Dear Big Tech Companies: why does this have to be so hard?

By A. Jo Williams-Newkirk

Created July 7, 2023

When your kids are tiny, the Kindle Fire Kids tablets are da bomb. Like, seriously, they’re reasonably priced, regularly on sale, hard to kill, come with a no-questions-asked replacement policy for the first 2 years. Their simplified interface is also great for the three-and-under crowd.

But then somewhere between ages four and five, a shift began. Suddenly I realized YouTube (via my Google account) was a big part of my son’s internet usage. As he got more independent, I got more nervous (and it became a real challenge to find my own preferred content in YouTube). No problem, I thought. There’s YouTube Kids. I set up the app, logged in, handed it to my kid, and, err, nope: most of his favorite content wasn’t available through YouTube Kids (we’re talking popular channels dedicated to reading kid’s storybooks aloud, people, nothing niche). Ok, so I’ll just use Google’s Family Link and supervised account features to give him managed access to YouTube on our shared devices. Set it all up, feel accomplished for two seconds before trying to log in to my son’s account on my phone and … cue annoying game show buzzer … no. You can only sign a kid’s managed Google account in on a device that doesn’t already have other account on it. Which means you have to factory reset any existing device, add your kid first, then add your own accounts back. Google actually has the gall to label this a feature and not a bug.

At this point, I looked at the Amazon Fire HD 8 Kids tablet, 8" that I’d previously restricted to long car rides, appointments with kid in tow, power outages (we have a UPS for our router), etc. It was still reasonably shiny and new at ~1 year old and felt zippy enough for media consumption. “I’ve hacked these things before,” I thought. And back in the early days of Android phones I was pretty handy with flashing rooting and ROMs. “I’ll just install vanilla Android on there and voila, a pristine tablet to run a Google supervised account.”

I was so young and naïve. There don’t seem to be any methods to root the more recent generations of Kindle devices. Mine’s a 2022 12th gen, and you have to go waaaaayyyyyyyyyy back to find a device that can be rooted. But there are tools for adding Google Play to Kindle devices and swapping launchers to make them act more like stock Android. So, I dove in. Little did I know that these methods generally aren’t tested on Kids versions of the devices and Family Link managed accounts are known not to work even on the non-Kids models.

So here’s what I did that finally got me to a place that I can live with. Until the next growth spurt / developmental milestone that renders all of my carefully crafted guardrails invalid.

GOAL: Kindle Fire Kids tablet that acts like a “normal” Android tablet. Log into Google apps using a regular, non-supervised Google account that you lock down as heavily as possible and then never ever reveal the password.

Step 1

Set up a dedicated account for your child. DO NOT make it a supervised account. If you, like me, already had an account set up and supervised, use Family Link to edit the age of the child to one day shy of 13 years old. Then wait 24 hours. Seriously. You should get an email in about a day giving you the option to turn the account into an unsupervised one. The UI absolutely will not allow you to set the birthday to anything later to make the child over 13 immediately (age limit varies by country).

Step 2