I’ve heard lots of people talk about the Amazon Fire Phone as a “pretty good phone if you consider the hardware”. And that it is – you can’t look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, HD display, Corning Gorilla Glass 3 (front and back) and say the hardware sucks – it most definitely does not. But everybody, and I mean everybody, will reach that point where Amazon’s proprietary Fire OS will trip them up. It’s simply that much far behind the stock Android experience that it renders itself pretty much as a bad experience. To counter that, the guys at XDA have ported CM11 for the Fire Phone.
Cyanogenmod’s CM11 is an Android 4.4 KitKat-based software that can be installed to specific brands of smartphones and tablets, provided they are supported and the software works. CM11 is pretty close to the stock Android experience, although there are some tweaks in the CM11 software that make it a class above stock Android. The Amazon Fire Phone’s bootloader is locked, that is why there is no easy way of getting Fire OS out of there and putting in stock Android. But XDA people seem to always find ways.
First step is getting a tool called “Safestrap” installed on your Fire Phone – this makes custom ROM installation possible even with the locked bootloader. Then it’s just a matter of downloading the CM11 install files specific to the Amazon Fire Phone and flashing them from Safestrap. From what we’ve heard, everything works, although you will need to find a third party camera app because somehow CM11’s app causes problems.
Remember, all of these requires root access, so get on that first. Then make sure you have a good working backup of all your important apps and data before flashing the ROM, as this process requires a factory reset and there might be danger of you losing data. Are you excited yet? Check out the official XDA thread via source link below.
SOURCE: XDA
NICE NICE NICE
Stock Fire OS has improved since the last update, but this is something I must do #CantHelpMyself
Amazon should do their Fire customers a favor and help get CM officially ported to CM12.1 before they lose even more face on this.
I wish they’d officially support it.. There just isn’t any usable OS for this thing.
Eh a bit bothersome i think, i just installed google store and zen ui, i’m pretty happy with having fire os in the background since the phone is quite fast and fire os’s camera app is decent even tho its simplistic, it does do the job better than say open camera which ive found lacking in many departments.