DEV Community: Moses Roth

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

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 — Ring Appstore integrations now have published marketing guidelines: use only the approved compatibility phrasing ("Compatible with Ring cameras," "Available in the Ring Appstore"), avoid review-blocking claims (exec quotes, usage stats, "first/best/only," "Built with Ring"), follow the badge sizing/placement rules, and submit any press releases or videos for PR-team approval 10 to 12 business days before publish.
🔘 Ring Appstore: staging users no longer need to purchase your app to test it — Ring Appstore staging users can now authorize a test account on the Test page and run staging builds of any app, including paid ones, without completing a purchase or subscription activation first, so drop the payment flow from your staging test loop (production still requires activation and fires subscription_activated, and testers still need an active Ring Protection plan or trial for cloud features).
⚛️ React 19.3 — React 19.3 is on npm and promotes <ViewTransition> and Fragment Refs from experimental to stable, so you can drop third-party motion libraries for Transition-driven enter/exit/move animations and opt into the new Trusted Types support in React DOM plus rendering <Context> directly in Server Components.

📢 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 • Sept 8, 2026: Fire TV Beta & Ring Dome Cam 4K

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 • Aug 31, 2026: Hackathon & Ring Updates

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 • Aug 24, 2026: Alexa+ on Fire TV & OpenIAP

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.

📬 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.

12 Hints to Harness AI

Moses Roth — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:05:34 +0000

Everyone's talking about AI, how you have to try it, how it can improve your life, and how it's the worst thing to ever happen.

But what about using it for something useful? Maybe you've played around with it, used it to write an email, asked it a question you were too embarrassed to ask your friends or too cheap to ask a professional.

But what about using it to do something big? Maybe something you always wanted to do or your boss is telling you to do. Something you haven't had the time or the energy for.

Because that's what AI is really for: helping you work, doing all the boring parts for you, and making it easy and fun.

1. Harnessing AI

To tell this story, I have to talk about testing React Native libraries on Fire TV. I totally get if you have no interest in that or don't know what it means, but it will lead to useful hints for AI, whether you're interested in app development or not.

💡 React Native is a cross-platform framework for building apps. Libraries are reusable code you can insert into your app. So the React Native Directory is an index of reusable cross-platform code.

Last year my team at Amazon Developer announced that Fire OS (for Fire TV and tablets) was now on the React Native Directory. Since then, the Vega Open Beta launched (Amazon's new Fire device platform) and it was also added to the directory.

Things have been a bit quieter since then, but if you check out the Fire OS and Vega OS listings on reactnative.directory, you may notice that there are now 100s of compatible libraries.

Those 100s of libraries were all tested one at a time, on a real device, in a real app, with real, verified results, and each one took virtually no manual work.

So how did that happen?

The answer, which will probably not surprise you, is AI.

But more specifically, my colleague Gio and I built an AI harness.

An AI harness is sort of what it sounds like, a way to guide AI to do a specific type of task, by providing the context, tools, and environment it needs to do it.

I'm telling you this story because harnesses are not just for testing apps. They're not even just for coding or other technical purposes.

You could build a harness to prepare your taxes every year, organize all your paperwork, plan your vacations, help you analyze the stock market, apply to new jobs, or any of a thousand things you have to do or want to do and just can't find the time or motivation for.

So how do you build one?

2. Have a plan

It may not shock you to learn that the answer to that question is also AI.

We asked Claude what the best way to test multiple libraries would be, and it suggested a reusable harness.

From there, we went back and forth with Claude a long time as it got more details about our requirements and as it offered various choices about how it could look.

You’ll hear a lot of devs talking about “prompt engineering” or “context engineering”. It basically means talking to an LLM in a way that gets the best results, by being highly specific.

But this can be a tough skill to learn, so most AI tools now have a Plan Mode for working out what to build before the actual coding begins (and wasting too many tokens).

