Running Amazon Instant Video on Android tablets

In September, Amazon finally released an official Instant Video app for Android. Unfortunately, this app is not downloadable on tablets via their app store — only phones. Yet, Amazon Instant video has been supported for years on Amazon’s own “Fire” Android-based tablets. It really bums me out that Amazon Instant Video continues to snub their competitors’ products, but if you’re like me and have a lot of purchases locked up in their store, there is a way:

I’d read in a couple places that if you install the APK manually, it works fine on tablets — as long as the phone version of Amazon’s store app is installed as well.

I used adb (apt-get install android-tools-adb) to transfer both apps from my Nexus 4 to my Nexus 7:

First, Enable USB debugging on both devices.

On the phone:

Find the app ids:

$ adb shell pm list packages | grep amazon
package:com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient
package:com.amazon.kindle
package:com.amazon.mShop.android

Locate the relevant APK files (your paths may vary):

$ adb shell pm path com.amazon.mShop.android
package:/data/app/com.amazon.mShop.android-1/base.apk

$ adb shell pm path com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient
package:/data/app/com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient-1/base.apk

Fetch the APKs (using the paths we got):

$ adb pull /data/app/com.amazon.mShop.android-1/base.apk mshop.apk
5364 KB/s (29897881 bytes in 5.442s)

$ adb pull /data/app/com.amazon.avod.thirdpartyclient-1/base.apk avod.apk
3134 KB/s (1960268 bytes in 0.610s)

On the tablet:

$ adb install mshop.apk
5139 KB/s (29897881 bytes in 5.681s)
    pkg: /data/local/tmp/mshop.apk
Success

$ adb install avod.apk
3166 KB/s (1960268 bytes in 0.604s)
    pkg: /data/local/tmp/avod.apk
Success

Now you should be able to launch Amazon Instant Video on your tablet, watch some Star Trek TNG, and dream of a world where tech companies don’t play silly games about which kind of PADD you use.