[Fire TV Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] harlekinwashere:
Have a stab at it. Crowdsource away. :)

You are only up against a userbase that doesnt know the least bit about the device, buys their Fire TVs in high percentages from resellers on Amazon, ebay and the local used good portal, because they saw a "free HBO" and SPORTZ label on it, that got told for the better part of two years that root is not necessary - by a freaking product blogger who maybe single handedly killed this scene - syphoning out all information from this community to sell it against ads on his portal (but he contributed pictures)...

And even now most people cant decide if they'd rather have "eazy Amazon Alexa fullservice", or be able to own their devices - but "has hacker found a way so I can use Alexa in *insert country here*".

People don't know how to interface with the device, or even how to copy files, people are told, that they don't need to know anything other than how to sideload using ES File Explorer. And as long as most people have their piracy options - they don't care about the rest.

Thats the deal. When Amazon started to force people that wanted to use alternative launchers away from their upgrade path - product bloggers celebrated it, because it would make stuff, so much more eazy.

Good luck getting the numbers. I have yet to get the impression that anyone (but me and a few others, but I can only buy so many Fire TV 2s in my lifetime...) actually care.

The broader lesson here is - that no one who cares about root rights, buys FIre TVs anymore. And rightfully so. There was so much wrong information circulating, structurally - because some people cared more about establishing their own dependencies, being on the hunt for "great dealz" and buying their way around having to learn basics - that there simply never was a culture of ownership (caring about root rights) around this product.

People updated root away, because product blogger told them, new firmware had great new feature.

Also - Amazon in the backend - now is set up very well to make the windows where devices are rootable very, very short. They don't even provide you with a prompt anymore - they just update away. They update before shipping, they force you having to be online to activate the device...

Those are structural issues. If you don't see them, having worked in the industy for several years, look again.

Back of the shelf boxed units still would be the best bet for people willing to take a chance - and word of mouth that "one guy got an older firmware on a refurbished stick, sold by Amazon" is just that. Word of mouth.

In the meantime you can wait for a new rooting method, and don't care, that amazon restricted apps from reading logs via adb and put in all kinds of non standard android features like "great blacklist, so eazy", and there is still no full conversion rom for this thing, because navigating via a remote is only slowly becoming part of android as an OS.

Its a pitty that it turned out this way - because for a short window - both the Fire TV Stick and the Fire TV2 where the best value for money in this sector you could buy (raspberry pie still has less "power" than a AFTV2) - but you had too many interests only "faking" that they would act in favor of a homebrew community - too many users that only cared about solving problems that came up as a result of them not understanding what they bought on shady channels - looking for service, to many people too willing to excuse Amazon of wrongdoing, before even all the facts came out...

The truth is, that this is a dead category.

Give the raspberry pie two more years, and understand that if you care about openness and doing stuff the manufacturer hasnt set up for you - open hardware will be more and more your only opportunity.

Not so much because devices become harder and harder to hack open (which is also an increasing issue) - but because you cant set up a community thats set on "demanding enduser service", paying resellers to cut corners as far as them learning to set up stuff, and listening to product bloggers that provide them with tutorials stolen from here ("But they have added pictures!!"), as long as it is convenient for them, but then help mask the fact, when and how amazon splits this community or moves against our interests, because they benefit more - when they can make their readers entirely dependent on Amazon - and look, its so easy....

Try to get your numbers in this environment. I watch. ;)