Identifying Fire Tablet Devices

When developing your Android app, keep in mind that your app runs on devices including Fire tablets with different screen sizes, hardware features, and software implementations. To help ensure that your app works well across a broad array of devices, query the features of the device hardware or software and be responsive to the features that are available.

Avoid trying to detect specific device models such as Fire tablets. Device detection is less flexible than feature detection, and adds development effort over time when you add device models.

You can detect features in several different ways, such as by querying the package manager, performing reflection, or checking the result of convenience methods. For example, to determine if a camera intent is available, you can use PackageManager to determine if the camera software is installed on the device.

 /**
 * Determines if the current device can handle an image capture action.
 * @return true if the device can handle an image capture action. False if it cannot.
 */
protected boolean canHandleCameraIntent() {
  final Intent intent = new Intent(android.provider.MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE);
  final List<ResolveInfo> results = getPackageManager().queryIntentActivities(intent, 0);
  return (results.size() > 0);
}

Fire Tablet Features

The following table lists common Fire tablet features, including the build model, API level, and Fire OS version. This information is also available in the Fire Tablet Device Specifications.

Additional Supported Technologies

Fire tablets provide support for the following technologies:

• Text-to-Speech Fire tablets include the IVONA Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine, and support the Android TextToSpeech API. For more information, see TextToSpeech in the Android documentation. The following languages are currently supported by the TTS engine.
  • U.S. English
  • French (downloadable)
  • Italian (downloadable)
  • German (downloadable)
  • Spanish (downloadable)
  • Canadian French (downloadable)
  • Australian English (downloadable)
  • British English (downloadable)
  • Brazilian Portuguese (downloadable)
  • Russian (downloadable)
• Web apps Fire tablets support web apps through an optimized web runtime based on Chromium. For information about building and publishing web apps, see Web Apps.
• E-mail Fire tablets have a pre-installed e-mail client that responds to mailto: links and e-mail intents.
• SD card Some Fire tablets do not have external storage. You should not have to change your app for Fire tablets if it stores data on the SD card. For tablets that only have an internal SD card that is not removable, you can use getExternalStorageDirectory() to write to the internal SD card.
• Audio formats Fire tablets support the following audio formats natively: AC-3, E-AC3, AAC LC/LTP, HE-AACv1 (AAC+), HE-AACv2 (enhanced AAC+), AMR-NB, MP3, MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, and PCM/WAVE.
• Dolby Audio API Dolby provides an API that uses the audio processing engine on the Kindle Fire HDX tablets and Kindle Fire HD tablets. On the Dolby developer website, you can download the Dolby plug-in and learn more about Dolby developer services.