As you may have heard by now, we have a few announcements to make that should be of particular relevance to you Kodi for Android users out there.

Google Play

Firstly, Kodi is now available in Google Play. You can download it at the previous link or using the following QR code.

The version currently available on Google Play is Isengard 15.0 Beta2. We’ve decided to go with Isengard as the first release for Google Play, because it is dramatically more prepared for the feature set that modern Android devices like the Nexus Player and the NVIDIA Shield Android TV bring to the table, including support for 4K and HEVC, among other things.

The benefits of installing the Google Play version of Kodi are fairly simple. You always get the most recent stable release without needing to mess with finding, downloading, and sideloading apks. With that said, we will continue to publish apks on our site, so if you’d rather sideload, or if your Android device doesn’t have Google Play, we’ve still got you covered.

Amazon App Store

On a less positive note, as you may know, we’ve been informed that Kodi has been removed from the Amazon App Store because, according to the Amazon representative, “it can be used to facilitate the piracy or illegal download of content. Any facilitation of piracy or illegal downloads is not allowed in our program.”

As others have noted and we agree, this seems to be an absurd statement, purely because the same can be said about any web browser or media player that can play an online stream, which is approximately all of them, including at least one that Amazon prominently displays on its Fire TV packaging material. The version of Kodi submitted to the Amazon App Store is shipped as a purely vanilla media player, and the add-ons available from within the Kodi repository are entirely piracy free, pointing only to legal streams available to anyone on the internet. Installing piracy-related add-ons onto Kodi is roughly as difficult as installing pirated apks onto an Amazon Android device.

Perhaps most frustratingly, while Amazon has removed the Kodi app from its app store, in its physical store it continues to sell set top boxes that are clearly violating the Kodi trademark by associating Kodi with pirated add-ons and other material. Which means, as far as we can tell, one of the biggest single organizations pushing the use of Kodi for piracy is Amazon itself.

If you’d like to read more on the topic, AFTVnews and TorrentFreak do a pretty good rundown of the situation as it currently stands.

We spent some time going back and forth trying to find a shirt to protest Amazon’s removing Kodi from their App Store, but at the end of the day, we decided all our ideas sounded a bit too much like the proletariat protesting the establishment. So instead, here’s a cool, distressed looking shirt that we like a lot. Important to mention is that compared to previous T-shirts, the prices for shipping are far more reasonable. Have fun!

Credit to forum user Tinwarble for the cool Kodi Shield image.