Once upon a time you could play Scrabble, do crossword puzzles, and run other third-party apps and games on Amazon Kindle eReaders.
But Amazon stopped offering the feature in 2014 when the company launched the Kindle Voyage. Every new model since then has lacked support for so-called “Kindle Active Content.”
Still, if you had an older Kindle, you may have been able to continue purchasing and installing apps and games from the Kindle Store… until recently. Now you can’t do that anymore.
As discovered by members of the MobileRead forum, Amazon has removed the Kindle Active Content section of the Kindle store.
It’s not exactly surprising that Amazon stopped selling these apps and games six years after the company started phasing them out.
If you do have an older Kindle device capable of running games like Sudoku, poker, blackjack, or chess, then you may want to hold off on installing any firmware updates (assuming Amazon even offers them for your model), as some users also report that newer versions of the Kindle software kills support for Active Content.
Meanwhile some other eBook makers continue to embrace support for third-party apps by releasing devices with E Ink displays and Android-based operating systems, making it relatively simple to install apps and games designed for phones and tablets. Just keep in mind that many of them aren’t really designed for devices with grayscale displays and slow screen refresh rates.