The Amazon Kindle Fire appeals to people who like the idea of a tablet to read books, watch movies and do some simple things like surfing the web and checking their email. You can also play games. But how good does the Kindle Fire do for Bible Study apps. We’ve got the 5 best Kindle Bible Study apps that run on the Kindle Fire.
A Kindle runs a heavily skinned version of Android. The Fire OS runs Android 7.1 Nougat, which lags a few generations behind. Google released Android Pi in 2018 and will release unnamed Android O this year.
The fact that Fire OS uses Android means many Android Bible apps will run just fine on the Kindle Fire. However, the app creator must choose to send their app to the Amazon Kindle App Store, which has some of the most stringent evaluation processes of any App Store. This leads many app developers to ignore Amazon.
The following apps come in no particular order. I chose them based on…
- Price of the app plus add-on books
- Size of library
- Quality of the app and its features
- Stability and speed of the app
- Olive Tree Bible Reader
- Accordance Mobile
Bible by Olive Tree
The best Kindle Fire Bible app comes from Olive Tree. Bible by Olive Tree includes a simple user interface but also includes powerful enough features to let Bible students study the original languages and use most of the best commentaries available on mobile devices today.
The modern translations and better commentaries or other reference books will cost extra. They offer free books and even some language study tools for nothing extra. However, the Olive Tree library carries more resources than the other apps here.
Open your favorite Bible and then look at the Resource Guide, available along the right or bottom (depending on whether you hold the Fire in landscape or portrait mode). The resource guide will find all of the books in your library that include info about that passage.
The user can do the basics, like highlighting, searching, take notes, sharing verses and bookmarking. Add to that the excellent user of the tap and hold to work with the text and the resource guide, and you get an awesome Bible reading and study experience on the Amazong Kindle Fire.
Accordance Mobile
The Accordance Mobile Bible app gives users access to their Accordance books for free. Even Kindle owners who don’t own any books on Accordance can download it for free and get some free books. Sign up for an account for free, also, and you’ll get a few more books. However, it works best if users invest in the Accordance ecosystem on Mac or Windows.
When you see all it can do, you’ll likely agree it’s the best app for advanced Bible students while remaining simple enough for the average Bible reader. I prever the user interface of Bible by Olive Tree above, but Accordance comes in at a close second. The app’s description lists the free resources. I quote it here:
The following free resources are included in your initial download of Accordance Mobile for Android:
• ESV Bible with Strong’s numbers (ESVi)
• World English Bible (WEB)
• Samples of the Greek New Testament and Hebrew Bible
• Easton’s Bible Dictionary
• Outlines of each book of the Bible
• Margin notes and cross-references
• Bible Lands PhotoGuide Sampler
• Kohlenberger/Mounce Concise Hebrew–Aramaic Dictionary
• Mounce Concise Greek-English Dictionary
• BiblicalTraining.org
If you register an Accordance account, you will also be able to download a free Android Starter collection including:
From Accordance Mobile page in Amazon App Store
• The 1901 American Standard Version (ASV)
• French: Louis Segond Bible
• German Elberfelder 1905
• German Lutherbibel 1912
• Greek and Hebrew Strong’s Dictionaries
• Hitchcock’s Dictionary of Bible Names
• Nave’s Topical Bible
• Portuguese Bible: João Ferreira De Almeida Atualizada (ALMEIDA)
• Spanish 1909 Reina Valera with Strong’s numbers
• Dr. J’s Bible Study Methods
• Maps Sampler
• Timeline Sampler
• Chronological Readings
• Devotional Readings
• Classic Passages
• Parables & Miracles
You can read the Bible and search for words, topics and even more powerfully search for tags, lemmas and more.
The app lets you open two books at a single time and set it up so the app will scroll the two books together as you move through a passage. The Bible will cause the other book, like a second text, a commentary or study Bible, showing the information about the same verses displayed in the Bible.
Tap and hold on the word and you’ll get a toolbar open up. Tagged English Bibles will let you look up the word based on the Strong’s number. Greek and Hebrew words will let you see morphological details.
