14 DAY TRIAL // Last month, Amazon unveiled its cheapest tablet to date, called the Fire and costing only $50 / €45. And like all Amazon tablets released so far, this one doesn’t offer access to the Google Play Store, but only to Amazon’s own App Store.
So that’s why, regardless of how cheap and attractive the Amazon Fire tablet might appear to some, the fact that the Google Play Store can't be accessed might put off a lot of customers from buying it. But what if we told you that there was a simple way of getting your Fire tablet to access the Play store. And you don’t even need to root your device.
The crafty folks at the xda-developers forum have come up with a solution for installing the Google Services Framework and Google Play Store apps on your super affordable Amazon tablet.
Get all the apps you want on your super-cheap Fire tablet
To do that, you will need to connect the slate to a Windows PC and run a number of files that will connect to your tablet via adb and load all the apps and files. After this process is finished, you will have to wait for about 10 minutes without touching anything, thus allowing the Google services app time to automatically update.
There’s a second solution as well, and this one does not involve the use of a script. You will have to manually install a series of apps, including the Services Framework, Google Account Manager and Google Play Store.
Since neither of these workarounds is officially supported by Amazon, you might find yourself faced with some problems. For instance, Google’s own Inbox app doesn’t really work. But other apps like Gmail, Chrome and YouTube do work.
Amazon’s cheapest tablet is a very entry-level model which arrives with a 7-inch IPS display boasting 1,024 x 600 pixel resolution and a quad-core chipset clocked at 1.3GHz. The producing company also throws in 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage (microSD card slot support for memory expansion up to 128GB).
The slate also features a 2MP main camera plus a VGA front-facing one. The Fire tablet ships out with Fire OS version 5 dubbed Bellini out of the box.
