DEV Community: Moses Roth

Amazon Dev News • Vega 2.0 & New Alexa Devices • Nov 2, 2026

Moses Roth — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 15:18:10 +0000

Hi dev team!

The big news this week is the new lineup of Alexa devices: the Echo Show 16, a new Echo Dot and Echo Studio with Home Camera, Echo Time, Alexa Photo Frame, and Alexa Home Map. Alexa+ is also rolling out in early access in Japan.

A bunch of Vega updates this week: the Vega beta has ended and Vega 2.0 is out. Anisha walks through the upgrade to React Native 0.83 for Vega OS and Barak explains the new Vega native APIs with two sample apps: a native UI component and a periodic background task, and there are new hands-on Vega workshops. If you're moving a Fire OS app over, there's a guide to porting it to Vega with ADBT, and Zattoo shares how it unified its TV apps.

On the events side, Kiroween 2026 has started and Kourtney is headed to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas to lead a workshop on Bee.

📲 In-App Purchasing: EU subscription refund window — In-App Purchasing's Types of Purchases page now notes that EU customers can cancel a subscription within 14 days of sign-up and get a refund.
🛠️ Just Walk Out for physical stores: new authorization docs — The Just Walk Out technology docs for Amazon physical stores add pages for bringing your own shopper authorization: considerations, device registration, device heartbeat, Start Auth and Process Auth, plus fixes across several existing pages.
⚛️ Vega: new sample apps and workshops — New on the Amazon Developer GitHub: a native UI component sample for building C++ UI components in a React Native for Vega app, a periodic background task sample for running scheduled JavaScript after the app closes, and hands-on workshops on upgrading to React Native 0.83 and shipping one TV app across Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, and web.

⚛️ Vega 2.0 general availability

If you've been putting off a React Native upgrade or a Fire OS port, Vega OS 2.0 and the Vega SDK 2.0 are now generally available, with a much newer React Native, new native APIs, Amazon Devices Builder Tools for AI to help with the move, and breaking changes limited to one major release a year so minor SDK updates won't mean rework.

💬 The newest lineup of Alexa devices

If you build Alexa skills, smart home devices, or Fire TV apps, your customers will soon be using our newest Alexa+ hardware: the redesigned Echo Show 16 with Fire TV built in, the Echo Time nightstand clock, the Alexa Photo Frame, and a new Echo Dot with a built-in smart home hub, plus an Echo Studio with Home Camera, all tied together by Alexa Home Map, a 3D view where people control connected gear by tapping where it sits in the room.

🗾 Alexa+ arrives in Japan

If your skill or connected device serves customers in Japan, Alexa+ started rolling out there in Early Access on October 29 as a conversational assistant we built for Japanese rather than translated, across Echo, Fire TV, and the Alexa app, joining a dozen countries including the U.S., UK, Germany, Brazil, and Australia.

🤖 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore CLI version 1.0

Building AI agents from the terminal just got faster: AgentCore CLI 1.0 is now generally available, with quicker startup, a consistent command structure, guided menus, direct access to memory, identity, and gateway resources without wrapping them in a project first, and a migration path for existing projects.

This season we're heading to AWS re:Invent 2026 in Las Vegas, where Dev Advocate Kourtney is leading a workshop, "Turn a Bee wearable into your re:Invent notetaking companion." Web Summit in Lisbon, the AI Engineer Code Summit in San Francisco, and the online Kiroween 2026 hackathon are also worth a look, and we hope to see you in Vegas!

Date	Event	Location	Description
Oct 30 – Dec 4	Kiroween 2026	Online	Kiro's annual Halloween-themed hackathon: build a new app with Kiro in one of four categories for a share of $100,000+ in prizes, with submissions due December 4.
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. Dev Advocate Kourtney Meiss is leading a workshop, "Turn a Bee wearable into your re:Invent notetaking companion."

Vega developers get a new release and a migration guide this week: React Native 0.83 for Vega OS and From Fire OS to Vega: Porting your TV app to React Native for Vega with ADBT. Zattoo walks through its own move in How Zattoo Unified Its TV Apps with React Native and Vega OS. There are also new pieces on Ring cameras for small businesses, prompt optimization in Amazon Bedrock, home robots, connecting your coding agent to AWS, and Kourtney's talk on keeping up with AI without burning out.

📽️ How Zattoo Unified Its TV Apps with React Native and Vega OS

Zattoo was one of the first apps on Vega OS. On DEV Chat, Bogdan Plieshka, Principal Frontend Engineer at Zattoo, tells host Chris Traganos how a native team with no React Native background rebuilt its TV experience on one codebase it shares with web and mobile. He's candid about keeping playback fast on streaming sticks that people keep for years, and about how AI moved his team's time from writing code to reviewing it. If you're thinking about moving to Vega, this is a practical look at what that switch involves. If you'd rather read it, the written case study covers the same move.

📰 React Native 0.83 for Vega OS

By Anisha Malde

If your Fire TV app is still on React Native 0.72, this is the upgrade guide to read first. Anisha Malde lays out the jump to 0.83, why it's smaller than eleven releases sounds (Vega has run on the New Architecture from the start), and how the upgrade skill in the Amazon Devices Builder Tools MCP plans the migration with Vega-specific knowledge instead of a generic diff. She also covers what you get once you're there, including React 19, a faster Hermes and modern DevTools, and links a hands-on workshop if you'd rather learn by doing it on a demo app.

📽️ From Token Maxing to Token Frugaling: The Local Model Cliff | OkThink

Margaret Pieczkowski, co-founder of OkThink, lost track of her work once she had more than ten AI coding agents running in separate terminals, so she built Firehose to manage them. At AgentConf 2026 in Warsaw, host Chris Traganos asks her how she stays in charge of the decisions while the agents write the code, and why she thinks cutting token spend and talking to agents by voice come next. If you're running more than a couple of agents yourself, she has practical advice on where that workflow starts to break.

📰 Enhance your React Native App with Vega native APIs

By Barak Schlosser

Sometimes JavaScript and the community libraries aren't enough, like when you need a view that draws and animates in native code, or work that keeps running on a schedule after your app closes. The Vega SDK now lets you write those pieces in C++ and use them from React Native like any other component or module. Barak breaks it down with two sample apps, a native UI component and a periodic background task, so you can see how the wiring works on both sides before you try it in your own app.

📽️ A Home That Maintains Itself: iRobot's Vision for Home Robots

On the latest AI Innovator Series episode, Adam Pope, VP and Chief Engineer at iRobot, joins Emerson Sklar (Alexa Chief Evangelist) to unpack how Roomba moved from reacting to a room to anticipating it, and why the goal is AI that takes chores off a customer's plate rather than adding features. If you ship a connected device, the useful part is how they decide what belongs in voice and what stays in the mobile app, and how the Alexa+ integration surfaces settings owners never knew their robot had.

📰 From Fire OS to Vega: Porting your TV app to React Native for Vega with ADBT

Newer Fire TV sticks run Vega OS, and your Fire OS APK won't run on them. That makes porting a real planning item for any TV team. This guide shows how Amazon Devices Builder Tools gives your coding agent a phased App Porting workflow that turns an existing Fire OS codebase, whether it's a web hybrid, React Native, or native Java/Kotlin, into a buildable React Native for Vega app. It also covers where you have to step in yourself: the review checkpoints the agent won't stop at unless you ask, and the files that tell you what still needs a human. If a Vega port is on your roadmap, read this before you point an agent at your repo.

📰 AWS launched hard spend limits. Here's how they work.

By Lucas Swanson

AWS now lets you put a hard ceiling on what a single project can bill you. On the AWS Developers channel, Ana Cunha demos the new spend limit. It starts at $20 per project, pauses the project when it reaches the cap, and sends alerts before you hit it. She also shows how to bring a paused project back. This walkthrough of how hard spend limits work explains how a limit differs from a budget alert, which only sends an email, and what to check before you set one. With a limit in place, you can try out an Alexa skill backend or a Fire TV companion service without watching the meter.

📰 App Development Opportunities: What small business owners told us they need from their Ring cameras

By Harish Komaragiri

The Ring team spent months interviewing restaurants, salons, retail shops and other small businesses about what they wish their cameras did, and the answers point to app ideas for the Ring Appstore. The pattern repeats across them: owners can see what happened on camera, but they still have to scrub through footage by hand to work out what it means for the business. If you're deciding what to build for Ring, this is first-hand research on four problems owners already spend their own time on, with example alerts that show what a useful answer would look like.

📽️ Spotlight on streaming TV with Horizon Media and AMC Global Media

Sarah Baehr talks with Michele Siravo and Chima Ogbuokiri about joint research from Horizon Media and our Amazon Ads team on why viewers are re-bundling their streaming subscriptions, and what that looks like for AMC Global Media, a content provider whose shows live inside bundled hubs. If you build a streaming app for Fire TV, this is useful context on how audiences now find content through aggregated surfaces as well as your own app, and where ad-supported tiers fit. It's audience research to study rather than something to build against, but it should shape how you think about discovery.

📰 What's new in Android developer tools and performance at Android Dev Summit

By Adarsh Fernando

Adarsh Fernando, Group Product Manager for Android Developer Tools, rounds up the tooling news from Android Dev Summit. The theme is building alongside AI agents: Android Studio now works with the coding agents and models you already use, and a new command-line path opens up the Android toolchain to terminals and CI. For anyone building for our new Alexa Tablets, which run Android with Google Play, these changes reach the same Studio and build pipeline you ship with today. The post links out to the summit sessions on each area, so it works as a map of what to try first.

📽️ Optimize Your Prompts with Amazon Bedrock

A prompt that runs thousands of times a day pays for every wasted token. In this AWS Developers channel video, Steph Gooch demos Bedrock's built-in prompt optimization, which rewrites your prompt for the model you've picked so you get better output and spend fewer tokens overall. She covers the one-click rewrite and the deeper evaluation-driven mode that tests a prompt across several models, then shows how to version the results and add the step to a CI/CD pipeline. If you're shipping a Bedrock-backed feature and haven't checked what your prompts actually cost, this one is worth your time.

📰 How to connect your coding agent to AWS

By Ana Cunha

A coding agent can write your code, but it can't work in your AWS project or know what has changed in AWS since its model was trained. This guide sets up the Agent Toolkit for AWS so the agent you already use, whether that's Kiro, Claude Code, or Cursor, can check current AWS docs and work in your project with the same permissions you have. It all starts from one prompt you copy out of the console, and you finish by testing the connection without creating anything, so it's an easy first step if you're building a cloud backend for your app.

