Upload to Amazon AppStore

[kno10]

Problem

It would be very cool, to allow kids on Amazon Fire devices to play minetest.

Solutions

It should be easy to upload an App to Amazon.

Unfortunately, Amazon is a PAIN, with extremely unhelpful service. Be prepared to repeatedly receive canned responses such along the lines of

Thank you for contacting us. Your app contains Minetest. Please provide documentation demonstrating that you have the right to Minetest in Title, Icon and Metadata by visiting the Contact Us page and selecting the category “Appstore” and the Topic “Content Policy Results”. The documentation must be either a confirmation letter from the intellectual property rights holder or a copy of the applicable license.

and they will send you the same over and over again, even if you copy them the license text.

Alternatives

Give users instructions how to install F-droid on Amazon Fire devices, and how to kill their monitoring service, tahoe.

Additional context

No response

[kno10]

DO NOT BUY AMAZON KIDS PRODUCTS

if you intend to run open-source such as minetest on them.

After reopening the ticket and providing full license documentation, this is the next action by Amazon AppStore:

We are contacting you regarding your developer account and submitted applications with the Amazon Developer Program.
During our review processes, we have found that your application(s) contains content that infringes on the intellectual property rights of other parties.
Due to violations of our content guidelines and/or our developer agreement, we have disabled your developer account and suppressed and/or rejected all submitted applications associated with this developer account. We have retained records of your developer account but your account is now terminated from further submission uploads.
Note that you are not permitted to create a new developer account with the Amazon Developer Program.

Yes, you heard this right, they completely banned me from AppStore without any actual reasoning.

I really think minetest should be on the AppStore, but you may need to involve a lawyer.

[rubenwardy]

I suspect it may be because you're trying to submit Minetest without our permission. The LGPL license doesn't give you the right to the Minetest name

[kno10]

@rubenwardy Its unmodified, in fact I simply uploaded the .apk from F-droid.
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.minetest.minetest/
and included the link to www.minetest.net/get-involved/#donate in the description. If you insist on a name change, this will likely rule out minetest from all Linux distributions, but require them to fork it just to change the name...

To quote the LGPL:

1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Library's complete source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and distribute a copy of this License along with the Library.

I provided them with the full license documentation.
If they object to the name, they can say so precisely, not with a generic canned response.
They could have rejected the submission, but they completely closed the account (fortunately, I did not have anything else in the AppStore).
But all you get from Amazon Crapstore is canned responses.

But nevertheless: as I do not want to have to take care of updates myself (and am only interested in a single installation), I would rather see an official upload from the minetest team. This was just a temporary solution to get around the com.amazon.tahoe service that kills any app it does not recognize. So while you can install the .apk via adb, it will be automatically killed every minute. Amazon does not allow you to install your own apks on your device.

To anybody struggling with running minetest on Amazon Kids tablets:

adb install minetest-5.8.0-armeabi-v7a.apk
adb shell am force-stop com.amazon.tahoe
adb shell pm disable-user com.amazon.tahoe

and using ES File Manager to launch the app may work. Use at your own risk. Tahoe is likely also responsible for enforcing the time usage limits you may have set, so this may break the "parental controls" of Amazon (not that they are actually useful - they are incredibly poor).
It would be better if Amazon Kids weren't this crap, and I as a parent could install (and time limit) arbitrary applications. Instead of giving parents a decent control over the contents, the Amazon Kids+ software is built like the Amazon front page, to raise the next generation of mindless consumer drones.