making a kindle fire gen 5 into an “ereader”

ereader is in quotes because it won’t be an ereader truly ever as it doesn’t have the paper ink screen and stuff 

yeah I found my moms old kindle fire!! It is a gen 5 kindle fire that runs android 5! 

So here’s how I did it 

1. Plug into computer 

2. Get told by strangers online that it is impossible to do with this device (lol fuck you I did it anyway) 

4. Root the device using the kindle fire super tool software 

5. Debloat and replace Amazon stock apps with android/google apps 

6. Realize it can’t run the Google play store so you need to get rid of it somehow and panic 

7. Download aurora instead (another play store) 

8. Sideload reading apps by downloading APKs to the computer then putting them into the device 

9. Change the wallpaper and the icons of the apps to resemble a kindle using adobe photoshop so that the wallpaper is high quality and not grainy 

10. Download media! (You can also optionally get a video player if you wanna use it as a multipurpose device) 

now this is a very rough outline of what I’ve been doing for the past couple hours (when I say a couple I actually mean 6 hours) 

Some things I ran into: 

1. Good reads app won’t install 

2. Can’t change the boot animation to match the studio ghibli theme im going for 

     I spent the most time trying to do this. Every source I’ve read says to locate the system and then media folder and there will be a “bootanimation.zip” which has to be replaced with an identically formatted file 

     I tried everything to get to this location in my kindle including root file browsers, using the command prompt on super tools to try to open the folder, using a 3rd party app called Super Boot Animations (which I totally didn’t pirate!!), and even installing the Android Programming thingy on my computer 

   Soooooo I gave up after a while because it didn’t feel worth it to me, instead I disabled the Lock Screen and I’m just gonna try to ignore the ugly boot animation of the kindle fire 

3. Amazon keyboard is ugly, tried to make a custom black and white keyboard, every keyboard customization app is super ugly too 

    I couldn’t find any of these apps that work on my version 5.1.0 which are unlocked and I didn’t feel like spending money so that sucks 

  I’ll probably figure out a way to put in one later 

Good things I ran into; 

1. Super easy to use the super tool to do whatever you need just tedious and time consuming 

2. There is a feature where you can customize almost everything like seriously this thing is a blank canvas 

3. SO MANY APPS THAT DO SO MUCH AHHHH YES 

4. no. More. Ads. 

5. You can customize the sounds of your device to make it do different stuff when you press the buttons or put it on the charger it’s so satisfying