📽️ Keeping Up Without Burning Out: My AI Workflow for DevRel

In a lightning talk at DevRelCon 2026 NYC, Dev Advocate Kourtney Meiss shares the workflow and mindset she uses to keep up with AI without burning out: her current toolbox, and the questions she asks before handing a task to AI or doing it herself so she actually learns. If a new AI tool every week feels like more than you can follow, it's a practical way to set a pace you can keep.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

Amazon Dev News • Blink 4K Cameras & Kindle+ • Oct 26, 2026

Moses Roth — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 15:03:07 +0000

Hi dev team!

Blink just debuted its first 4K, spotlight, and pan-tilt cameras, along with an expanded XR lineup.

Amazon Polly got a major upgrade to its Generative engine. And AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities is now generally available. Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+, and it includes KDP audiobooks. Ring launched an Appstore Challenge for college students with $500,000 in prizes, and Kiro now has memory in its IDE and CLI.

Elsewhere, there are two new Sidewalk application notes and fresh releases for the Bee CLI and the Ring Appstore API. Two reads dig into how Kiro fixes itself. On video, a few of our leaders talk about AI and ambient computing, and the recording of my next app devCon talk is up too.

GitHub Universe and React India both kick off this week. Further out, we'll be at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas at the end of November, where Kourtney Meiss is leading a Bee workshop.

Have a good week!

⚛️ Vega Studio: Accessibility Inspector — Vega Studio 0.24.2 adds an A11y Inspector that flags accessibility issues in your .tsx and .jsx files by severity, with Fix, Preview, and Explain actions and a whole-workspace scan.
🔘 Ring Appstore API: account linking token exchange — The Ring Appstore API docs now detail the token exchange request and required response for account linking; each refresh invalidates the previous refresh token.
🤖 Amazon Polly: Generative engine upgrade — The Amazon Polly Generative engine is now more expressive and accurate at low latency, adds 14 voices, and brings Hindi and Finnish to GA.
🧩 Kiro: memory in IDE and CLI — Kiro IDE and CLI now keep memory across sessions, so they remember your preferences, repo conventions, past corrections, and approaches you've already ruled out.
🐝 Bee CLI v0.9.0 — Bee CLI v0.9.0's sync command now saves your insights as markdown files and bumps the handlebars dependency to 4.7.10.
📡 Amazon Sidewalk: SID API Revision A.5, Protocol A.3, and new app notes — The SID API Developer Guide adds registration over a wired link, factory-registered endpoints, and LoRa data-rate and keep-alive options; the Protocol Specification adds LoRa Profile C for continuous RX; the Test Specification adds BLE connection-policy tests; and new application notes cover Registration over Wire and Gateway Session Keys, which arrive in Sidewalk SDK 2.0.0.

📷 Blink debuts its first 4K, spotlight, and pan-tilt cameras, plus an expanded XR lineup

For smart home builders, here's a sign of where camera hardware and AI summaries are heading: Blink is launching five new cameras, including its first 4K, spotlight, and pan-tilt models plus long-range XR models for gates and outbuildings, and the 4K model adds Video Descriptions, AI-written summaries that tell owners what happened without making them scrub through clips.

🔘 Ring Announces Appstore Challenge with $500,000 in prizes for college students

If you know student builders, Ring's Appstore Challenge invites teams from eligible U.S. colleges to build an app for the Ring Appstore and launch it to real Ring customers, with four prizes totaling $500,000 ($250,000 for the Grand Prize); applications close November 20, 2026.

📢 AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities is now generally available

If your backend runs on AWS, you can now turn days of security triage into a review queue with AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities, generally available today, which uses AI to find, confirm, and rank the real issues in your code and then opens pull requests with fixes for you to review.

📚 Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+, with KDP audiobooks included

Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+ on Amazon.com, at the same $11.99 a month, and the subscription now includes audiobooks: KDP audiobooks made with Virtual Voice (invitation-only at first) and ACX audiobooks, with KDP Select audiobooks enrolled automatically.

This season we're heading to Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2026, and the calendar is also packed with gatherings like React Advanced London and AI Engineer Code Summit. If you're at re:Invent, come say hello; we hope to see you there!

Date	Event	Location	Description
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	Android Dev Summit 2026	Online	Google's Android developer event returns with a live keynote on October 28 at 10am PT on new products and features across the Android ecosystem; watch the livestream.
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. Dev Advocate Kourtney Meiss is leading a workshop, "Turn a Bee wearable into your re:Invent notetaking companion."

The Kiro team explains how Kiro fixes itself and keeps those fixes honest. There's also a run of new videos, including my next app devCon talk on building where your customers are.

📽️ 62% of Students Use AI Daily. Cengage Is Redesigning Education Around Them

On the latest AI Innovator Series episode, Emerson Sklar (Alexa Chief Evangelist) talks with Ghazal Badiozamani, SVP of Product & Content at Cengage, about designing AI that builds understanding instead of handing out answers. They dig into using Socratic conversation as a form of assessment, and into learning paths that follow a student across devices, Alexa included. If you're designing conversational or multimodal experiences, it's a useful look at how a large education publisher thinks about retention, trust, and where voice fits.

📰 How Kiro fixes itself, and how we keep the fixes honest

By Myeongsoo Kim, Patrick Chapman, Chang Liu, Mingwei Zheng, Berk Cirisci, Sam Mayers, Joe Hsu, Liam Bouayad-Agha, and Shweta Garg

The Kiro team explains how Kiro fixes itself, with the agent finding quiet flaws in its own harness, like a misleading line in a tool description that no user would ever report. The more useful half is about judging those fixes: a change that looked like a clear win turned out to be one lucky run, and splitting the results apart is what stopped it from shipping. In a follow-up essay on AWS Builder Center, Andriy Drozdyuk draws the broader lesson. An agent can propose its own fix, but something independent has to decide whether the fix worked, such as fresh control runs, contamination checks and a human sign-off.

📽️ Build Where Your Customers Are - Moses Roth | next app devCon 2026

At next app devCon 2026, I made the case for taking Android, web, and React Native apps past phones and browsers to the Amazon devices where customers already spend their time: Fire TV, Alexa+, Bee, and Ring cameras. The session looks at how other developers are shipping multi-device experiences and how to get started right away, then rounds up our AI builder tools, device SDKs, and open-source samples. If you've built for mobile and want to know where your app can go next, start with this talk.

📰 What Is a REST API? Build a Dad Joke API on AWS in 5 Minutes

By Erik Hanchett

On the AWS Developers channel, Erik Hanchett starts with a working dad-joke API and works backward to what makes an API RESTful, then builds his own with Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS SAM. The companion write-up on AWS Builder Center walks through the same build step by step, and its concepts half needs no setup at all. If you've called APIs from a Fire TV app, Alexa skill, or Vega app but never stood up a backend of your own, you finish with a working serverless endpoint you can grow into the service your app needs.

📰 What are MCP Apps? Building Apps that run on Claude & ChatGPT!

By Ashita Prasad

On the AWS Developers channel, Ashita Prasad explains MCP Apps, an extension to the Model Context Protocol that lets your MCP server return interactive UI like dashboards, forms, and charts that render right inside a Claude or ChatGPT conversation. The companion write-up covers the architecture and the sandboxing model that keeps those embedded views isolated from the surrounding chat. It then builds a small sales analytics chatflow end to end and deploys the TypeScript server on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. If you already run an MCP server, it's a practical look at giving your tools a front end inside the chat, and the sample repo gives you a working starting point.

📽️ Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Reinventing Amazon for the AI Era

Our CEO Andy Jassy sits down with a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to explain why AI demand is still outrunning the infrastructure we're building, and why cheaper inference could be what opens AI up to the broad set of companies that haven't adopted it yet. The conversation also turns inward, covering how smaller teams are shipping products faster and how we're rethinking Alexa. It's a useful hour if you want to understand where we're investing and what that means for the platforms you build on.

📽️ What Comes After the Smartphone? Amazon’s Panos Panay on AI and Ambient Computing | Disrupt 2026

On the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 stage, Panos Panay, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services, talks with Julie Bort about how AI could move everyday computing off the phone and into ambient devices that work in the background. If you build for Alexa, Fire TV or Ring, it's a direct look at where our devices leadership sees the hardware your apps run on going next.

📽️ The Fire TV Remote (2026 release), Button by Button

The Fire TV channel tours the 2026 Fire TV Remote one button at a time, including the button changes that come with this release. If your app handles remote input or shows on-screen key hints, the tour is a quick way to check your navigation and labels against the remote your viewers are holding now.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

Amazon Dev News • Fire TV APIs & Bee Frontier and Eclipse • Oct 18, 2026

Moses Roth — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:48:04 +0000

Hey there, dev team!

I'm off to Athens for CityJS Athens tomorrow, so this week's post is a little early.

Bee has two new devices: Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse, a wearable you can clip on or wear on your wrist and a slim magnetic phone attachment, and Bee now connects to Alexa+. Bee also has a new help center covering setup, privacy controls, and the new Bee Pro subscription.

For Fire TV reporting, the Stability dashboard has an updated UI, the Stability API is now generally available, and the Performance and Monetization Metrics APIs are in public beta.

On the AWS side, Lambda Web Functions run the Express or Next.js server you already have on Lambda as-is, Amazon S3 is on the Vercel Marketplace, and there's a beginner's guide to event-driven architecture built around a single food delivery order. Kiro also added the Kimi K3 model and enterprise sign-in controls.

We have new Amazon Developer tutorials too: Kourtney compares testing on the Vega Virtual Device and a Fire TV Stick, I walk through getting started with Vega, and Gio made this cute little video that turns Amazon Devices Builder Tools into a two-minute retro quest:

The Build, Ship, Shape hackathon closes this Friday, October 23, so get your project submitted. As I mentioned, I'll be in Athens for CityJS Athens this week, and Gio is speaking at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America in San Jose.

Come say hi if you'll be in Athens or San Jose!

