Hey team!
Alexa+ just went free on Fire TV for everyone in the US! So for Alexa+ devs, your audience just got bigger, and for Fire TV devs, the audience will be able find your content that much easier.
Alexa+ add-ons can now take payments and run a full checkout inside an Alexa+ conversation, with your own backend staying the merchant of record.
OpenIAP now supports Fire OS and Vega OS, so you can use one API for all your app payments including Google Play, Apple, and now the Amazon Appstore!
If your app is still on cloud streaming for Vega, we published a new guide for migrating a cloud-streamed app to native Vega OS.
We're heading into a full fall conference season, and the team is all over the world: Giovanni Laquidara at AGNTCon in Shanghai, Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde with Gio at Agent Conf in Warsaw, and I'm giving a talk at CityJS Athens. We hope to see you there!
If you're looking for something to watch, there are two agent builds below: wiring Claude Code into Amazon Bedrock and Giovanni on teaching an agent to build TV apps.
Let's dive in!
🛠️ Dev Updates
- 📊 New Alexa+ add-ons Metrics Catalog — A reference for the account-linking, permission, engagement, and task-completion metrics available for Alexa+ add-ons, so you can measure how yours is used (no payments-specific metrics yet).
- 📷 Ring Partner API now documents multi-camera devices — A new Multi-Camera Devices section covers hardware like the Ring Elite lineup that carries more than one camera module: the device reports as one unit, and each module is a
component_idyou can target per camera across Capabilities, Configurations, Live Video, RTSP, Media Clips, Image Snapshots, and Motion Detection webhooks.
📢 Announcements
💳 Alexa+ add-ons can now take payments and run checkout in-conversation
- New docs lay out a UCP-compatible REST checkout (five HTTPS endpoints, a
.well-known/ucpprofile, OAuth 2.0, idempotency) where your own backend stays the merchant of record and source of truth for cart, pricing, tax, and fulfillment, with two payment paths you can combine to cut drop-off: a Partner Wallet for cards saved with your service via account linking, and an Amazon Wallet for instruments in the customer's Amazon account.
🧩 OpenIAP now supports Fire OS and Vega OS in-app purchases
- OpenIAP, the open-source IAP standard behind react-native-iap and expo-iap and now backed by Amazon alongside Meta, has added support for both Fire TV operating systems: Fire OS through the Amazon Appstore SDK (a Gradle-level flavor switch if you already ship Android) and Vega OS through a Kepler IAP adapter, with receipt verification and product IDs staying consistent across both, so a React Native, Expo, or Flutter app can sell consumables, entitlements, and subscriptions on Amazon devices through one API. It's live in the current stable releases, and OpenIAP's own announcement has the per-framework setup.
📺 Alexa+ is now free on Fire TV for everyone in the US
- No Prime or subscription required on current Fire TV Sticks, the Fire TV Cube, Amazon Ember smart TVs, and third-party Alexa+ built-in TVs; the free tier covers conversational content discovery, on-screen questions, live camera feeds, and smart-home control, which puts a much larger audience within reach of Alexa+ add-ons.
📅 Events
We're heading into a full fall conference season. The agentic-AI run kicks off with AGNTCon in Shanghai and Agent Conf in Warsaw, where our team is giving talks and a workshop, then Next App Con Berlin and CityJS Athens round out October with a talk each. We hope to see you there!
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 26–30 | Gamescom | Cologne, DE | The world's largest games event; we'll be on the floor. |
| Sep 6–7 | AGNTCon + MCPCon China | Shanghai, CN | The Linux Foundation's open agentic-AI summit, where Sr. Dev Advocate Giovanni Laquidara gives a talk on Sep 7, "I Taught an Agent to Build TV Apps," on a TV-app coding harness built with the Claude Agent SDK and Strands SDK. |
| Sep 11 | ZurichJS Conf | Zurich, CH | An annual JavaScript conference in Zurich covering web, frameworks, and emerging JS platforms. |
| Sep 11–14 | IBC Show | Amsterdam, NL | The world's leading media, entertainment, and broadcast-technology show at RAI Amsterdam, with 1,300+ exhibitors and 600+ speakers. |
| Sep 17–18 | Agent Conf | Warsaw, PL | Dev Advocates Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde are giving a talk, and Giovanni Laquidara is leading a workshop. |
| Sep 24 | React Native Connection | Paris, FR | A React Native community conference; we'll be there. |
| Oct 7–9 | Next App Con Berlin | Berlin, DE | A mobile and app-platform conference at Berlin's CityCube, where we'll have a speaker and a workshop. |
| Oct 21–23 | CityJS Athens | Athens, GR | Dev Advocate Moses Roth is giving a talk. |
| Oct 21–22 | NAB Show New York | New York City, US | The East-coast edition of NAB Show, a broadcast, media, and entertainment-technology conference at the Javits Center. |
| Oct 22–23 | AGNTCon + MCPCon North America | San Jose, US | The North America edition of the Linux Foundation's agentic-AI conference, with MCP and agent-systems tracks for builders, contributors, and enterprises. |
💬 Dev Posts
We finally have the recording from Giovanni's droidcon talk for those of you who couldn't be there in person, and it's a great watch on teaching an agent to build TV apps. Alongside it this week: a new guide for migrating a cloud-streamed Fire OS app to native Vega OS, and a short walkthrough of wiring Claude Code into Amazon Bedrock so your coding agent runs against your own account.
📽️ I Taught an Agent to Build TV Apps: Lessons from Building a Coding Harness
Sr. Dev Advocate Giovanni Laquidara walks through the coding harness he built to hand the grind of TV-app boilerplate to an AI agent, on top of the Claude Agent SDK and Strands SDK: how to structure the tools, when to reach for which SDK, keeping the agent honest with SOPs and evals, and bridging into Android Studio, Gradle, and the platform CLIs.
📰 Migrate a cloud-streamed Fire OS app to native Vega OS
A new step-by-step guide for Cloud App Program developers who've ported their app to React Native for Vega and want to replace the cloud-streamed Fire OS version with a native Vega OS package. It walks through building a VPKG with a higher version and build number, reassigning device targeting so Vega OS devices get the package, and submitting for approval. Uploading the VPKG automatically removes the app from the Cloud App Program, so there's no separate removal request.
📽️ Building Apps on AWS Using Claude Code
Senior Developer Advocate Erik Hanchett wires Claude Code into Amazon Bedrock with two environment variables so model calls stay inside AWS and bill to your own account, then installs the AWS Agent Toolkit, scaffolds an agent with Strands, and runs the same setup in Claude Desktop. A practical starting point if you want your coding agent talking to Bedrock without routing anything out of your account.
📰 Preparing your app for broader memory limits
By Blair Harmon
Android 17's per-app memory limits are expanding beyond Pixel to more manufacturers over the coming year, across 4GB to 16GB+ devices, even as new hardware holds or cuts physical RAM to offset rising memory prices. Exceed the limit and the system compresses your app's pages into zRAM (CPU overhead and jank), then terminates it. Fire TV and Fire tablet developers should read this too: Fire OS is Android, and memory is already at a premium on low-RAM TV sticks. It covers how to spot limiter kills in production (ApplicationExitInfo, ProfilingManager heap dumps, Android vitals) and the adb commands to test against the new limits first.
📬 Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!
Top comments (0)