updated and accurate difficult.
I’ll look into the SDK changes soon.
Fair enough, no worries, thanks for the explanation.
BTW, I found the guide that needs updating. It’s the one that explains how to sideload using a Mac:
http://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-sideload-apps-to-your-amazon-fire-tv-using-a-mac-with-os-x/
Step 1 is no longer valid. The link should probably be changed to the one I mentioned in my previous post (the 20140321 ADT/eclipse bundle zip file).
sorry, I mis-spoke in my reply. The incorrect step is the first instruction in “Step 3 – Setup ADB”.
Awesome stuff, followed your guides closely and no problems at all. Superb job indeed!
I finally unblocked my updates and let my FireTV download the latest software. Not sure if that eliminated my root or not but I don’t care. I never really used the rooting features anyway. I have the latest ES file explorer, Kodi and now am running my apple bluetooth keyboard and things run so much better with the new update.