Setting up your Kindle Fire device for testing and debugging is a simplified process thanks to Android Debug Bridge (ADB) support. Since questions around ADB driver support have come up on Stack Overflow and our developer forums I thought it would be beneficial to walk through the setup process.
Note – this post was updated on April 16th, 2014 to reflect changes in the Amazon Android SDK addon.
First, ensure your development computer has at least one package of Kindle Fire system images installed. This is critical because the package includes the vendor identification needed for ADB to recognize any of the physical Kindle Fire tablets. This is done through the following steps:
For complete information about setting up your development computer and installing the SDK packages, see Setting Up Your Development Environment.
If you installed a previous version of the Kindle Fire USB driver then take the following steps to remove the previous USB device driver and force re-installation of the driver.
Next, we need to turn on ADB support on our actual Kindle Fire device. Follow these steps:
As a security precaution, you should set Enable ADB to Off when you are not trying to connect to the Kindle Fire tablet to your development computer.
First, ensure you have enabled ADB on the Kindle first as described above. For the USB driver to install correctly, Windows must recognize the device as Android Composite ADB Interface during installation. If ADB is not enabled, Windows instead recognizes the device as Portable Devices.
Do the following to install the Kindle Fire USB driver:
Next, do the following to detect your Kindle Fire tablet through ADB:
adb kill-server adb start-server adb devices |
If the serial number does not appear after running adb devices, do the following:
android update adb |
adb kill-server adb start-server adb devices |
If your Kindle Fire device still does not show up you may need to reboot your development machine and then try again.
Perform the following steps if your development computer runs OS X:
./android update adb |
4. In the terminal shell, navigate to your Android SDK platform-tools directory.
5. Run the following commands and confirm that the serial number for your Kindle Fire tablet appears in the list of devices.
If your Kindle Fire device does not show up in the list of devices you may need to reboot your development machine and then try again.
You should now be able to fully test with your Kindle Fire device over the Android Debug Bridge. For additional information on enabling ADB for Kindle Fire Devices, see Setting Up Your Kindle Fire Tablet for Testing.
-Dave (@TheDaveDev)