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Hacking the Kindle Fire's keyboard layout

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If you bought a Kindle Fire and want to use it only for reading, don’t worry you will be fine, but if you want to use it as a tablet, as soon as you try to write something in a language other than English, you will realize that you gave to yourself a pretty expensive brick ;).  The Kindle Fire comes with an autocomplete feature (that cannot be disabled) that inserts matching words when you press the space bar, while this is arguable a nice thing, if you are writing in a language such as Spanish it’s a bit of a pain in the ass. You have to erase and retype all of the words inserted by this feature.

Surfing the web you will find a lots of comments saying that is not possible to change the Kindle Fire's keyboard layout, while this is true based upon the Fire’s defaults options, there is a guy who hacked the system and give us a neat way to change it.

This guy is Gero Zahn and this is how he did it http://blog.gerozahn.de/2011/11/kindle-fire-keyboard-layouts-solved/

There is another way to do it, also based on the solution discovered by Gero, but those guys found a way to do the same trick in only one step!

You can grab it from github at https://github.com/shaftekbiz/android-language-settings-app

I 've tried the last one and worked like a charm. Now I can switch back and forth from English and Spanish with just tapping and sliding the space bar. Thanks a lot to those guys!  




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  1. NickNovember 14, 2013 at 8:08 PM

    Your post was helpful for language based fixes but I was wondering if there is a way to change the layout of the keyboard. Such as changing around or adding and removing wanted and unwanted characters. For example when I am typing I hit the space bar with my right thumb predominantly. The location of the period button pushes the button farther to the left and I end up missing it often and hiting period. This is especially bad when typing searches in the url bar since the ".com" button appears and pushes the space bar even further to the left. I'm currently using the kindle fire (not hd).

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