🔘 Ring Appstore API: location-based integration subscriptions — The API now includes location-based integration subscriptions alongside device-based ones, so check that your plan-coverage logic handles both.
🏪 Just Walk Out for physical stores: who handles receipts, lookups, and refunds — A new Post Purchase page, also noted in the document history, covers each Retail Integration model.
📊 App Stability dashboard: updated UI — The Stability dashboard in App Health Insights has an updated UI.
🏠 Alexa+ Smart Home Glossary — A new glossary defines the terms used across the Alexa+ smart home docs, whether you connect with ACK, Matter, or an add-on.
🐝 bee-cli v0.8.0 — Adds threads commands and MCP tools, puts threads in the data API, and supports repeatable flags in resource commands.
📚 Bee help center — Bee's new help center covers setup, privacy controls, and the Bee Pro subscription, and has a page for Frontier and Eclipse customers.
🤖 Kimi K3 model is now available in Kiro — Moonshot AI's open-weight Kimi K3 is now selectable in Kiro, with a context window big enough to hold a whole codebase.
🔒 Kiro: enterprise sign-in controls — Administrators can now choose which sign-in methods users see on managed devices, for example requiring IAM Identity Center.
☁️ Amazon S3 on the Vercel Marketplace and v0 — Add S3 object storage, S3 Tables, or S3 Vectors to a Vercel or v0 project straight from the Vercel Marketplace.
⚛️ React Native 0.88 — Adds web-style event capturing and bubbling, variable fonts, and iOS SceneDelegate support, with no user-facing breaking changes.
🛠️ Expo SDK 58 — Ships React Native 0.88 and iOS 27 support; check the upgrade notes for breaking changes before you bump.

🛠️ Appstore Reporting: Monetization Metrics API and Vitals Performance API Enter Public Beta

You can now pull crash, performance and subscription health data straight into your own alerts and release gates, alongside the App Stability dashboard's new UI, with the Stability API now generally available and both the Performance API extending Vitals API V2 and the new Monetization Metrics API for subscription lifecycle and fulfillment status entering public beta.

🐝 Bee Frontier and Bee Eclipse: Introducing new AI wearable and phone attachment

Building ambient or voice-first experiences? Our newly announced Bee Frontier (a wearable for the wrist or a clip) and Bee Eclipse (a slim magnetic phone attachment) are a useful reference for pairing always-available capture with privacy the user can see and control, and Bee now connects to Alexa+ so what it captures can come back as a hands-free answer; the new Bee help center covers setup and the new devices.

📢 Announcing AWS Lambda Web Functions

Lambda Web Functions run the HTTP framework you already use, so an Express or Next.js app or API moves onto Lambda without a rewrite, with each instance serving many requests and global distribution built in, and builder walkthroughs show it with Bedrock AgentCore and for an Express app.

🔍 Claude Code Review is now generally available

Claude Code's automated pull request reviewer is out of research preview and generally available for Team and Enterprise organizations, with a review depth admins can set for each repository, and the Claude Code team explains how they review code agents write.

🗺️ HERE Location Reasoning (HLR) expands map data access to AWS

If your agents need location answers drawn from real map data rather than guesswork, HERE Location Reasoning is now generally available as a pay-as-you-go MCP server on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore through AWS Marketplace and as a Kiro Power, so you can add deterministic geospatial reasoning to logistics, field service, or in-car assistants without building your own spatial stack.

Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is underway online, so jump in and start building before the deadline. In person, I'm giving a talk at CityJS Athens, my colleague Gio is giving a talk on Oct 22 at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America called "Hand the Agent the Clicker," on Porthole, which streams Android and Android TV emulators to a browser and hands the same controls to an AI agent over MCP, and we'll close out the season at AWS re:Invent 2026, so 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	Athens edition of the CityJS conference series, covering modern JavaScript and frontend frameworks. Dev Advocate Moses Roth is giving a talk.
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	Linux Foundation conference for the open agentic AI ecosystem, with MCP and agent-systems tracks for builders, contributors, and enterprises. 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.
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.

It's a hands-on week: Kourtney finally settles the Virtual Device or Fire TV Stick question for Vega testing, Panos Panay explains why the new Alexa Tablet went all in on Android, and the Claude Code team shares how they keep up with reviewing code their agents write. If you're shipping a web backend, the Lambda Web Functions walkthroughs is worth your coffee break.

📽️ How to Test Your Vega OS App: Vega Virtual Device vs. Fire TV Stick

Developer Advocate Kourtney Meiss settles a question every Vega developer runs into early: test on the Vega Virtual Device or on a real Fire TV Stick? Her answer is both, at different stages. She demos each target with the Vega CLI, Vega Studio in VS Code, and an AI coding agent, explains what the virtual device can't simulate, and shows when to move to hardware. If you're setting up your first Vega test loop, this video tells you where each tool fits.

📰 Event-driven architecture on AWS: a beginner's guide

By Saurabh Rob Dahal

If your backend still chains direct calls from one user action to four services, this guide follows a single food delivery order to show how EventBridge, SNS, SQS, and Lambda split up the work. It wraps with a small app you build alongside your coding agent and Agent Toolkit for AWS.

📽️ Getting Started with Vega

New to Vega? This is my walkthrough, where I take you from a fresh install of the Vega Developer Tools to a running Hello World app, building the same app three ways: with an AI coding assistant, from the command line, and in VS Code. That makes it easy to pick the workflow that fits how you already work before you start a real Vega project.

📰 Lambda Web Functions + Bedrock AgentCore

By Meena Thandavarayan

With this week's Lambda Web Functions announcement, you can run the web server you already have on Lambda as-is, and two builder pieces show it in practice. Meena Thandavarayan's Lambda Web Functions + Bedrock AgentCore puts a browser chat UI on one and streams an agent's replies back as they're generated. Vishal Alhat's Because Your Express App Deserves Better Than a Lambda Adapter breaks down how it changes the economics for I/O-heavy APIs and builds a small API to prove it.

📽️ I Asked Panos Panay Why You’d Spend $499 on an Amazon Tablet

Andru Edwards sits down with Panos Panay, SVP of Devices & Services, to dig into the thinking behind the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro: the move to Android, Alexa at the center of the experience, and a direction he says was two and a half years in the making. It's a rare look at how the hardware choices, from the screen shape to the keyboard, are meant to change how people use a tablet, which is useful context for anyone planning how their app should look on our new devices.

📰 Retro tech meets modern AI: Inside an Amazon developer's garage turned working computer museum

By Kurt Schlosser

GeekWire visits the Maple Valley, Wash. garage of Darko Mesaroš, a Distinguished Developer Advocate at AWS, where decades of vintage machines are repaired, kept running, and wired up to talk to today's coding agents. It's a fun weekend read and a good reminder of how much today's tools rest on the hardware that came before them. If you've ever wondered what an AI agent makes of a terminal older than you are, start here.

📽️ Jamie Siminoff: My way of winning is building a lock no one else has.

Ring founder and chief inventor Jamie Siminoff sits down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to tell the story behind Ring's first smart lock, built around a hand-crank dial that does away with the dead-battery problem. He also shares how he prototyped it himself overnight with AI, gives an update on Search Party, and explains why he came back to Amazon. Hear him lay out his four principles for moving fast and his case for staying focused on customers instead of competitors, a useful perspective for anyone building hardware or shipping products quickly.

📰 Leadership in Focus: Miguel Sainz

The Zoox Leadership in Focus series profiles Miguel Sainz, Vice President, Software Systems, who leads the software behind the Zoox robotaxi. It's a short read on how one engineering leader approaches building software for a vehicle that drives itself, and it's useful to anyone whose code has to be right the first time.

📽️ Working With Kiro workflows

On the Kiro channel, Developer Experience Engineer Catherine Cao demos the quickest path into Kiro workflows, going from a plain description of the job you want done to a multi-step workflow you can run and save for reuse. It's a short, practical starting point if you keep re-prompting an agent for the same multi-step task and want to make it repeatable.

📰 New ways to drive smarter discovery, deeper engagement, and business growth on Google Play

By Paul Feng

Paul Feng, who leads Google Play Engineering, Product, and UX, lays out Play's latest round of discovery, engagement, and quality-program updates, with a checklist for getting your listing in front of users in AI-driven surfaces. Our new Alexa Tablets run Android with Google Play, so this is a good read on how your app gets found on them, and which polish work Play rewards with lower service fees.

📰 How the Claude Code team does code review

By Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang

The Claude Code team at Anthropic explains how they review code now that agents write most of it. They treat human attention as the scarce resource and let automated review run continuously while a change is being written. The piece digs into where humans stay in the loop, how the team checks that saved review time isn't just showing up later as reverts and incidents, and how they keep shared context when fewer people read every line. If your team is shipping more agent-written changes than its reviewers can keep up with, the section on adopting the process is a practical place to start. It's a useful companion to this week's Code Review general availability.

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Amazon Dev News • New Alexa Tablets & Ring Devices • Oct 12, 2026

Moses Roth — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 14:47:24 +0000

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.
📲 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.

🤖 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, with 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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Amazon Dev News • New Fire TV Stick 4K & Amazon Ads Agent • Oct 4, 2026

Moses Roth — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 19:29:15 +0000

Happy Sunday, everyone!

I'm off to Berlin tomorrow for Next App Dev Con Berlin, where I'm giving a talk and my colleagues Anisha and Gio are leading a workshop, so the post is a little early this week. If you're there this week, come say hi!

The big news is the all-new Fire TV Stick 4K, which runs Vega OS and ships with a redesigned remote. This is the best, fastest Vega stick yet. You can check out its device specifications.

There are also new Alexa+ features on Fire TV, Live App Tests that can now run up to five in parallel, and an update to our React Native multi-TV sample.

The Amazon Ads team relaunched its ad platform as Amazon Ads Agent and posted an article on viewers' streaming habits and how they've changed.

On the agent side, Kiro shipped workflows for handing multi-step jobs to a group of agents, and Anthropic launched claude.dev, a new developer blog.

Don't forget that our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is still running through October 23 with $190,000 in prizes. If you're the kind of person who reads this newsletter, you're probably the kind of person who could create something cool, so I hope you all do!

🛠️ Parallel Live App Tests — Live App Testing now runs up to five tests per app in parallel, each on its own track so testers and in-app purchases stay isolated, and the Live App Testing FAQ has a new "Multiple LAT tracks" section on how to use them.
🔑 Changes to Available Amazon Data Portability LWA Scopes — The "Digital software and video games downloads" scope was removed effective September 25, so drop it from your consent flow if you request it (the purchase and subscription scopes are unaffected).
📺 React Native Multi-TV App Sample — Our one-codebase TV sample for Fire TV (Fire OS and Vega OS), Android TV, Apple TV and web now builds against Vega SDK 0.24 (it declares the target OS version the SDK requires and adds the Babel plugins Reanimated needs), and Android TV remote keys are forwarded correctly so select works again.
🔈 Full-screen autoplay video ads on Alexa+ — Amazon DSP advertisers can now run their 15-second video ads full screen and muted on the Alexa home screen of Alexa+ Echo Show devices, where viewers tap or ask Alexa to play it with sound and click through, and the same asset also runs on classic Alexa with no new setup.

