Skip to main content

CyanogenMod Frees Your Fire Phone From Amazon’s Chains

With a price tag under $200, decent specs, an excess of cameras, and a 4.7″ screen, the Fire Phone has almost everything you could want (even Google Play).  But it’s still tied to Amazon and runs a proprietary version of Android. For those of us who don’t like what Amazon has done to the interface, that can be a turn off.

Fortunately there’s a solution. Liliputing reports that developer ggow has ported hashcode’s Safestrap utility to the Fire Phone.

For those not familiar with Android hacking, Safestrap is a firmware installer and recovery tool that lets you bypass the locked bootloader found on many smartphones. It gives you the ability to load custom firmware by installing them on another part of your device’s internal storage.

That’s good news for me; I really don’t like what Amazon has done with the Fire Phone, and am looking forward to making use of ggow’s next trick. He’s also ported CyanogenMod 11 to run on the Fire Phone.

I’m told it looks like this:

cyanogenmod fire phone 11

CyanogenMod 11 is the latest version of the open-source Android firmware. It’s based on Android 4.4 KitKat, and while it supports most Android apps ggow has noted that with the Fire Phone you’ll need to install Open Camera app and also flash a particular set of Google apps in order to get everything to work right.

He also made it clear that this was a beta release, so it’s not for the faint of heart. But if you want to give it a shot, you can find instructions over at XDA Forums.

Similar Articles


Comments


fjtorres July 14, 2015 um 4:55 pm

The Fire phone is reportedly $139 on eBay.
And it still includes a year of Prime.


Amazon Fire Phone to get Google Play Store and other goodies via CyanogenMod – TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics July 14, 2015 um 8:28 pm

[…] has the details. Related: Amazon Fire phone just $60 today if you subtract $99 Prime Membership credit from $159 sales price. That one’s over for now. But will it be revived tomorrow, Wednesday, as part of […]


„Echtes“ Android für Amazons Fire Phone: Jetzt kannst du Custom ROMs installieren | eBook-Fieber.de July 16, 2015 um 10:42 am

[…] Quelle: The Digital Reader […]


Write a Comment