Amazon offers a Kindle Fire HD 7" emulator to test and debug your apps if you don't have a Kindle Fire HD 7" device. While we recommend developers test their apps on a physical device, you can test many aspects of your apps without running your code on a device. This allows you to be confident that the user interface, navigation and flow through the application are as you designed it. If you need to test the same application on multiple devices you can quickly compare the experience without juggling cables.

As the emulator images reflect the underlying devices as closely as possible, they include support for some of the Kindle Fire unique capabilities such as GameCircle, In-App Purchasing, and Maps.  Because the emulator images run as self-contained virtual machines, it is possible to have multiple, concurrent instances allowing you to deploy and compare results simultaneously. As you can imagine this leads to very efficient, iterative development making device-specific interface adjustments easier to manage.

To ensure that the emulator performs as well as possible on a range of computers,we support GPU emulation which delivers a smoother graphical experience and faster start-up experience. While this will help performance throughout the emulator for host computers that support these capabilities, it will have the most impact in graphics-intensive OpenGL- based applications such as games.Learn more by following the instructions at this link. 

Another tip we can offer is to preview the customer experience as if the user is signed-in.  Kindle Fire HD comes to customers pre-registered, and our trusted 1-Click purchase process increases purchase and download of your apps and in-apps items.  Because users of your apps will be signed in, we recommend you test the user experience as a user who is signed-in.  The Kindle Fire HD 7” emulator will not be signed-in by default.  To preview the experience of a registered user, you should navigate to Settings->My Account and then register the device with a valid Amazon account.

Ready to get started?  Review the documentation, install the emulator, and give it a whirl. We’d love to hear your feedback in the forums.