Amazon is rolling out new software for the Kindle Fire which brings Book Extras, sharing of passages, improved Personal Document features and other updates to the 7 inch tablet. Unfortunately if you receive the update on a rooted Kindle Fire it will remove root access.

The good news is it’s relatively easy to root a Kindle Fire running software version 6.3.

Rooting an Android device allows you to access protected files and settings and make changes to the way the operating system works. This is a pretty nice feature to have on most Android phones and tablets, but it’s even more significant on a device like the Kindle Fire which runs a heavily modified version of Android.

For instance, the Kindle Fire can download and run tens of thousands of apps available from the Amazon Appstore. But if you want to be able to access the hundreds of thousands of apps available from the official Google Play Store, you need to root your tablet.

Update: The instructions mentioned below let you root a Kindle Fire manually. If you’re looking for a simpler process, you can follow our guide for using the latest version of Kindle Fire Utility.

But before that works, you may need to configure your computer to use the Android Debug Bridge (adb) and recognize the Kindle Fire. If you’re using Windows, you can follow the instructions from the “Install ADB” section of our original guide for rooting the Kindle Fire.

Once you’ve done that, you should be able to take a Kindle Fire with software version 6.3, boot into fastboot mode, push the TWRP 2.0 custom recovery tool to the tablet, push the su app to the tablet to enable root access, and then install the SuperUser app in Android in order to allow apps to use root privileges.

When following the instructions at xda-developers, note that all of the commands that start with “adb” or “fastboot” need to be typed into a terminal/command prompt window.

So you would download the three required files listed in the post (fbmode.zip, twrp2, and su) and unzip them to a folder on your computer. Then if you’re using a Windows PC you can type “cmd” into the start menu to open a command prompt, navigate to that folder, connect your Kindle Fire to a PC with a USB cable, and run those commands in order.

Update: A new version of Kindle Fire Utility is also in the works. It should make the process of rooting a Kindle Fire running software version 6.3 much simpler.

Share this article: Share this: Facebook

Twitter

Reddit

Pocket

Tumblr

Pinterest

LinkedIn

Email