🔥 Fire TV launches an all-new, faster Fire TV Stick 4K and a new remote

The new Fire TV Stick 4K runs Vega OS 2.0 with Alexa+ built in, and it's the device most new customers will open your app on. Its device specifications are already live, covering codec, HDR, DRM, memory, and marketplace support, so add it to your test matrix now.

💬 Alexa+ is making Fire TV smarter, from your TV to your phone

This fall's Fire TV update brings Alexa+ into content discovery: search reasons across a viewer's subscriptions and watch history, a new Alexa+ hub suggests what to ask, and the Fire TV mobile app saves recommendations to the watchlist, which changes how viewers will find the titles in your content app.

📊 Introducing Amazon Ads Agent

Promoting an app on Fire TV, Prime Video, or Twitch? Our unified ad buying platform, renamed Amazon Ads Agent at unBoxed 2026, now handles campaign planning, targeting, and reporting through agentic chat, with Full-Funnel Campaigns live for US advertisers and DVA+ rolling out in late October.

📖 Completely redesigned Kindle family

Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, and Kindle Colorsoft were rebuilt from the ground up on what Devices VP Kevin Keith calls a first-ever display construction for e-readers, a useful case study for anyone building reading or content experiences across our device family.

🤖 Introducing Kiro workflows

Kiro workflows let you hand a multi-step job to a group of agents and leave the runtime to finish it, with each step in its own fresh session so a reviewer judges the work without inheriting the coder's reasoning, and a process that works can be run again as is.

📚 claude.dev: Anthropic's new developer blog

Anthropic launched claude.dev, where its own engineers write about agent design, context engineering, and how the Claude Code team uses its own tool. Check out Addy Osmani's LinkedIn post for details about the launch.

Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is underway online, so jump in and build something before the deadline. In person, you'll find us at Next App Dev Con Berlin, where Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel and co-leads a workshop with Giovanni Laquidara and I'm giving a lightning talk. Then at later this month I'm also giving a talk at CityJS Athens, and AWS re:Invent 2026 is also happening in Las Vegas, and 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 7–9	Next App Dev Con Berlin	Berlin, DE	Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel and co-leads a workshop with Giovanni Laquidara, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk. Mobile and app-platform conference at Berlin's CityCube, with workshops, talks, and platform announcements.
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	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.

Start with Emerson Sklar's AI Innovator Series conversation with Canva's Anwar Haneef on why Canva built its own design model. If you ship a streaming app on Fire TV, the Amazon Ads research on streaming simplicity is next, and Laura Salinas shows Kiro and Agent Toolkit for AWS getting the AWS parts right on the first pass.

📽️ How Canva’s strategy has built a visual engine for AI

In this AI Innovator Series conversation, Alexa Chief Evangelist Emerson Sklar talks with Anwar Haneef, Canva's GM and Head of Ecosystem, who argues that a model that can generate an image still can't produce good design on its own. That gap is why Canva trained its own first-party model on typography, layout and brand intelligence. Anwar unpacks how that model fits into a bigger rethink of the creative process, which is useful to anyone building AI features where output quality matters more than output volume.

📰 Consumers want streaming simplicity. Here's what that means for your next campaign

By Matt Miller

New research from Amazon Ads and Horizon Media, shared at unBoxed 2026, finds viewers settling on one main streaming destination and discovering everything else through bundles and add-on channels. AMC Networks is the worked example, reaching new households through Prime Video Channels. If you ship a streaming app on Fire TV, it's a useful read on where your next viewers will come from.

📽️ Ship Without the Guesswork — Kiro + Agent Toolkit

Laura Salinas builds a personal portfolio site from scratch to show what changes when a coding agent works from current AWS documentation and tested deployment procedures instead of stale training data. The demo is small on purpose, so the payoff is easy to see: Kiro gets the AWS parts right on the first pass. Anyone who has watched an agent confidently write an out-of-date AWS config will appreciate the fix.

📰 How VTV Digital Tackled Vietnam's Live Streaming Bottleneck Using AWS

Vietnam's national broadcaster moved its HD, multi-channel live streaming onto AWS to clear a delivery bottleneck and reach viewers across the country. For a Fire TV or streaming app that has to push live video to a big audience at once, it's a compact case study in what scaling that delivery takes.

📽️ Getting Started on AWS Just Got Easier

AWS developer advocate Darko Mesaroš demos the new AWS sign-up flow, which drops a new account straight into a ready-made project with $100 in free credits, and most new customers won't need a credit card. A single prompt connects your coding agent to the account. New to AWS: Learn AWS without a surprise bill goes deeper on the free plan and spend limits.

📰 New to AWS: Learn AWS without a surprise bill, start free, build your first app

By Saurabh Rob Dahal

AWS's revamped signup lets most new customers start on the free plan with no credit card and up to $200 in credits. This guide takes on the fear that keeps a lot of developers from ever opening a console, a forgotten resource running up a bill. It breaks down how the free plan and the optional project spend limit protect you, along with the tradeoffs a spend limit brings, then lays out a first project you can build with your coding agent through Agent Toolkit for AWS. A low-risk place to start that backend for your Fire TV, Alexa, or Vega app.

📽️ Invite Your Teammate to Your AWS Project

AWS Developer Advocate Lucas Swanson and Solutions Architect Fabricio Flores demo AWS Projects by building a real app together, showing how one shared project lets a whole team work out of a single account. Still passing credentials around or setting up separate accounts just so a collaborator can deploy? This short video shows a simpler way to start building together.

📰 A Builder’s Guide to AWS GenAI and Agentic AI Repositories

By Lahari Chowtoori

AWS keeps hundreds of GenAI samples on GitHub, and picking the right one to start with is harder than it should be. This guide sorts them by where you are, from your first Amazon Bedrock model call, to building agents with Strands, to running them in production on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, with MCP tooling and RAG patterns further along. Find your stage and skip the searching.

📽️ What is Agent Focus, and how can you accelerate development

Sr. Dev Advocate Erik Hanchett demos Agent Focus Mode, a layout that puts chat at the center of Kiro and brings in diffs and specs only when you need them. It's built around agents running in parallel, with the editor one switch away when you want it back, a good fit for anyone already juggling several agent sessions at once.

📽️ Inference for Agents | Tejas Bhakta, Morph | Built to Scale, Episode 3

On Built to Scale, Valentina Escudero talks with Tejas Bhakta, founder and CEO of Morph and a former Autopilot engineer, about why coding agents often do better with small, specialized models than with the biggest frontier model, especially now that benchmarks are saturating. Tejas shows how Morph merges LLM-generated edits into real files quickly, gives a plain explanation of speculative decoding, and names what he sees as the hardest unsolved problem in the agent stack. Anyone wondering where agent inference speed and cost actually come from will get a clear answer from someone who has pivoted three times as a solo founder.

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Amazon Dev News • Jev, Strands & Beta Hub • Sept 28, 2026

Moses Roth — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:11:08 +0000

Hi team!

If you build for Fire TV, check out our two big testing announcements: Appstore Beta Hub lets your Live App Testing testers install and manage beta apps straight from their Fire TV, and accelerated subscriptions take a subscription renewal test from a full plan period down to minutes. On the Vega side, we have a Developer Bulletin on Vega DevKit after the Mac OS 27 upgrade.

If you've been active online at all the past couple weeks, you must have heard about Jev! If you've been curious but don't know where to get started, check out the explainer videos from Neha and Mike in the Dev Posts section. We also have a bunch more AI content for you, including stuff on Strands, Bedrock, and Bee.

One more post I wanted to highlight, Claude now has a developer portal of their own, where you can submit and download plugins! If you're interested, check out their blog on how to use it.

A ton of the Amazon Developer team will be in Berlin next week for Next App Dev Con Berlin, including a workshop from Anisha and Gio, a panel with Anisha, and a lightning talk from me! Let me know if you'll be there and come say hi!

⚛️ Developer Bulletin: Issues with Vega DevKit after Mac OS 27 upgrade — upgrading a Mac to OS 27 removes Rosetta, which several DevKit components depend on. One command restores it: softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license.
📢 Claude Opus 5.5 is now available on AWS — generally available through both Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS, built to keep reporting on its progress and to finish multi-step coding work in fewer tokens than Opus 5.

🧪 Appstore Beta Hub

Your Live App Testing testers no longer need a sideload or an emailed link: Appstore Beta Hub is a self-service app they install from the Amazon Appstore on a supported Fire TV, and they manage their beta apps from the device itself.

⏳ Accelerated Subscriptions for Live App Testing

Testing a subscription renewal used to mean waiting out the full plan, so an annual plan meant an annual wait. Accelerated subscriptions compress that to minutes. Worth knowing before you switch: enabling it cancels all your existing subscription testing.

🔥 Best Buy and Amazon expand Fire TV partnership, opening ad inventory to Best Buy Ads

If you ship a Fire TV app, the installed base you're targeting just got quantified: Best Buy's renewed multi-year deal keeps Fire TV as the only software on every Insignia TV it builds, and the announcement puts numbers on that surface at tens of millions of Fire TV sets across 100-plus models from 24 to 85 inches, with the ad-inventory piece advertiser-facing and rolling out in February 2027.

🎬 Prime Video adds on-demand news clips to its news destination

Prime Video's free news destination now carries News Clips, curated playlists that stitch short-form clips from multiple networks into Trending Topics and Local News carousels, alongside the 24/7 live feeds already there. Living-room devices get it first with mobile and web to follow, which is the device-tier rollout order to expect when you ship a new surface into the Prime Video app.

Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is underway online, so start building before the deadline. In person, Next App Dev Con Berlin is our big one this season, with Developer Advocate Anisha Malde on a panel and co-leading a workshop with Giovanni Laquidara, plus a lightning talk from me. I'm also giving a talk at CityJS Athens. 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 7–9	Next App Dev Con Berlin	Berlin, DE	Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel and co-leads a workshop with Giovanni Laquidara, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk. Mobile and app-platform conference at Berlin's CityCube, with workshops, talks, and platform announcements.
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 — broadcast, media, and entertainment-tech industry conference, at the Javits Center.
Oct 22–23	AGNTCon + MCPCon North America	San Jose, US	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.

