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Comment by david_allison | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon Appstore will continue to be available elsewhere, including on Fire TV and Fire Tablet devices.

Well, it'd better continue to be available, seeing that Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...

I have two Kindle Fire tablets (they're low-quality as general purpose tablets, but cheap and good for reading comics or books) and both have Google Play on them.

Mind you, I had to sideload it for both of them.

I did that too but it turned out to be just too much trouble. Play store kept trying to update the handful of apps that exist in both Amazon's and Google's ecosystems, and it completely them.

> Amazon's devices don't support the Google Play store...

FireOS devices aren't certified by Google and so, they do not come with "Gapps" (including the Play Store) preinstalled. Even if they were, Amazon might have some reservations about preinstalling Gapps (which run with higher than normal privileges), effectively letting Google get hands on its user's purchasing habits.

All that to say, this is a business limitation not a technical one.

See also: Google's iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6582494 (2014).

It might not be "supported", but I thought you could easily sideload play store and play services? You don't even need to muck around with rooting or even adb.

I wouldn't call sideloading the play store and services "easy", especially for Kindle Kids/FreeTime profiles.

Not at all easy. It’s a PITA using all sorts of odd sources.

It's literally downloading a few apks and installing them. You don't even need to use adb. You can do it all within the preloaded browser that's on the tablet.

https://www.howtogeek.com/232726/how-to-install-the-google-p...

I don’t remember it being that easy when I did it 3-4 years ago. I was also a bit uncomfortable downloading the google support libraries from APKmirror, as my life is on my google account. IIRC the APKs were unsigned.

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