Up until now there was no way to unlock or root the 8th-gen Fire HD 8 (the 2018 model). But if you want even more control over the tablet you may want to root it and/or unlock the bootloader so that you can add or remove software that would otherwise be locked down. You can install the Google Play Store fairly easily. But it has an Amazon-designed user interface, comes with Amazon’s Appstore and tight integration with Amazon Music, Video, and Kindle eBook services, among other things. It runs Fire OS 6, which is a fork of Google Android 7.x Nougat. There’s one catch though - the Fire HD 8 is very much an Amazon tablet. You can pay a bit more for a 32GB model, or you can pay a bit less if you wait for the tablet to go on sale (Amazon has sold it for as little as $50).
The $80 tablet has an 8 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel IPS display, a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, 1.5GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage plus a microSD card reader.