[Fire HD 8 and HD 10 General] scoutdriver73:
There are several other guides in this forum for debloating the “useless” apps off of the Fire. Unfortunately, none of them really met my goals, and left me wanting more. I had several goals that I wanted to accomplish with this project.

Goals:

1.	Improve the responsiveness of the Fire by removing unwanted/needed services from RAM. I have four of these for my kids, and its painful to watch my kids wait 30, 45, 60 seconds for a game to load, as the Fire churns away trying to unload services from memory.

2.	Maintain the battery life. Amazon did a great job with the battery management, and I did not want to see a regression in this area.

3.	Keep/be able to use certain Amazon services. Everyone has different use scenarios for using the Fire, which is why some of the other guides did not work well for me. I needed to keep some of the Amazon services working, namely the following:

a.	Prime Video

b.	Kindle Books

c.	Audible

4.	Install Google Play Services for getting other apps. I did this 3 years ago right after I got the Fires, but did not need root at the time, so they still had all the Amazon bloat on them as well.

5.	Get Google Family Link working in conjunction with the Amazon services. For Family Link to work, Google Play services must be installed as system apps, which presents another problem, as the smallest (relatively current) Open Google Apps is too large to flash in TWRP, so a manual approach was needed.

6.	Install a different launcher, Fire Launcher is awful. I installed Nova Launcher as a system app to easily support widgets

7.	Install a different keyboard. I installed GBoard as I use it on all my Android devices and am biased.

I was able to accomplish my goals without having to make any compromises, since we now have root for this Fire.

Thanks to all who spent so much time on that. I did try the two ROM ports that are available, but they were not stable enough for a device that my kids use.

I did needed to do this on four Fires, so I wrote a script, to make it faster after the first and to ensure that they are all exactly the same to start with.

Prerequisites:

1.	Fire 8 HD (2017) – other models are going to be close, but packages and dependencies will almost certainly be a little different. YMMV

2.	Firmware 5.3.7.0 – Same as above, earlier versions may be close, but dependencies may be different. If you are on an older version, upgrade to the latest. Download the firmware directly Amazon to have as a backup anyway. Version 5.3.7.0 is file update-kindle-50.6.5.0_user_650601220.bin. Rename the file from a “bin” to a “zip” to flash it from TWRP.

3.	Rooted – I followed the instructions in this thread. Thanks to @k4y0z for the excellent work! See post #337 for exactly what steps I used to root 5.3.7.0

4.	Magisk zip for installation from TWRP. I used version 20.4, which was the latest at the time. Please note the warnings in the rooting thread regarding updating Magisk from MagiskManager.

5.	I’m going to assume some level of familiarity with use an android device, using ADB, booting to recovery, enabling ADB, etc. If you don’t, google is your friend. All of the assumed knowledge is easy to acquire with a little googling.

6.	Windows computer with ADB drivers for the Fire. Sorry, I wrote the script as a BATCH file, and don’t want to take the time to re-write if for Linux/macOS

7.	Download the files linked in this post. I’ve provided one download and also individual links if desired.

Steps:

1.	Boot Fire to Recovery

2.	Format Data from TWRP

3.	Copy update-kindle-50.6.5.0_user_650601220.zip and Magisk-v20.4.zip to the Fire

4.	Flash the 5.3.7.0, then Magisk. Select reboot after install if wanted

5.	Allow Fire to boot. This will take about 10 minutes while the Fire is “Optimizing System Storage.”

6.	Enable ADB without Registering with Amazon

a.	Select Language and press "Continue"

b.	Select any Wifi Access Point, then press "Cancel"

c.	The press "Not Now"

d.	The press "Skip"

e.	Now you can go to Settings > Device Options > Click on the Serial Number 7 times to enable Developer Options > Go to Developer Options > Enable ADB

f.	Select box to always allow USB Debugging from this computer and select allow​

7.	Extract the download files, and run the “Debloat.bat” script. Script will check a couple things, print some warnings, and then do the following:

a.	Remove Amazon Ecosystem with the exception to the following:

i.	Prime Video

ii.	Kindle Book Reader

iii.	Audible Books​

b.	136 packages are uninstalled or disabled and hidden.

c.	Uninstalled packages will also be deleted from /system, with a few exceptions

d.	Install Google Play services as system apps (four apks)

e.	Install Nova Launcher as a system app

f.	Install GBoard to replace the default keyboard

g.	Cleanup misc Icons from bloat removal

h.	Set Amazon Fire HD 8 (2017) host-name to a user supplied value

i.	Additional user apps can be installed at this step if desired

i.	See notes in batch file for instructions

ii.	Look in section :install_Other​

8.	After the script finishes, Go to Settings > My Account to register with Amazon

9.	Open Google Play and sign in using Google Account. For Family Link, use the child’s account. The setup failed once out of four times. When it failed, I just re-opened Google Play and started again and it worked fine.

Additional Notes:

•	With firmware 5.3.7.0, there was about 120M of free space in /system. Afterward, there is more than 600M of free space for installing other apps if desired.

•	I spent a lot of time looking at the installed apks. I evaluated each and every apk to determine if it should be removed. I looked at as many other lists as possible to see what others had learned as well. I’ve attached the spreadsheet that I used. Hopefully it will be of some use to someone else. I used a couple spreadsheets I found in this forum as my starting point. Thanks to those authors for their work and for sharing!

•	I left the package names long, so I could reference exactly which package had been installed at a later date if wanted.

•	See this post on why I decided to disable and hide apks that have required libraries.

•	A list of all the removed apks is created in a log file - debloat_log.txt

•	Performing a factory reset will NOT restore all the Amazon apps/services as most were also deleted from system.

•	Amazon Backup has been removed, but the Fire can be backup to a Google account.

•	I intentionally wanted to remove as much of Alexa as possible. I have good notes in the spread sheet regarding what packages to keep to keep Alexa functional.

•	I also did not want Google Assistant, so I did not pursue replacing/installing Assistant.

•	Battery life remains great. With wifi on and connected, screen off, battery life dropped less than 1% every 24 hours.

Links:

•	Google Account Manager

•	Google Services Framework

•	Google Play Services

•	Google Play Store

•	Nova Launcher

•	GBoard

•	Magisk

•	Amazon Firmware - Version 5.3.7.0 - SHA-1 Hash - 1313424520A1346436147C1CE591E8E58FE59E18

•	Spreadsheet List of Apps

•	Debloat Script - Updated 7 May 2020, validates hostname entry

•	Debloat Archive (Everything needed except Magisk and Amazon firmware) - Updated 7 May 2020 to include new batch script