Emulator for Amazon Kindle

Question

My app would work very nicely on the new Amazon Kindle Fire, but it would be nice to test it and remove any kinks before they flood onto the market! Is there an emulator of the kindle fire available

Answer 1

The Tech at Amazon told me that there is an "internal" SD Card. I just write to the normal SD CARD file path.

Answer 2

Looks like Carl is Right and amazon dropped emulator's support - I was able to test on emulators about 6 months ago but now they are gone. However description link still exists(on time I'm writing this) - it describes the exact steps I was using to install emulator when it was available:

Installing Kindle Fire Device Dependencies

Take the following steps to install the software packages for Kindle Fire.

1. In Eclipse, on the Window menu, click Android SDK Manager. - or - On the command line, run     the following command, where <ANDROID_SDK> is the path to your Android SDK:
$ <ANDROID_SDK>/tools/android
2. In the Android SDK Manager window, verify that SDK Path points to the path for your Android     SDK. To modify the path, in Eclipse, on the Window menu, click Preferences, click Android, and     then update the SDK Location. Note: In Mac OS X, these menu items are on the ADT menu instead     of the Window menu.
3. In the Android SDK Manager window, on the Tools menu, click Manage Add-on Sites. Click the     User Defined Sites tab, and then click New. Note: In Mac OS X, when the Android SDK Manager   window is open, the Tools menu appears in the parent Eclipse window instead of the Android SDK  Manager window.
4. In the Add Add-on Site URL dialog box, enter the following URL: 
http://kindle-sdk.s3.amazonaws.com/addon.xml
5. Click OK, and then click Close. 
Wait for the Android SDK Manager to refresh, as indicated by the progress bar.
6. In the Android SDK Manager window, select the latest revision of each of the following     packages. 
Tools:
Android SDK Tools (install the latest version)
Android SDK Platform-tools (install the latest version)
Android API versions later than 4.2.2 API 17:
Note: You can install and target SDK platform versions later than Android 4.2.2. However,  regardless of the target SDK version you choose for your app, you need to verify that your app  runs correctly on the Kindle Fire tablets.
Android 4.2.2 API 17:
SDK Platform
Android 4.0.3 API 15:
SDK Platform
Android 2.3.3 API 10:
SDK Platform
Extras:
Kindle Fire USB Driver (not applicable for OS X)
Android Support Library
7. Click Install n packages.
8. In the Choose Packages to Install dialog box, accept the license agreements for the     packages, and then click Install.
9. Wait for the packages to install, and then close the Android SDK Manager window after    installation is complete.
10. Restart Eclipse.

After step 5 there also were additional options (this is also described here) under Extras which are now gone:

Extras:
Amazon AVD Launcher
Kindle Fire Device Definitions
Kindle Fire USB Driver

Hope they'll return them back.

Answer 3

The Fire does not seem to have a SDCARD. How does it handle application that use the SDCARD. Do they, perhaps, divert SDCARD I/O to the "cloud?"

Answer 4

Quoting the documentation:

It is possible to configure a standard Android emulator to simulate the Kindle Fire device platform. You should configure your emulator with the following characteristics:

• Width: 600px
• Height: 1024px (note that the device will reserve 20px of the height to display a soft key menu, yielding a height of 1004px when in full-screen mode
• Abstracted LCD Density: 169
• Target: Android 2.3.4 - API Level 10
• RAM: 512 MB

Answer 5

Support for the Kindle Fire emulator seems to have been discontinued as of sometime in early 2014. You can still find the page describing it here on the Wayback Machine, but now it is gone from the Amazon developer pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130919204543/https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/fire/emulator-guide.html

On this forum page:

https://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=479

an Amazon developer rep finally states that "We have dropped supporting Emulator. Sorry for the inconvenience."

The Amazon developer site's "Pre-Submission Assessment" page says to use an actual Kindle Fire device for testing:

"To complete this group of tests, install the app on a Kindle Fire tablet and launch."

https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/support/submitting-your-app/tech-docs/03-pre-submission-assessment-guide

They don't actually say "we had an emulator, but it didn't work out," but as we've been left to draw our own conclusions, that might be a pretty good summation.

For its new Fire phone, Amazon has made available a testing service which uses an actual time-shared Fire phone to which your APK gets uploaded. The test routine will push some buttons and make some random pokes at grids and the like, and some random keyboard entries, and then a few minutes to hours later you'll get a link to the results (including actions performed and their relative times of occurrence, and the resulting screen shots, plus a logcat) on your developer account. It works but it is by no means a comprehensive test.

https://developer.amazon.com/public/resources/development-tools/app-testing-service

For my part, I have just purchased a Kindle Fire HD 2013 solely for testing, used, with a tiny crack in the corner of the display but otherwise working fine, for a very low price. It's always better to have a real device than an emulator anyway.

I'll probably supplement that with some regular AVDs that are as close as possible to the various other Kindle Fire devices.

Answer 6

There is a Kindle Fire Emulator available from Amazon. You'll need to install Kindle Fire Add-On in Android SDK Manager. Detailed instructions here: https://developer.amazon.com/sdk/fire/emulator-guide.html