Playing with Fire Mod Brings Android TV Apps and UI to Amazon Fire TV

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The Amazon Fire TV is a really solid streaming box if you want something that’ll stream 4K content, have access to a strong selection of apps, offer some decent games to play, and look fairly sleek on your TV stand. Dig a bit deeper into the Fire TV though, and you can do some pretty neat things with this little guy.

We’ve seen previous mods for the Fire TV that allow you to install GApps onto it, and while that’s great if that’s all you want to do, XDA Junior Member SimLynks recently created a thread over on the Forum to introduce a new mod that allows you to essentially transform your Amazon Fire TV into an Android TV.

The mod is called, “Playing With Fire”, and it requires root access, the Xposed Framework, Build.prop modifications, changes to the system partition, and (of course) very careful reading of all the instructions that SimLynks has provided. Going through all of these steps will require a bit of time, but seeing as how this mod changes pretty much every single thing about the Fire TV, that’s to be expected — make sure to be very, very careful when following these instructions.

Once you do get everything up and working, you’ll have access to the full Android TV user interface, OpenGApps with almost everything working (Live Channels, USB Tuner, Leanback Launcher, etc.), the ability to install and run apps from both the Google Play Store and Amazon’s App Store, automatic updates for Google Services and from the Play Store, button remapping, and much more.

This mod is not for the faint of heart, but if you’ve got a rooted Fire TV or TV Stick (both version 1 and 2 should work) and a bit of spare time on your hands, this is certainly one of the most interesting developments for the platform that we’ve seen yet.

You can head over to the thread on the XDA Forums via the link below, and while you should’t have any issues as long as you follow everything step-by-step, you can always reach out to the community for assistance should you run into any bugs or issues.