[Fire Original Android Development] ggow:
This is off topic but I'll post my reply here...

Hey,

I tried to reach out to you on a social channel, but I couldn't find a twitter or anything tied to you. I make videos on YT for a tech channel and have considered doing a series of videos on devices that were abandoned by companies that lived on thru 3rd party developers. Think the Blackberry Playbook for example. I've had a Fire Phone since the day they lowered the price to $199 with Prime membership and I always held out hope in the back of my mind that the device would end up getting fully unlocked to support current versions of Andriod given the solid specs that it had at the time and still does to some extent.

For this project, I'm planning on reaching out to a lot of the engineers that were on the development team for the Fire Phone at Lab 126 to ask very poignant questions about a lot of things that were promised but never materialized to see if there was ever any truth in any of them (a Fire OS 5 version for the phone for example). I'm also going to try and blitz Jeff B. for what it's worth on his social channels in hopes of getting a response by himself or whoever he forwards the e-mail to.

On the flip side, I want to get information from the people that were working to crack the system back in 2014-2016 to detail the attempts and progress that they made on those fronts when the company kept silent. Obviously, the forums on here are a resource, but they don't seem to paint the entire picture- as you wouldn't really bother spending your time discussing the intricacies of what you were trying to do in your own time on these forums with people that have zero programming knowledge.

Aside from this, one of the biggest questions that I've always had centered on the source code for 4.6.6 and whether or not that ever had the possibility of making a bootloader unlock possible. Or if there was ever a possibility at all that someone would have uncovered a way to get around the bootloader lock given enough time and motivation. I don't have any other Fire device, but it's my understand that the tablets were somehow able to update to versions of Andriod not used in Fire OS (Fire Phone being locked to Kitkat for example). Is this the case? How did people find a way to unlock those device's bootloaders?

Hoping to hear from you,

Z

You won't find me on any social media, I don't have time for that.

Amazon including Jeff B. have washed their hands of and do not care about the fire phone anymore, period.

It is stuck on kitkat at the moment, the CM-11 ROM which I maintain at least gives it relief of FireOS.

Employees of lab126, current and old will be under strict NDA so don't expect much

The fire phone is quite unique and it is protected like fort knox. Not saying it's impossible to unlock, just that no-one as succeeded yet.

All the exploits I checked for are closed, and confirmed by a couple of people because it's good to double check.

The tablets all have vulnerabilities of various types which were exploited by various individuals.

Not going to go into details about exploiting vulnerabilities, too big a subject to cover here.

No need to reply to this. If you have any progress then post over in the Fire Phone forums.