Old kindle fire updating experiments.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Since I got a new tablet (Galaxy Tab A), I've been playing around with trying out various versions of Android on my 1st gen Kindle Fire.

After many semi-failed attempts I got Android 4.4.4 working pretty well this evening.
First attempts got Android working but not the google play store so couldn't update apps.

None of the instructions I found worked on their own, had to use a combination of utilities and bits of different instructions.
Hardest part was getting the new bootloader and recovery programs into the firmware, and even then I could never get the power switch to bring them up, so had to resort to some programs on the PC to tell the kindle to reboot in recovery mode.

Once I figured that out it was just a matter of installing CyanogenMod otter files, and gapps files.  Finding the latest gapps files should have been much easier than it was. 

First attempts I didn't clear out all the old data, so all the apps I had on the Kindle were still there and worked, but the play store wouldn't work.  Last attempt I wiped the system and data areas clean and everything worked, but I had to reinstall every app.  The Kindle and Amazon Video apps for Android work fine so there's nothing really lost by dumping the Amazon Fire OS, unless you get all your apps from Amazon instead of Google that is....

I doubt I'll use it now that I have the Samsung tablet, but it was an interesting experiment, not sure if it's any more responsive, maybe a little, battery life is supposed to be better but it's old so I doubt I'd notice an improvement even if I was using it a lot.