Good morning, everyone!
The big news this week is our all-new Alexa Tablets, with Alexa+ built in and Google Play on board, and new Amazon Kids Tablets for younger and older kids. If you're targeting either, the device specs are live.
Ring had a big week too: a smart lock you can recharge by hand, arriving in early 2027, and five new cameras, led by four Retinal 4K models and Ring's first pan-tilt indoor cam. For Ring Appstore developers, the API now reports end-to-end encryption status, and there are new computer vision guidelines for apps that analyze camera video.
New to AWS, or know someone who is? The new AWS Free Tier gives new accounts $100 in credits up front and up to $100 more as you try core services, with no charges on the Free plan, and two short videos below show the new sign-up experience and how to build without setting up permissions first.
The Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is online and open for you to join. In person, the team heads to CityJS Athens and NAB Show New York. After that we'll be at React Advanced London and GitHub Universe. We'll close out the season at AWS re:Invent 2026 in Las Vegas.
Happy building!
🤖 ADBT for AI 1.0.16: a dedicated agent and WebView debugging — Amazon Devices Builder Tools for AI 1.0.16 lets you install a dedicated adbt-dev agent into your coding host and call on it only when you want Amazon Devices help, for Vega and Fire OS apps, and adds WebView debugging through Chrome DevTools for Vega apps, where ADBT detects a WebView app and picks the right tools.
❓ Alexa Tablet Devices FAQ: distribution, testing, and ads — The new FAQ for Alexa Tablets covers what changes for developers: you distribute through Google Play (except Amazon Kids+ apps), test with Google Play's pre-launch tracks because Appstore Quality Central and Live App Testing don't support these devices, and use Google AdMob or similar since Amazon Publisher Services isn't available on them.
:mobile_phone_with_arrow: In-App Purchasing: authenticated Real-Time Notifications — In-App Purchasing now lets you verify your Real-Time Notifications endpoint with a confirmation token set in the Developer Console, so your backend can confirm purchase and subscription events come from us before acting on them.
🔒 Ring Appstore API: end-to-end encryption status — The Ring Appstore API now reports whether a user's device video is end-to-end encrypted, so update your integration to detect encrypted footage and skip processing it, and read the new Developer FAQ section on encryption modes before your next release.
🔘 Computer Vision Guidelines for Ring Appstore Apps — A new Ring developer guide gives Ring Appstore apps that analyze camera video or images a tiered computer vision pattern that spends on the events users care about rather than every motion trigger, and explains when a single managed API call is the better choice, so read it before you pick your first model.
🏪 Resolve Scan Test Cases for physical stores — New Resolve Scan test cases for identity connectors cover accept and reject responses, malformed input, server errors, and load performance for physical stores with Just Walk Out.
💻 Kiro CLI V3 is now the default — Kiro CLI V3 brings the same agent harness as Kiro IDE and Kiro Web to your terminal, with spec-driven workflows, background agents, and cloud sessions that keep running after you close your laptop, so expect the new experience on your next update.
:alexa: Introducing all-new Amazon Alexa Tablets and Amazon Kids Tablets
- Both new tablet families run Android with Google Play, so if your Android app is already on Google Play it can now reach our three-model Alexa Tablet lineup with Alexa+ built in, and the new Amazon Kids Tablets once a parent approves it; the Alexa Tablet device specifications give you each model's hardware details to plan testing, especially multi-window and pen input on the 12 Pro.
🔘 Ring introduces a rechargeable smart lock, four new 4K cameras, and a pan-tilt indoor cam
- For anyone designing a connected device that can't be allowed to fail closed, Ring's first smart lock is a useful reference: you recharge it by hand with a built-in crank dial, it stays connected over Amazon Sidewalk instead of home Wi-Fi, and it arrives in the U.S. in early 2027 alongside four new 4K cameras and Ring's first pan-tilt indoor cam. Read more about the smart lock and the cameras on About Amazon, or the full lineup on the Ring blog.
☁️ The new AWS Free Tier: up to $200 in credits to start building
- New AWS accounts now get $100 in credits up front and can earn up to $100 more by trying core services, with six months on a Free plan that won't charge you, so a backend for your Fire TV, Alexa, or Vega app costs nothing to start; Aaron Hunter demos the new sign-up flow and Erik Hanchett shows how to build without setting up permissions first.
Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is underway online, so jump in and build before the deadline. On the road, I'm giving a talk at CityJS Athens, and my fellow Dev Advocate Gio is presenting "Hand the Agent the Clicker" at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America on Oct 22, where he'll show how Porthole streams Android TV emulators to a browser and hands the same controls to an AI agent over MCP, before we head to AWS re:Invent 2026. We hope to see you there!