Future of Software Development | Closing Panel at Agent Conf 2026 is the one to start with, a closing-panel conversation about where the craft goes next. Then What does a million tokens actually buy? puts numbers on a question most of us have been eyeballing, and Stop Starting From Scratch: Build Agents with Strands harness is the practical follow-on if you want to build rather than read.

📽️ Future of Software Development | Closing Panel at Agent Conf 2026

Chris Trag moderates Agent Conf's closing panel with Margaret Pieczkowski, Grzegorz Wołodko, Bartek Pucek, and Carl Ross on the bottleneck that shows up once agents write most of your code and other realities of the new software development world we now live in.

📰 Bee Private Compute: How Bee keeps your conversations private

A confidential-computing architecture worth reading as a reference design: Bee transcribes audio on device in real time and discards it, then encrypts transcripts, summaries, and to-dos under keys the device alone creates and holds, so Amazon has no master key. Before anything leaves the device it attests that the receiving server is running approved software, and processing happens inside an isolated enclave built on the AWS Nitro System and NitroTPM, the same infrastructure that backs Nitro Enclaves for AWS customers.

📽️ What Can You Build with Jev? Smart AI Agent Routing

Neha Sharma demos intent-based routing in Jev from TypeSafe AI, sending a single prompt to four specialist agents (Researcher, Skeptic, Comedian, Optimizer) and showing the probability each one scores before the router picks a winner.

📽️ Meet Strands harness: Build State-of-the-Art Agents at 28% Lower Token Cost

Strands harness is AWS's new agent harness: it ships the plumbing you'd otherwise hand-tune for every agent, from context management and memory to tools and task tracking, behind a single call. The video builds a docs-maintainer bot that keeps documentation current on its own, and Morgan Willis walks the same build in the written version. Worth your time if you've been assembling that scaffolding yourself for every new agent.

📽️ Jev: Is This Tool Call Ready?

Mike Chambers brings together the two previous videos: Jev and Strands. Here Jev sits inside a Strands agent and checks a tool call before it runs, so a bad one is caught instead of executed. Watch this one for the pattern you'd actually drop into your own agent loop.

📰 How to Use Builder Center to Land Your Next Role

By Rufeda Ali

On the job hunt?

Rufeda gets into the practical case for treating your Builder Center profile like a résumé you send when someone asks what you've built, and the type of posts that actually earn a reply.

📰 What does a million tokens actually buy?

By Edvin Hallvaxhiu

A price quoted per million tokens isn't comparable across providers, because a token isn't the same unit from one model to the next. Edvin actually measures the gap rather than guessing at it, and the same text can cost meaningfully more on one model than another purely because of how it tokenizes. Read it before you pick a model on the sticker price, especially for text-in-text-out work like summarization, extraction or RAG.

📰 Use open weight models as your AI coding agent with Amazon Bedrock

By Aris Tsakpinis, Sainath Miriyala, Saurabh Trikande, and Suryansh Rana

If your prompts and your code can't leave your own AWS account, this walkthrough points OpenCode at open weight models hosted on Amazon Bedrock so the whole coding agent runs inside your account. Multi-model routing is the part worth studying: heavy reasoning and quick edits bill per token against different models instead of one flat rate. Read it if data residency or a per-token budget is what has kept a coding agent off your stack.

📽️ Getting Started with Kiro Web and Cloud Sessions

Catherine Cao follows a single task end to end in Kiro Web, kicking off the work from the browser, handing it to an isolated cloud environment where Kiro runs it, and landing the result as a pull request. If you've only used Kiro on the desktop, the cloud session model is the part worth studying: your machine isn't the execution environment, so the task keeps running independently of your editor and you review the diff the same way you'd review any teammate's PR.

📰 Build plugins for Claude with the directory submission portal

Anthropic opened a submission portal for the Claude plugin directory, so an MCP connector or Agent Skill you've built can be packaged as a plugin, submitted for review, and tracked through the pipeline until it goes live. If you've wrapped an Amazon developer surface in an MCP server, this is the distribution path that puts it in front of Claude users without asking them to configure a local server by hand.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

Amazon Dev News • Alexa+ in India & AWS Builder App • Sept 21, 2026

Moses Roth — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 03:38:50 +0000

Hey dev team!

Alexa+ has launched in India! That brings us up to 12 countries, with the US, Italy, Mexico, Canada, the UK, Spain, Austria, Germany, France, Brazil, and Australia. Where's next?

Our partners over on the AWS Builder team have launched an app, with articles, workshops with free sandbox environments, community spaces, events, courses, and a Wishlist where you can give feedback directly to AWS product teams.

A bunch of Dev Updates too, no matter what platform you're developing for: Amazon Appstore, Alexa+ Smart Home, Ring Appstore, Android, plus a new beta release from our friends at Expo.

If you couldn't make it out to Agent Conf last week, check out the recording of Anisha and Kourtney's talk, where they explain how a team of agents is like a football team (soccer for us yanks).

Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is ongoing, so be sure to sign up, and we'll be in Berlin for Next App Dev Con in just a couple weeks!

📲 Amazon Appstore ends support for Easy Port and the Billing Compatibility SDK — As of September 15, 2026, Amazon Appstore is ending support for Easy Port and the Billing Compatibility SDK; migrate to the current Amazon In-App Purchasing (IAP) SDK to keep purchases working.
🏠 Alexa+ smart home devices get an Automated Testing Service — the new Alexa Automated Testing Service (ATS) lets you create test plans that define voice commands and expected results (from templates or from scratch), then run them against your device and download reports you can save for a CI/CD pipeline.
🔘 Ring Developer Portal: FAQ and Certification Best Practices — Ring's Developer Portal now publishes a certification FAQ and best-practices guide, so review it before submitting your Ring integration for certification to avoid rejections.
🔘 Ring adds two video-encryption modes to the Partner API — Ring's Partner API now supports two additional video-encryption modes, so review the release notes and update your encryption configuration if you consume Ring video streams.
🔘 Ring updates its Appstore Marketing Guidelines — Ring's Marketing Guidelines now source approved product imagery from the Ring Press Center and put the Appstore badge download link on each badge entry, so pull fresh assets from there when you market your Ring integration.
🛠️ Expo SDK 58 Beta is now available — Expo SDK 58 Beta is available, letting you upgrade your Expo apps now to test the new release ahead of its stable launch.
🤖 Android Bench 2.0: Pushing the frontier with challenging long-horizon tasks — Google's Android Bench 2.0 adds harder long-horizon multi-step tasks for evaluating on-device AI agents, so benchmark your agent against the new suite to gauge how it handles extended, real-world Android workflows.

🤖 Alexa+ launches in India

Amazon's next-gen Alexa+ assistant just went live in India, widening the international footprint your skills and devices will eventually need to serve.

👷 Introducing the AWS Builder app

The AWS Builder app puts the whole builder.aws.com experience (docs, community content, and re:Post answers) in your pocket.

🤖 Introducing Strands Harness

Strands Harness, newly open-sourced under Apache 2.0, is a pre-assembled agent you spin up in one line of Python or TypeScript: it runs across Bedrock, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Ollama, or LiteLLM with built-in shell, file, and web tools, context management, and long-term memory, at a claimed 28% lower token cost than comparable setups.

🎬 Five-Service Streaming Bundle Launches on Prime Video in the U.S.

Prime Video just launched the first-ever five-service streaming bundle in the U.S., a real peek at how people will subscribe to streaming going forward: one bundle, one bill, many services.

👓 New Ways to Work with SPECS for Enterprise

Snap is opening its Specs glasses to enterprise deployments on Snap OS, including working with AWS to connect SPECS to Amazon Quick.

This autumn we're across Europe: at Next App Dev Con Berlin, Developer Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel, Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop, and I give a lightning talk, and I'm also giving a talk at CityJS Athens. Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is underway online too, so build your project before the deadline, and we hope to see the rest of you in Berlin and Athens!

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.
Sept 24	React Native Connection	Paris, FR	French React Native conference covering the framework, ecosystem, and platforms built on RN.
Oct 7–9	Next App Dev Con Berlin	Berlin, DE	Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel, Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk. Mobile and app-platform conference at Berlin's CityCube, with workshops, talks, and platform announcements.
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 — broadcast, media, and entertainment-tech industry conference, at the Javits Center.
Oct 22–23	AGNTCon + MCPCon North America	San Jose, US	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.

Anisha and Kourtney's talk from Agent Conf last week is up, check it out. What AWS's Matt Wood told employees about the future of AI is a candid look at where the CTO thinks all of this is headed, straight from the internal all-hands. If you'd rather build than read, Build Your First AI Agent on AWS (in about the time it takes to drink a coffee) does exactly what the title promises, and Quit Tokenmaxxing: 4 Context Engineering Techniques for AI Agents is the video I'd send to anyone whose agents are burning through context.

📽️ Agents FC: Harness Agents Into a Winning Team | Anisha Malde & Kourtney Meiss at Agent Conf 2026

Amazon Developer Advocates Anisha Malde and Kourtney Meiss use a football-team analogy at Agent Conf 2026 to break down the engineering behind reliable multi-agent systems: clear roles, shared rules, coordination, and observability. They evolve a demo called Agents FC from an opaque black box into an observable, governed system, covering the agent loop, orchestration, context engineering, and the three layers of a strong harness. The ideas then map onto Amazon Bedrock AgentCore in a live multi-agent football simulation, so if you are building agent teams on AgentCore the talk gives you a concrete pattern for structuring and monitoring them.

📰 Connect your AI coding agent to AWS

By Ana Cunha

The Agent Toolkit for AWS closes the gap between your model's training cutoff and AWS's actual current state: it wires your coding agent to live AWS docs and API references, task-specific Skills written by the service teams, and scoped calls to your own AWS account within your existing permissions. It runs on the agent you already use (Kiro, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) via the AWS MCP Server, so setup is either a copy-paste prompt from the Console banner or the aws configure agent-toolkit wizard. The Skills are open source, so you can read exactly what workflow each one steers the agent through, or contribute your own. If you have ever watched an agent confidently recommend a deprecated API, this is the fix worth wiring in.

