The beauty of the XDA development community is how passionate it can be. We are constantly impressed by some of the feats pulled off by developers in our community, allowing users to break free from the burdens imposed by some OEMs to make their device truly theirs. Amazon has become one of the most restrictive OEMs in this regard. Their Fire devices don't really run Android in the traditional sense, rather, their devices run Amazon's heavily customized Fire OS. It might be based on Android, but it barely resembles it. The OS in the 7th gen Amazon Fire HD 10 is actually based on Android 5.1 Lollipop, which is a very old version of Android that's starting to become deprecated by some developers.

If you have one of these tablets, all hope isn't lost: a developer has managed to put together an unofficial LineageOS 14.1 build based on Android 7.1 Nougat. Now granted, this is still a very old version of Android, with Android 7.1 having been released around late 2016 to early 2017. Nonetheless, this is still a very impressive development. Not only is the tablet stuck on Lollipop, but the low-end MediaTek MT8173 on it isn't exactly developer-friendly at all. The software in this tablet predates the Project Treble times by several years, so you can't just flash a GSI on it.

Being able to run Android Nougat on the tablet should open a lot of doors for Fire HD 10 users. There are a number of bugs to take note of such as a nonfunctional camera and issues with wired headphones and OMX. Still, if you want to try out the build for the Fire HD 10, you can head over to the XDA thread linked below to find the instructions and download links. You'll need to unlock the bootloader first, and we have instructions for how to do that here.

Unofficial LineageOS 14.1 for the 7th gen. Amazon Fire HD 10