Looking for information on the Kodi remote control app for Android? See Kore -The official Kodi Remote for Android.

Read this page and still need help? Check out the Kodi for Android support forum.

Kodi for Android is a full port of the complete Kodi application to Google's Android operating-system. With the Android NDK (Native Development Kit for Android) Kodi runs natively under Android as a Native Activity application. The main goal for the Android port is to have Kodi working on inexpensive Android set-top-boxes. And whole Android smartphones and tablets are not the main target platforms they do have limited support as well.

1 Main topics

Other Android-specific wiki pages for topics, guides, and advice. For everything else standard Kodi pages will normally apply.

HOW-TO:Install Kodi for Android

This page describes how to install Kodi, either from an app "store" such as Google Play, or manually from an APK file. Android hardware

For most high-definition videos (1080p or higher resolution), hardware video decoding is necessary for smooth video playback on most Android devices. Therefor this article contains a list of SoC chipset hardware, (SoC stands for "System on a Chip" which contain the CPU plus GPU and VPU circuits combination, and is also known as a "chipset"), as on Android platforms this SoC chipset is what can playback common video codecs smoothly using Kodi/XBMC. Android_development

Team-Kodi (formerly called Team-XBMC) first ported XBMC Media Center software to Android in 2012, and the whole project cross-platform application was renamed to Kodi in 2014. Kodi itself is a huge open source project and it takes loads of people working together to maintain it for all platforms, that is why Team-Kodi is always on the lookout for C/C++ programmers to volunteer in assisting us with the development of Kodi. Whether you have contributed to the Kodi/XBMC project in the past or not, please consider doing so now. Touch controls

Touch gestures can be used to control Kodi on touch screen type devices such as those for Android and iOS and is installed preconfigured with default touch actions.

2 Requirements

Main page: Android hardware

Supported hardware See also:

It is highly recommended for users to not make any hardware purchases in anticipation of running Kodi on Android without first researching the device you want to buy. Before you do buy, make sure multiple people have verified that it works! If in doubt, do not buy any hardware!

Kodi v17 and later requires Android 5.0 or higher.

x86 (Intel) or a NEON-compatible ARM-processor, (for example: Nvidia Tegra 3 and newer are fully supported by Kodi, while Tegra 2 and older are not).

The main aim for the Android port of Kodi is to foremost target media-players/set-top-boxes/sticks that connect to a large screen television and uses a standard remote control as its main interface device, (that is the same market as for HTPC).

3 How-tos

Assorted how-tos related to the video library that have been added to the wiki:





As of v14, Kodi supports a backdoor to specify the location of your settings folder, which includes the userdata folder and add-ons. It is the equivalent of using environment variables on other platforms

This page describes how to install Kodi, either from an app "store" such as Google Play, or manually from an APK file.

This page describes some of the methods to install Kodi onto an Amazon Fire TV (box) or Fire TV Stick. The Fire TV uses Kodi for android and does not require root. All Fire TV products allow sideloading, so no hacking or modification is required to install Kodi.

Android apps can be launched from within Kodi by going to Programs -> Android programs . It is even possible to launch Android apps from shortcuts on the main menu for skins that supports custom home items.

To use an external player on Kodi for Android you simply need to make a playercorefactory.xml file in the userdata folder.





4 Tips and tricks

Avoid using wireless. A lot of Android boxes and "sticks" have weak wifi, even those that advertise as being wireless-n. It may be possible to use a USB-to-ethernet dongle on some devices, or even a USB wifi adapter that has a better wifi radio than what is built-in.

Switch to a different network protocol to see if that has any effect, i.e. SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP, WebDAV, etc.

Try sharing the media on another device to rule out a device-specific (or network) issue.

Turn off thumbnails, Kodi -> Settings -> Video -> File and deselect 'generate thumbnails'.

H.264 videos encoded with Hi10P profile will not work on some Android hardware as some ARM processors are not powerful enough to software decode it, and no hardware decoders exist for it. However, some newer/faster processors are able to playback Hi10P video using software decoding.

If RSS feed is enabled, disable it in settings. This can make the main menu a bit faster.

Running out of disk space storage, or want to try tweaking caching and other performance settings to achieve faster response times?

4.1 Helpful applications

Some helpful Kodi related Android applications, as suggested by the community. This list should not be seen as any kind of official endorsement by Kodi.