📽️ What is an API? (The Only Explanation You'll Need)

Axel Espinosa builds the case for splitting logic out of a monolithic website so a web frontend and a mobile app can share one backend, then codes a working API endpoint live. A restaurant analogy grounds the concepts (the menu is the interface, the waiter is access control, the kitchen is the backend you never have to think about) before it lays out where REST, WebSocket, and GraphQL each fit. A solid explainer to hand a junior teammate or to sharpen how you frame API design in your own reviews.

📰 Build Your First AI Agent on AWS (in about the time it takes to drink a coffee)

By Vishal Alhat

A hands-on walkthrough with the full code inline: a "why did my bill go up?" agent that pulls a cost breakdown, reasons over the numbers, and names the top drivers in plain English. The stack is the current AWS answer to the duct-tape era, one line each: Strands Agents is the open-source loop, Bedrock AgentCore is the managed runtime with sessions, memory, and guardrails, and Kiro handles the spec-first build. The whole agent is two files, and it ships with mock cost data by default so you can run it without touching your billing account, flip one flag to hit the real Cost Explorer API. A useful demo-craft note too: the mock keeps the data deterministic on stage while the reasoning and tool-calling stay entirely real.

📽️ CI/CD for Beginners

Jonathan Vogel builds a deployment pipeline from scratch on a real app, starting with a manually-deployed Lambda function and adding one layer at a time. The host replaces ad-hoc CLI commands and half-remembered deploy steps with a single GitHub Actions workflow file triggered by a git push, then layers in tests for continuous integration. If you have ever gone back to a project weeks later and had to reconstruct how you shipped it, this is a clean template for turning that manual process into something a file handles for you.

📰 You Earned AWS Credits. Now What?

By Rufeda Ali

A practical guide for turning Student Rewards AWS credits ($30 across 7 and 14 badges) into a first hands-on project. It covers how credit redemption works in the Billing and Cost Management console, which services credits do and don't cover (S3, EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, Bedrock, Polly, and more, but not Marketplace or Training and Certification fees), and the Free Tier interplay for new accounts. If you mentor students or run a workshop, it's a clean reference for getting newcomers past the "I have credits, now what" hurdle with console-only starter projects like Polly speech synthesis or Comprehend sentiment analysis. Super helpful if you get some credits through the Build, Ship, Shape hackathon.

📽️ Quit Tokenmaxxing: 4 Context Engineering Techniques for AI Agents

Morgan Willis breaks context engineering down into four patterns for keeping an agent's context window lean: compress what's old, externalize what's large, select what's relevant, and isolate what doesn't belong. Each technique comes with working Strands Agents code, so you can see how to shape what enters, stays in, and gets transformed out of the window rather than just stuffing everything in. If you're building agents and watching token counts (and latency) climb, this is a practical reference for spending that budget deliberately.

📰 What AWS's Matt Wood told employees about the future of AI

At the AWS Global Meeting on September 17, AWS Chief AI and Technology Officer Matt Wood framed the company's AI strategy as a rerun of its cloud playbook, naming Trainium for compute, Bedrock for inference, and AgentCore for agents as the building blocks. To make the point he brought startup Odyssey on stage, whose Odyssey-3 foundation world model trains and runs on Trainium3 and learns physics from raw video rather than hand-coded rules. The developer-facing surfaces here are the ones Wood named, Trainium, Bedrock, and AgentCore; the world models themselves are a reference for where frontier workloads are heading, not yet an API you can call.

📰 CW@60: Nobody notices when it works

By Werner Vogels

For Computer Weekly's 60th anniversary, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels reflects on two decades spent building the kind of infrastructure people only notice when it fails. It's a thoughtful read on the unglamorous discipline behind reliable systems, and why the work that runs in the background is often the work that matters most.

📰 How Hyundai Turned Amazon Autos Into Dealership Sales

Hyundai was the exclusive launch partner for Amazon Autos, and this case study is about the measurement plumbing behind it: a privacy-safe attribution framework on AWS Clean Rooms and Amazon Marketing Cloud that matches pseudonymized customer tokens against Amazon shopping and media signals without either side exposing raw data, with Amazon DSP driving the display, video, and streaming campaigns. The reported results: a 10x+ offline sales multiplier and 78% of offline Amazon sales new to the Hyundai brand, on a 90%+ match rate that cut duplicated reach 22% for a 2.2x efficiency gain. If you work on clean-room attribution or AMC/DSP integrations, it's a concrete end-to-end example of tying online media to offline conversions.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

Amazon Dev News • ChatGPT Amazon Ads & Agent Conf • Sept 14, 2026

Moses Roth — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:02:31 +0000

Hey team!

It's fall dev events season, the Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is ongoing and most of the Amazon Dev Rel team is in Warsaw this week for Agent Conf. Be sure to say hi, if you're there too.

If you make apps or content, I recommend checking out the articles on ChatGPT Amazon Ads, Prime Video's Shop the Show, and Prime Video AI Lip Syncing. None of these features are generally available yet, but they will give you a little peek into the future of advertising, content, and AI.

Amazon Quick, the AI assistant for your business data, is now generally available as a native desktop app. Here's a look:

On video, Emerson is interviewed about Alexa+, the AWS crew has a cool demo of their Neon robot, and Erik gives a great demo of Kiro Crew.

There's also a bunch more about Ring, Fire TV, Alexa, Zoox, React, Claude, and more!

🛠️ Dev Updates

🔘 Ring Appstore Marketing Guidelines — New guidelines for Ring Appstore integrations set the approved compatibility phrasing, badge rules, and a 10 to 12 business-day PR review for press and videos.
🔘 Ring Appstore: staging users no longer need to purchase your app to test it — Staging users can now test any app, paid ones included, without a purchase or subscription; production still requires activation.
⚛️ React 19.3 — <ViewTransition> and Fragment Refs are now stable, alongside Trusted Types support in React DOM.

📢 Announcements

📣 Amazon Ads brings advertising into ChatGPT

Amazon Ads and OpenAI opened a U.S. pilot placing conversational Amazon ads inside ChatGPT, keyed off Amazon's shopping signals, an early signal of where ad surfaces are heading.

📊 Amazon Quick is now generally available on desktop

Build on a persistent, native desktop client for Amazon Quick that sits alongside your local tools and pulls context from your business data without a tab-switch, now generally available beside the browser version.

🎬 Prime Video's Shop the Show adds new features and expands to thousands of titles

Prime Video's Shop the Show now surfaces products tied to what viewers are watching across thousands of titles so they can browse featured items without leaving the stream, a useful reference for how contextual, shoppable video comes together at scale.

📅 Events

Our first-ever Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is still ongoing, so there's time to build on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee for a share of a $190K pool before submissions close October 23. We're also all over the conference circuit, from Agent Conf, where Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde are giving a talk and Giovanni Laquidara is leading a workshop, to Next App Con Berlin and CityJS Athens, and 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, which we're hosting: build on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits, with submissions closing October 23.
Sept 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.
Sept 17–18	Agent Conf	Warsaw, PL	Dev Advocate Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde are giving a talk, and Giovanni Laquidara is leading a workshop. Callstack's conference on agentic development — designing, prompting, and orchestrating AI agents in modern software.
Sept 24	React Native Connection	Paris, FR	French React Native conference covering the framework, ecosystem, and platforms built on RN.
Oct 7–9	Next App Con Berlin	Berlin, DE	Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel, Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk. Mobile and app-platform conference at Berlin's CityCube, with workshops, talks, and platform announcements.
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 — broadcast, media, and entertainment-tech industry conference, at the Javits Center.
Oct 22–23	AGNTCon + MCPCon North America	San Jose, US	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.

💬 Dev Posts

Prime Video Uses AI to Sync Actors' Mouths in Dubbed Titles, Starting With 'Maxton Hall' is the one I'd read first: it's a concrete look at applied ML solving the uncanny mismatch between dubbed audio and on-screen lip movement. If you'd rather watch than read, Alexa & The Evolution of Voice AI is a great sit-down on how far voice AI has come, and Reducing cost and improving performance with Claude Platform has practical, dollars-and-latency advice you can apply this week.

📰 How Do Self-Driving Cars Work? A Robotaxi Technology Guide

Zoox breaks down how its purpose-built vehicles perceive, predict, and plan, from the fused camera, lidar, and radar sensor stack to the real-time decisions that move a car through a city. It's a clear systems-level read on an autonomy stack that runs in production across Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin, and other markets, useful if you want to understand how the perception, prediction, and planning layers fit together rather than just the buzzwords. Worth a look for anyone building on real-time sensor fusion or safety-critical decision loops.

📽️ Alexa & The Evolution of Voice AI | with Emerson Sklar

John Kelvie of Bespoken talks with Emerson Sklar, Chief Evangelist for Amazon Alexa, about where voice AI is heading and what it means for the people building on it. They get into the return of the personal assistant, more natural back-and-forth conversation, multimodal experiences, and the AI-powered developer tools reshaping how Alexa skills get built. If you've shipped voice experiences before, it's a useful read on how the platform's assumptions are shifting and what the next generation of Alexa apps can do.

📰 How Zoox Designs Audio With Intent

Sound is one of the hardest interfaces to get right in an autonomous vehicle, and Zoox digs into how its team designs audio as a deliberate signal rather than an afterthought. The post covers how the robotaxi uses sound to communicate intent both to riders inside the cabin and to pedestrians and cyclists around it, and why every cue has to be legible without being alarming. If you build interfaces where a system has to convey state to people who never chose to interact with it, the reasoning here about clarity, restraint, and trust transfers well beyond a car.

📽️ AWS Partners with Anthropic on the Model Hardware Standard

Cagatay Cali and Albert Zhao unpack the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), an open standard that lets agents plug into hardware the way MCP did for software, with a humanoid-robot demo (Neon) to show it working. AWS (via Strands Agents) and Anthropic are building the standard together and testing it against real robots, and a research preview is open for access requests. If you're wiring agents to anything physical, this is the emerging interface layer to watch, and there's a Discord to follow development.

📰 The best tech products of 2026, according to USA TODAY

By Marc Saltzman

USA TODAY's year-end roundup features several Amazon devices, led by the Ember Artline with Fire TV, a 4K set that leans on three Amazon platform bets at once: the LLM-based Alexa+ assistant, an AI "Match the Room" feature that scans a space from your phone and generates ambient art to fit it, and Omnisense presence detection that wakes the display when someone walks in. The Ring Smart Smoke + CO Alarm also makes the list. For developers, it's a useful read on where Amazon is putting on-device and generative AI in ambient hardware, and on the sensing and personalization surfaces those experiences are built on.

