[Kindle Fire HDX 7" & 8.9" Q&A, Help & Troubleshoot] stormerider:
So I've had the HDX 8.9" for a while and in general I love it. But there are some things about it that I don't like, and find myself wishing that I'd picked up an iPad Air instead of the HDX. I'm not sure what the current status of things is, but the fact that there's still a sticky post here saying there isn't a good way to recover bricked units doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence. OTOH, maybe the problems I face are resolvable without having to root the unit entirely.

1) Restricted to the Amazon App store. There's a bunch of apps that are just way out of date (Trillian, looking squarely at you...) or not present on the Amazon app store. I've worked around this to some extent by loading up the 1Mobile Market store. This allowed me to get the newer version of Trillian, Chrome, Bluejeans, and such installed. But even apps that work in general have some gaps; for example Chrome works fine as a browser but I can't sign in to sync up my bookmarks and such... it crashes the app when I try to do that. Perhaps there's a better market than 1Mobile that I should be trying instead, since getting Google Play up and running would require a full root to my understanding?

2) Notifications. The notification system on the Kindle sucks. On the iPad I had, which I was using before I got the Kindle, an incoming IM or such would flash a banner across the top of the screen before going to the standard system bar up top as an indicator. This doesn't happen on the Kindle. Worse yet, if I'm doing something like watching a TV episode, I often will not actually hear any sound come through for a Trillian notification, and will only realize that I got a message after the episode ends. I'm not sure if this is specifically a Trillian-related sound issue, and perhaps I should try another IM client on the Kindle, or if there's possibly an app that will work that will help me get an on-screen display for incoming notifications when I'm doing something that hides the notification bar, like reading a book/Marvel Unlimited or watching a video.

3) Growl support. On the iPad I ran an app called Prowl that would receive forwarded Growl events from my Mac. This allowed me to get notifications from IRC/Hipchat/etc that come from my laptop but ping my tablet. As I'm partially disabled due to arthritis, I take various breaks throughout the work day when my back or such starts acting up, and I try to stay connected to my coworkers and family using the tablet. I found a few assorted Growl-related apps around, but can't seem to find any that work on the Kindle.

4) Google Authenticator / Authenticator plus. I used to use GA on my phone (Droid 4) and then switched to Authenticator Plus, as it stores the info for the accounts in Dropbox so you can have multiple devices generate codes. However, I can't find that even on 1Mobile. (The plugins for it seem to be there but not the main app?) Thoughts around this would be helpful, though it may tie into #1.

5) Email. I really dislike the native email client. The Android and iOS Gmail apps are really solid and do what I want them to do. At one point I found out how to sideload enough APKs to get the Android Gmail app working, but that kept generating weird app crashes (some of them the Google libraries like Google Service Frameworks, some of them actual apps, like it was crashing Trillian when the library crashes popped up). Eventually I uninstalled those and went back to using the native client. I'm not sure if there's a better way to get Gmail sideloaded at this point that doesn't do that (as this was something I did right when I got the device, not long after they came out), or if there's another app that works well with Gmail. Specifically, I don't want it to take forever to download my mail. I'd rather have a list of sender/subjects with no message preview and have the message get pulled up when I touch it, than have to wait for it to download the message contents for everything up to the message I want before I can tap into it and have the message display. (If you tap into the message before the download completes it seems like the native client won't refresh the message when it is downloaded, which is just... crap.)

I'm no slouch with tech (I'm a Unix Systems Administrator by trade), and I have access to Win 7, Linux, and OSX Mavericks machines to do whatever is needed, but I'm definitely not an Android wizard. I did root my Nook Color back in the day, and the wife's, so I'm familiar with the kind of process to go about things, but I'm very wary of bricking a very expensive piece of hardware. (I've got the 64G model, ostensibly so that I could have video content downloaded locally if desired, to have lots and lots of books loaded on the device, and for games. However, several of the games that I was playing on iOS aren't available on the Amazon store but do have Google Play versions. When all is said and done, I really like the Kindle as a device, but I am getting rather annoyed by some of the software side of things that just are non-existent issues on the iPad.)