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Amazon#

  • Verdict: 馃崊 Terrible!

Amazon is a strange company in the Android world. They cling to old Android versions (their latest devices still ship with the EOL Android 11), they don鈥檛 include Google services on their devices, and they are extremely aggressive towards bootloader unlocks.

They don鈥檛 follow the standard Android bootloader unlocking procedure. Instead, they use their own implementation, which relies on a special partition called idme. This partition stores device-specific information such as the S/N, MAC address, and more.

The official way to unlock the bootloader is to flash a signed unlock image to idme using the command fastboot flash unlock unlock.bin. Of course, this requires Amazon to sign the unlock image.

MediaTek#

Older MediaTek-based devices can be unlocked using amonet, a bootloader/bootROM exploit originally developed in 2019 to unlock the Amazon Fire HD 8 (2018).

The latest devices unlocked with amonet are the Fire TV Stick 3rd Gen and Fire TV Stick Lite 1st Gen (released around 2020).

However, Amazon has actively patched this exploit, so even if a port of amonet exists for your device, it may still not be unlockable.

The following list shows all available amonet ports for Amazon devices, along with whether or not they have been patched. If your device is not included in the list, it is most likely not supported:

Qualcomm#

There are also several older Qualcomm-based devices that can be unlocked using the cuber exploit (CVE-2014-0973):

Amlogic#

For Amlogic-based devices (e.g., Fire TV Cube), multiple exploits are available. They require DL-Mode, which Amazon disabled on newer hardware revisions or through OTA updates (e-fuses). This list shows the available exploits:

Conclusion#

As of this writing, no known exploits exist for unlocking the bootloader of Amazon devices released after 2020.

There have been multiple reports of users purchasing engineering samples from third-party sellers, but the firmware on these devices is useless for production units.

Authored by R0rt1z2, Ivy / Lost-Entrepreneur439.