📽️ Automate your code and tasks with Kiro Crew

Erik Hanchett demos Kiro Crew, an open-source persistent agent workspace that runs on your own hardware (Mac, Linux, Windows) rather than in the cloud. The demo covers the whole loop: installing with a single curl command, running setup, chatting from the terminal, wiring it into Discord, and handing it a real task, plus how it accumulates memory across sessions. It started as an internal Kiro tool and is now open source with hundreds of contributors, so if you want a self-hosted agent you can extend and keep your context on your own box, the GitHub repo and docs at kiro.dev/docs/crew are the place to start.

📰 Prime Video Uses AI to Sync Actors' Mouths in Dubbed Titles, Starting With 'Maxton Hall'

By Todd Spangler

Prime Video is rolling out AI-driven lip-sync that reshapes an actor's mouth movements to match the dubbed audio track, debuting on the German series "Maxton Hall" before expanding to more titles. For developers, it's a concrete look at generative video applied at streaming scale, where a model has to alter faces frame-by-frame while holding identity and expression stable across a full season. If you work on media pipelines or localization, it also reframes dubbing as a rendering problem rather than an audio one, with the quality bar set by whether viewers ever notice.

📰 IMDb Adds Digital Creator Profiles for the First Time

By Todd Spangler

IMDb is extending its catalog beyond film and TV to include dedicated profiles for digital creators, the first time the database has formally recognized online-native talent. For developers, it is a reminder that IMDb's entity model and public data surface keep widening, which matters if you build anything against IMDb metadata or reason about how Amazon structures entertainment identity data. Worth a look at how a decades-old catalog schema absorbs a category it was never designed for.

📰 Reducing cost and improving performance with Claude Platform

By Lance Martin

If you're building on Claude, this post lays out the three levers that cut your token bill without degrading output: prompt caching to avoid re-sending stable context, tightening instructions so the model does less work per call, and dialing effort to match the task. Each is a knob you can turn today in your own application code, and the guidance is concrete about when each one pays off. Worth a read before your next round of API cost tuning.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

Amazon Dev News • Fire TV Beta & Ring Dome Cam 4K • Sept 8, 2026

Moses Roth — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:47:05 +0000

Hey everyone! Yesterday was Labor Day in the US, so it's a rare Tuesday post this week.

Last week Chris Trag and I sat down for a live build session for the Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon. I hope everyone reading this participates, so check it out, if you're looking for ideas.

Ring launched the new Ring Dome Cam 4K, a 4K dome camera built for business and multi-site installs, giving you a new device your integrations can work with.

We also launched a new Fire TV Beta program for Fire TV customers to try out new software before it's released. If you're a Fire TV dev, it could be a great opportunity for you too, to test your apps against pre-release Fire OS builds.

On the events side, we're out in force this fall: Agent Conf in Warsaw next week, with Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde on stage and Giovanni Laquidara running a workshop, then Next App Con Berlin and CityJS Athens in October, so we hope to see you there!

Let's dive in!

🛠️ Dev Updates

🆘 Alexa+ and Smart Home Developer Support — Alexa+ and Smart Home devs can now get support through the DevAssistant tool, instead of the Contact Us form.

📢 Announcements

🔥 Fire TV Beta program

Amazon launched a new Fire TV Beta program for customers. It's open to Fire TV devs too, so I recommend checking out the FAQ, covering how to enroll and what to expect, if you'd like to test your apps against pre-release Fire OS builds.

🔔 Introducing the Ring Dome Cam 4K

Ring extends its lineup with a 4K dome camera built for business and multi-site installs, with USB-C or PoE power, Wi-Fi or Ethernet, local storage, and end-to-end encryption, widening the surface of Ring devices and footage your Ring Appstore integrations can work with.

📅 Events

We're out across Europe and the US this fall. Next up is Agent Conf in Warsaw on September 17, where Dev Advocates Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde are giving a talk and Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop, then we head to Next App Con Berlin and CityJS Athens in October. 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, which we're hosting: build on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits, with submissions closing October 23.
Sept 11	ZurichJS Conf	Zurich, CH	Annual JavaScript conference covering the web, frameworks, and emerging JS platforms, and we'll be in the room.
Sept 11–14	IBC Show	Amsterdam, NL	The leading media, entertainment, and broadcast-technology show at RAI Amsterdam, worth a look for anyone shipping streaming apps.
Sept 17–18	Agent Conf	Warsaw, PL	Dev Advocates Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde are giving a talk, and Sr. Dev Advocate Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop on agentic development.
Sept 24	React Native Connection	Paris, FR	French React Native conference covering the framework and the platforms built on it, and we'll be dropping in.
Oct 7–9	Next App Con Berlin	Berlin, DE	Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel, Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk.
Oct 21–22	NAB Show New York	New York City, US	East-coast edition of NAB Show for broadcast, media, and entertainment tech, at the Javits Center.
Oct 21–23	CityJS Athens	Athens, GR	Dev Advocate Moses Roth is giving a talk at the Athens edition of the CityJS series on modern JavaScript and frontend.
Oct 22–23	AGNTCon + MCPCon North America	San Jose, US	Linux Foundation conference for the open agentic-AI ecosystem, with MCP and agent-systems tracks for builders.
Oct 23–26	React Advanced London	London, GB	Advanced-React conference for senior practitioners working with the framework at scale.
Oct 28–29	GitHub Universe	San Francisco, US	GitHub's flagship event for developers and maintainers, 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; billed as the final edition.

💬 Dev Posts

A few things worth your time this week: our hackathon build session, a new Vega guide on User-Agent strings, and a look at how Amazon Luna runs AAA games on a $35 stick.

📽️ Amazon Developer Hackathon Build Session: Fire TV, Alexa+, Bee & Ring

Chris Trag and I (with some help from Emerson Sklar and Darlyze Calixte) walk through all four hackathon tracks (Fire TV, Alexa+ with MCP, the Bee wearable, and Ring), plus the AWS Builder and open-source mini-challenges, with live Q&A on judging and where to get help. If you're deciding what to build before the October 23 deadline, this is the fastest way to see what each track is looking for.

📰 Handling User-Agent Strings in Vega WebView and React Native Apps

By Ashutosh Joglekar

Vega WebView and React Native apps expose different User-Agent strings, and the OS and Chromium version tokens inside them change with every release. The guidance is to treat the UA as opaque: never hardcode substring or version checks, and if you need to identify your own Vega traffic, append an app-owned token or a custom header you control instead of parsing Amazon's default string. Essential reading if your backend does any device detection or capability gating.

📰 AAA games on a $35 stick: How Luna removes the hardware barrier with AWS

By Tyler Ng and Richard Lawrence

Amazon Luna streams AAA titles at 1080p60 to a $35 Fire TV Stick, a smart TV, or a browser with no download, and this piece digs into how: latency-based GPU instance selection across Regions, games in lightweight Linux containers, and controller input sent straight over Wi-Fi to dodge display lag. The engineering hook is the multi-tenancy model, four-plus certified 60fps sessions per GPU while keeping the fleet busy about 76% of the time, and it points you at Amazon GameLift Streams if you want to build your own streaming storefront on the same service.

📰 Zoox's Aicha Evans Is Reimagining Urban Mobility

By Joe Mullich

TIME's Trailblazers profile of Aicha Evans, CEO of Amazon's robotaxi company Zoox, which began charging for rides in Las Vegas in August and is expanding to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, and Austin next. It's a good look at where Amazon's autonomous and robotics ambitions are heading, toward purpose-built vehicles with no steering wheel and face-to-face seating.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

Amazon Dev News • Hackathon & Ring Updates • Aug 31, 2026

Moses Roth — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:20:32 +0000

Hi, everyone!

The Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is live! This is our first global hackathon and it runs through October 23, with $190K cash and AWS credits in prizes. You can build projects for Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, Bee, or any combination. My team is running this and we'll have a bunch more to share with you, but for now, check out the link and sign up!

Three big Ring Developer updates: TAKE, Ring's new default end-to-end encryption, which narrows what any integration on top of it can reach; a weekly metrics report in the developer portal; and dynamic scopes and sensor support in early access.

On the Fire TV side, there's a new AI-assisted guide for migrating Fire OS apps to Vega, and the TV sample apps got a refresh.

If you create content on YouTube, you can now tag the Amazon devices you mention as a YouTube Shopping Affiliate.

Our fall conference run is starting up as well, from Shanghai to Warsaw to Berlin to Athens. I'll personally be in Berlin and Athens, so if you're attending, come say hi!

🛠️ Dev Updates

📊 Weekly metrics reports for your Ring app — The Ring Developer Portal now generates a weekly report with 14 metrics across active users, account linking, trials, subscriptions, and revenue, each shown for the selected week, the week before, and year to date.
🔘 Ring API: dynamic scopes and sensor support (early access) — New apps can now request just the Ring API scopes they need (Cameras and Doorbells, Sensors, Chimes) instead of a fixed set, and Ring sensors are documented as a device family your existing device endpoints already handle; dynamic-scope apps can publish once the feature reaches GA.
🏬 Just Walk Out: payment and identity API fixes — The Just Walk Out payment and identity APIs received minor fixes and improvements.
📺 Vega EPG sample app — The TV-guide sample now runs on Vega OS 1.2, with a fix so its dependencies install cleanly from public npm.
📱 React Native multi-TV starter — The multi-platform TV starter template is now on the latest Vega SDK.

📢 Announcements

🏆 Build, Ship, Shape: our first global Amazon Developer Hackathon

The first global Amazon Developer Hackathon is open through October 23: build or significantly update a working project on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee across four tracks, for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits plus a 1:1 with the Amazon Developer team.

🔒 Ring introduces TAKE, its new default encryption standard

Ring's TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption) will roll out as the default end-to-end encryption for every Ring customer worldwide, and because Ring itself can't decrypt that footage, it narrows what your integrations can access and what Ring can hand to law enforcement.

🖥️ AWS and NVIDIA expand their partnership with 2 million more GPUs

AWS and NVIDIA will deploy two million additional GPUs and deepen their work across CPUs, networking, and robotics, growing the capacity you can train and run models on through AWS and Bedrock.

🛒 YouTube Shopping affiliates can now tag Amazon products

US creators in the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program can now tag Amazon products across Shorts, long-form videos, and livestreams and earn commissions, a new surface for anyone building on Amazon's affiliate program.

📅 Events

Our fall run kicks off in September and stretches through October. We're giving talks and workshops at AGNTCon + MCPCon China, Agent Conf in Warsaw, and CityJS Athens, and we'll also be on the ground at IBC, NAB, and GitHub Universe. Come say hi!