There’s also a simple way to share text outside the app.
YouVersion from Life Church
The YouVersion Bible app from Life Church is the most popular Bible app available. It’s not a powerful Bible study app, but it does a great job for people with simple needs.
The app is totally free and lets you download modern translations like the NIV, ESV, CSB, NKJV or NLT. You can also get the public domain books like the KJV. They don’t offer Greek or Hebrew texts for original language research.
Life Church’s apps excels at giving users a good Bible reading experience with a plethora of devotional reading plans. It also will share the app in beautiful mean-style images with text.
People who like to highlight and take notes in their Bible can do so with the Bible app. These will sync with the ministry’s Bible website.
Do you want to keep up with another person’s Bible reading? This helps with keeping one another accountable and YouVersion makes this simple. Follow one another and share your reading progress.
Because the Bible app’s totally free, it also doesn’t include things like language study, commentaries or other books to help you study beyond basic reading. You can listen to the Bible in the app.
Tecarta Bible
I use this app the least, but it always shows up as one of the most popular apps. It’s a step above the Bible app from YouVersion, but below Accordance Mobile, Olive Tree and other more advanced Bible study apps.
Tecarta Bible costs nothing to download the basic app on the Kindle Fire. However, the more modern translations will cost the user. If you want to read the NIV, ESV, NLT, CSB or other modern translations you’ll pay through either in-app purchases or on their website.
The user interace looks attractive and simple enough to learn quickly. Users can read, search, bookmar, take notes, highlight and study using commentaries and Strong’s tagged Bibles (KJV and NASB).
Tecarta offers a subscription service that costs $5/month or $40/year. The first month is free. That’s an interesting deal, but might get costly if you don’t need a lot of books. Head over to their store to judge for yourself whether buying a few books or subscribing the premium offering works best for you.
Bible Gateway
Like Tecarta, Bible Gateway offers a subscription model for accessing books other than the ones that come free with the app.
The app focuses on Bible reading with a verse of the day feature on the main screen. Listen to the Bible or read following one of their many reading plans. You can also share verses through the app to social media.
When you subscribe you’ll get access to more modern translations and some nice commentaries.
Like all the other apps, users can read, search, notate and highlight the Bible. Run the app with two books open on screen at a time. They will follow one another as you scroll through the book. Share verses with socila networks or family using your phone’s sharing feature.
Where’s Logos Bible?
A lot of people who read this site will ask, “Where’s Logos?” I put it on my list best apps in more than one place. On iOS and more traditional Android phones and tablets, it runs well and would easily make this list. The app does not work well on a Kindle Fire.
I own the latest version of the Kindle Fire – the 2018 Kindle Fire 8. I bought it because I no longer own a Chromebook or Android phone. Instead of paying $150 for a cheap Android tablet or $550 for the Samsung Galaxy S4, the best Android Tablet for sale now, I chose to get a cheap Kindle Fire.
The Fire showed up in my mailbox so I opened it up and loaded the Logos Bible app on the tablet and fired it up. It takes a few minutes to set up in the background. So, I put down the table and let it do its thing. Then I downloaded a few books and opened up my favorite Bibles and Study Bibles the way I like.
Later, I came back to my newly setup Kindle Fire 8 and fired up the Logos Bible app and it took forever to load. Then it immediately crashed. A few attempts at restarting the app failed so I restarted the Kindle Fire and it loaded this time. But the app takes forever to do anything.
Some will tell you that the Logos Bible app needs to “phone home” meaning it connects to the Logos servers to a lot of what you want to do with the app. I downloaded books to the tablet and tried to run using only those books. The app still chugged along like a school bus loaded with 8 year-olds who are my size climbing the Appalachian Mountains along I-40 near my house. It can get there, but it won’t be fast. It also seems to just stop for long periods of time.
You may not have any of these problems. I’d like to see a video of the Bible app from Logos running fine on your Kindle Fire. Post a link in the comments below and if I get a few I re-evaluate my situation and my chose to leave it off this list.
