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As a dyed-in-the-wool Android user, I’ve been eager to get as much of the Google apps experience over to my new Amazon Kindle Fire 7 as possible. Since the device’s Fire 5.0 Bellini OS is so close to stock Android 5 Lollipop anyway, I figured it was worth trying the basic Google apps suite. After all, other third party apps not available on the Amazon Appstore have worked fine.

As before, I swapped across the app .apks from my Lenovo A7-10, using ES File Explorer’s app backup feature. Stock Google apps like Docs, Drive, and even Maps backed up like any other, and let me save their .apk files into my Lenovo’s Backups folder. I then swapped the .apk files over onto my Kindle Fire.

Here’s where the problems started. Both Google Docs and Google Drive installed just fine, and showed me their attractive intro screens at startup. But after the intro screens, both immediately closed, throwing up a warning that they couldn’t find a user account. There may be a workaround for this, and if so, I’d love to know, because it looks like the apps themselves will run fine on the Kindle Fire. But until that account problem is fixed, I’m keeping the .apks on my Kindle Fire just in case.

Google Maps, however, installed from the .apk, and runs well on the Kindle Fire. The one issue it has is that there is no GPS I can find on the Kindle Fire, so no automatic location tracking. And I can’t seem to log in to my own Google account on it to access my locations and preferences – not yet at least. But if you are happy to use it as a regular atlas app, Google Maps will work fine for you.

Some day I’ll probably be brave enough to try to install the Google Play Store and Google Play Services, and see if I can hook up all the apps that don’t run right now. But that’s for another day and another post. Meanwhile, leave me to my Google Mapping.

 

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