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 for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits, with submissions closing October 23.
Sep 6–7	AGNTCon + MCPCon China	Shanghai, CN	Sr. Dev Advocate Giovanni Laquidara is giving a talk on Sep 7.
Sep 11–14	IBC Show	Amsterdam, NL	The media, entertainment, and broadcast-tech show where streaming-device teams gather.
Sep 11	ZurichJS Conf	Zurich, CH	A JavaScript community conference in Switzerland.
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're attending.
Oct 7–9	Next App Con Berlin	Berlin, DE	Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel, Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk.
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, at the Javits Center.
Oct 22–23	AGNTCon + MCPCon North America	San Jose, US	A Linux Foundation conference for the open agentic AI ecosystem, with MCP and agent-systems tracks.
Oct 28–29	GitHub Universe	San Francisco, US	GitHub's flagship developer event, focused on collaboration and workflows in the agentic era.
Oct 29–31	React India	Goa, IN	India's largest React conference, spanning web, mobile, and emerging React platforms.

💬 Dev Posts

A few things worth reading and watching this week. If you’re eyeing a Vega port, start with the migration walkthrough below, and check out the two AWS Developers videos on building and then observing agents.

📰 Migrating Your Fire OS App to Vega with ADBT

By Siddhesh Pandit

This walkthrough uses Amazon Devices Builder Tools (ADBT), the AI-powered dev suite, to take an existing Fire OS app and move it to Vega OS with the original source as a reference. It's a practical starting point if you've been putting off a Vega port and want to see how much of it the tooling can carry.

📽️ How to Build Agents That Write Their Own Tools

Senior Developer Advocate Sandhya Subramani builds an agent that closes its own capability gaps: ask for something outside its toolset and it writes a new tool, tests it, loads it, and uses it live in the same conversation, instead of hand-waving an answer.

📰 An Amazon SVP on writing 100,000 lines of code with AI

By Beth Galetti

SVP of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti hadn't written code in 25 years, then leaned on AI tools to build and ship 100,000 lines of it. Her piece is a candid read on how AI is widening who gets to build inside a company, alongside the $2.5 billion Amazon is putting toward reskilling its workforce.

📽️ Observability for AI Agents

Developer Advocate Elizabeth Fuentes Leone walks three layers of observability for agents built with Strands Agents, which emits OpenTelemetry natively. One method surfaces cycles, token counts, tool timings, and duration; turn on tracing and you get the full step-by-step decision path with tool inputs and outputs attached to each span.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

Amazon Dev News • Alexa+ on Fire TV & OpenIAP • Aug 24, 2026

Moses Roth — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:43:07 +0000

Hey team!

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!

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. And 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.

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!

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_id you 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/ucp profile, 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.

📽️ AI-Powered Personalization in React Native at Scale

Senior Program Manager Megha Hooli digs into how React Native teams deliver per-customer personalization without hurting performance: the recommendation systems, personalization engines, and predictive models behind it, and how they keep latency, data sync, and privacy in line as traffic grows. Recorded at Chain React 2026 in Portland.

📬 Feedback

Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!

How to Use React Native Libraries in Your Vega App

Moses Roth — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:15:13 +0000

Vega is Amazon's Linux-based operating system for Fire TV.

It uses a fork of React Native (React Native for Vega), so not all RN libraries work out of the box. That means if you are porting your app to Vega, you may need to wire in a Vega fork of some of your libraries as well.

The good news is that we have ported many of the most popular libraries used in TV apps, and we've also built the Vega Module Resolver Preset (VMRP), which replaces third-party libraries with their Vega-platform ported equivalencies.

Let's break it down with the four categories of libraries for Vega:

Libraries with Vega forks
Libraries that depend on another forked library
Libraries that work out of the box
Libraries that don't work with Vega yet

Libraries with Vega forks

Libraries with Vega forks work natively in your Vega app. You can find a list of them in the documentation. They are supported as part of the @amazon-devices/ namespace.

There are two ways to use a forked library:

1. Import the fork directly by its @amazon-devices/ name. Install the fork:

npm install @amazon-devices/react-native-gesture-handler@2.0.1759135970

Then import it using the @amazon-devices/ prefix:

import { ... } from '@amazon-devices/react-native-gesture-handler'

This works for your own code, but it won't help with transitive imports. If another library in your dependency tree imports react-native-gesture-handler by its original name, that import won't be redirected and will break at runtime. For that reason, option 2 below is recommended for most apps.

2. Keep your original import names by using the VMRP, which swaps the original library for the fork at bundle time. See How to use the Vega Module Resolver Preset below for the setup steps and an explanation of how it works.

The VMRP keeps your import statements platform-neutral and handles transitive dependencies inside other libraries automatically.

Check the Supported Libraries and Services documentation for more information and a complete list of the natively forked libraries.

Libraries that depend on another forked library

A lot of libraries rely on other libraries to work. For example, react-native-chart-kit relies on react-native-svg to work.

These libraries won't work on Vega on their own, they have internal imports of the original package that need to be redirected to the Vega fork via VMRP.

Simply adding @amazon-devices/react-native-svg to your package.json does not redirect that internal import because Metro still tries to resolve the string react-native-svg, and the build breaks. You'll need to use the VMRP (see How to use the Vega Module Resolver Preset below), because it rewrites imports inside libraries you can't modify.

Install the parent library, and then install both the fork and its upstream at their exact pinned versions:

npm install react-native-chart-kit@7.0.1
npm install --save-exact react-native-svg@13.14.0
npm install @amazon-devices/react-native-svg@2.0.1759135970

Your dependencies will then look like:

 "dependencies": {
     ...
     "@amazon-devices/react-native-svg": "2.0.1759135970",
     "react-native-svg": "13.14.0",
     "react-native-chart-kit": "~7.0.1",
     ...
}

You'll need to include both the @amazon-devices/ version and the upstream version of the dependency. The fork provides the native implementation, and the plain package must be present at the exact version the fork aliases so the VMRP can map it. (Only the aliased library needs an exact pin, the parent library can use a normal version range.)

Libraries that work out of the box

The simplest libraries are the ones that already work with Vega, no porting required. These are pure JavaScript libraries with no native module code. They don't touch any platform-native layer, so they run on React Native for Vega the same way they run on standard React Native. Just import them like you normally would.

Libraries that don't work with Vega yet

Finally, there are the libraries that aren't available on Vega yet.

Tell us which ones you would like to see come to Vega!

We're working on making Vega better every day, and that includes porting the libraries you'd like to see.

How to use the Vega Module Resolver Preset

The VMRP is a Babel preset (built on babel-plugin-module-resolver) that rewrites import specifiers at bundle time. It scans your node_modules for @amazon-devices/ packages, reads their alias target (the upstream package name and exact version they replace), and rewrites every matching import specifier to point at the fork instead. Because the rewrite happens during transpilation, it applies to all code Metro bundles, including imports inside third-party libraries you can't edit.

This is why both packages must be installed: the upstream provides the module specifier that existing code references, and the fork provides the native implementation that VMRP redirects to. The pattern is similar to how monorepo workspaces alias packages: two copies coexist in node_modules and a resolver layer decides which one gets loaded, except here it's a Babel transform doing the aliasing at bundle time rather than the package manager.

This keeps your import statements platform-neutral and handles transitive dependencies automatically, so it's the recommended approach for most apps.

How to set up the VMRP

1. Install the VMRP:

npm install --save-dev "@amazon-devices/kepler-module-resolver-preset"

2. Install the babel-plugin-module-resolver:

npm install --save-dev "babel-plugin-module-resolver"

3. Install both the original library and the Vega fork at their exact pinned versions. Check the Supported Libraries documentation for the correct pair:

npm install --save-exact react-native-gesture-handler@2.13.0
npm install @amazon-devices/react-native-gesture-handler@2.0.1759135970

Use --save-exact for the upstream library because VMRP compares the version string in your package.json character-for-character against the fork's alias target. Without it, npm writes a ^ prefix that prevents the exact match.

4. Register the preset in your Babel config (.babelrc or babel.config.js, in the same folder as your package.json):

module.exports = {
    presets: [
        'module:metro-react-native-babel-preset',
        'module:@amazon-devices/kepler-module-resolver-preset', // Enables the Vega Module Resolver Preset
        ...
    ],
};

5. Clean and re-build your package. You can now import the library by its original name, and it will be swapped for the fork automatically. A successful swap logs a confirmation line in the build output (Mapped react-native-svg to @amazon-devices/react-native-svg@...) and the native manifest will list the corresponding com.amazon.kepler.* system module dependency. If something goes wrong, you'll see a Skipped warning instead (see Troubleshooting below).

The @amazon-devices/ packages are published on npm. Install them with npm install like any other dependency. Always pull the exact fork version from the Supported Libraries documentation because a mismatched pin causes VMRP to silently skip the swap.

Troubleshooting

Version mismatch

The VMRP requires an exact upstream version match. A caret/tilde range or the wrong version means it silently skips the library rather than mapping it. You'll see a Skipped warning in the build output:

[kepler-module-resolver] Skipped react-native-svg, Version Mismatch! Application requested import react-native-svg@^13.14.0, aliased library is: @amazon-devices/react-native-svg@13.14.0. An exact match is required.

Note the ^ in the requested version above: a range prevents the exact match. Pin the original library to the plain upstream version ("react-native-svg": "13.14.0", not "^13.14.0") so it exactly matches what the fork aliases. If you used npm install without --save-exact, edit the version in package.json to remove the ^ and run npm install again to update the lockfile.

How to verify the swap succeeded

Grep the build output for [kepler-module-resolver]. A Mapped <library> line confirms the swap succeeded. A Skipped line means it didn't. Check for a version mismatch as described above. If a library redboxes at runtime with an error like "RNSVGPath was not found in the UIManager" and you don't see a Mapped line for it, the swap didn't happen.

Parent library incompatible with the fork's version

VMRP handling a transitive dependency doesn't guarantee the parent library works end-to-end on Vega. The parent library may depend on a newer version of the upstream package than what the Vega fork currently targets. For example, if a library requires react-native-svg@^15.0.0 but the Vega fork aliases 13.14.0, pinning to 13.14.0 satisfies VMRP but may break the parent library (it could use APIs only available in v15). Check the reactnative.directory Vega filter to confirm a library has been validated on Vega, and test it yourself before shipping it in production.