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31 – Oct 23 | Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon | Online | Our first global developer hackathon: build on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee across four tracks for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits, with submissions closing October 23. |
| Oct 21–23 | CityJS Athens | Athens, GR | Dev Advocate Moses Roth is giving a talk. Athens edition of the CityJS conference series, covering modern JavaScript and frontend frameworks. |
| Oct 21–22 | NAB Show New York | New York City, US | East-coast edition of NAB Show, the broadcast, media, and entertainment-tech industry conference, at the Javits Center. |
| Oct 22–23 | AGNTCon + MCPCon North America | San Jose, US | Sr. Dev Advocate Giovanni Laquidara is giving a talk on Oct 22, "Hand the Agent the Clicker," on Porthole, a CLI and MCP server that streams Android and Android TV emulators to a browser for a human and exposes the same controls to an AI agent over MCP. Linux Foundation conference for the open agentic AI ecosystem, with MCP and agent-systems tracks for builders, contributors, and enterprises. |
| Oct 23–26 | React Advanced London | London, GB | Annual advanced-React conference in London for senior practitioners working with the framework at scale. |
| Oct 28–29 | GitHub Universe | San Francisco, US | GitHub's flagship two-day event for developers, maintainers, and technical leaders, focused on collaboration and workflows in the agentic era. |
| Oct 29–31 | React India | Goa, IN | India's largest React conference, covering web, mobile, and emerging React platforms. |
| Nov 9–12 | Web Summit | Lisbon, PT | One of Europe's largest tech conferences, with broad coverage across AI, devices, startups, and platforms. |
| Nov 10–12 | AI Engineer Code Summit | San Francisco, US | The code-focused summit in the AI Engineer conference series, on agent and LLM development. |
| Nov 30 – Dec 4 | AWS re:Invent 2026 | Las Vegas, US | AWS's flagship annual conference, with 1,000+ technical sessions, keynotes, workshops, and the largest cloud-community gathering of the year. |
This week's reads and watches pair hardware with agents: Engadget's Alexa Tablet 12 Pro hands-on, a look inside the Amazon Leo satellite production line, and Swami Sivasubramanian on running AI agents at Amazon scale.
📽️ Introducing Ring’s latest lineup | 4K cameras, groundbreaking innovations, and more
On the Ring channel, a tour of the newest device lineup centers on a run of Retinal 4K cameras built to cover a home, business, or neighborhood from any angle. If you build for the smart home, this shows where Ring hardware is heading and what your users are likely to mount next.
📽️ Amazon Alexa Tablet 12 Pro hands-on
Engadget's Cherlynn Low gets hands-on with the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, from its nanomatte display to the new Alexa-first interface. She spends most of her time on the Dynamic Tab and how Alexa runs through the tablet's software, a useful outside look at how the assistant behaves on a large screen.
📰 How Amazon Leo built one of the world's biggest satellite production lines
By Zack Brown
We've now built more than 1,000 satellites for the Amazon Leo constellation in low Earth orbit, and this story goes inside the factory floor that got us there. Satellites used to be built one at a time, so it's a useful look at what changes when spacecraft come off a production line at constellation scale.
📽️ eDreams: the AI powering a travel subscription of 8 million+ members
On the AI Innovator Series, Emerson Sklar (Alexa Chief Evangelist) talks with Carsten Bernhard, Chief Technology Officer of eDreams ODIGEO, about how more than a decade of AI work grew into a network of specialised agents running the company's travel platforms. Carsten explains why his engineers ship AI-generated code only after a human has verified it, a useful model for any team bringing coding agents into production. He also talks about what Alexa+ could mean for how travelers interact with a subscription service.
📰 How AWS is helping companies build machines that think
We launched the Physical AI Toolchain on AWS, an open-source stack for building machines that sense their surroundings, reason with cloud-trained models, and adapt on the job. It brings architecture guidance, deployment automation, and ready-to-use code together with NVIDIA's physical AI stack, and it covers the whole lifecycle from training a model to running it across a fleet. Uwem Ukpong, vice president of AWS Industries, frames it as a way to put engineering hours back into the robot instead of the plumbing. If you're working on industrial automation, autonomous mobility, or humanoid robotics, it's open code you can pull apart and build on today.
📽️ Running AI Agents at Amazon Scale: Swami Sivasubramanian on Staying On the Loop, Not in It
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI & Emerging Technologies at AWS, sits down with Brad Porter for a candid conversation about where AI assistants end and AI agents begin. His org builds Kiro and Bedrock AgentCore, so his idea of a developer staying "on the loop" rather than in it comes from running these tools at real scale. The most useful part is how agents have changed the way we work internally, from large engineering migrations to prototyping before anything gets written down. Worth the time if you're deciding how much of your own workflow to hand to an agent.
📰 OpenIAP opens its purchase layer to community providers
By Hyo Jang
OpenIAP, the open-source purchase layer behind react-native-iap and expo-iap, now lets any store plug in through a public native contract, so a store's billing integration can live in its own repository while apps keep the same purchase APIs across React Native, Expo, Flutter, Godot, Kotlin Multiplatform and MAUI. Purchases now carry an explicit storeId for routing backend verification, and a conformance suite and registry show which providers were actually tested. The release ships an independent Amazon example provider for learning the pattern; for a normal Fire OS app, the official Amazon integration is still where to start. It's a major upgrade, so read the migration steps before you bump versions.
📽️ Build on AWS Without Worrying About Permissions
Setting up IAM has long been the first thing standing between a new AWS account and actual building. Erik Hanchett demos how the new sign-up experience takes that setup off your plate: you create a project, invite a teammate, and get to work without designing accounts and permissions first. It's worth a few minutes if you've been putting off a side project or bringing a collaborator onto AWS.
📽️ AWS Free Tier and the New AWS Experience
Aaron Hunter demos the new sign-up flow, which takes a fresh account to a first project, usually without a credit card. The headline is the credits: $100 for signing up and up to $100 more for trying core services. It also shows how to set a spend cap so experimenting can't turn into a surprise bill.
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