It's used so that you can just describe what you'd like to build as best you can, and then the LLM will ask follow up questions and then give you a written proposal before starting work. You can update it, rewrite it, or just tell the LLM what’s wrong with it and eventually you’ll end up with a document that describes exactly what you want.

For our project, we ended up with a 10-page document before one line of code was ever written.

3. Check your work

In the simplest terms, here's how our harness worked:

It had app templates: a Fire OS app and a Vega app with no main app file (App.tsx).
It would create custom main app files for each library.
It would plug that custom app file into the templates and run them on Fire TVs or emulators and log the results.
If the app worked, the library would get a pass (compatible). If it didn't work, it would get a fail (incompatible).

Once we built it, it was working great, getting great results, mostly passes. I repeatedly asked Claude if the demos were truly confirming the compatibility of the libraries on Fire TV and it always said yes.

Then Gio said, “let’s take a look and confirm ourselves”.

Every demo Claude built used a require() + Object.keys() pattern: import the library, dump its exports to the screen, call it a pass.

That means that all it did was prove the library loaded, not that it actually worked.

Remember how your math teacher used to say it's more important to show your work than to get the right answer?

Once you build your harness, check the work. Even if you're not an engineer or not building a technical project, open up the files in a text editor or IDE and see what it's actually doing. Ask your LLM to explain it to you if you need to.

In our case, I found it super helpful to actually watch the app being tested on the Fire TV. I spotted issues I never would have without actually observing it.

If it's generating reports or documents for you, read them.

You have to do that because...

4. LLMs are people too

AI will shock you with how oddly human it can be.

It will cut corners, avoid hard work, and even mislead you. (I asked Claude about this, and it insisted it can’t lie, but close enough.)

That means if you tell an LLM you need a working demo of an app, it will give you the minimal requirements that fulfill that request. And it’s not just laziness, it’s that the minimal requirement is more likely to be “successful.”

In this case, we asked it to create a demo and then run it and give it a pass/fail. It wanted to pass that test and it knew that an app that only does the bare minimum is more likely to pass.

So its "desire" to do less work and to please were working against us, getting results that didn't bear up under scrutiny, and the harness needed complete reworking.

5. Stop, collaborate, and listen

Our harness has gone through a ton of iterations but the first version was built with Kiro (Amazon's AI-based version of VS Code) and worked like this:

Kiro would prebuild the main app file and hand it to the harness, and the harness would combine it with the template, run it on the emulator, and judge the results.

We envisioned the harness as an autonomous agent, but it couldn’t construct the demos on its own without its own LLM call.

When I asked Kiro how to do this, it suggested integrating Vertex, Anthropic, or OpenAI API. But my job only gave me access to Kiro (at that time), no direct API calls.

I asked if there was any way to integrate Kiro directly into the harness and it said no.

But then Gio read about ACP (Agent Client Protocol), a JSON-RPC protocol for communicating with agents that Kiro supports. We tried to implement it, but it was too complex: session management, tool call parsing, chunked streaming responses. It didn't work cleanly.

But then Kiro itself suggested using kiro-cli chat as a child process within the agent. Spawn it with a structured prompt, pipe the output, parse the result. No protocol, no session management, just stdin/stdout.

And it worked!

I asked Kiro why it didn’t suggest that before and it told me it didn’t think about it.

Again, the AI shocking me with how oddly human it can be.

But the point is that neither Kiro, Gio, nor I got the real solution on our own, we did it together.

That’s what working with an LLM is all about: it does certain things you’ll never be able to do, but you also do things it can’t. It’s a true collaboration.

6. Trial and error

Once we got kiro-cli directly integrated into the agent, the basic framework of it was done, after that it was just the long process of refining through trial and error.

It would test a library and it would pass or fail. If it failed, I would ask it to investigate whether it was a real compatibility failure or a testing issue. If it was a testing issue, we’d need to refine the testing. Then we’d test another.

A huge amount of building with AI is just waiting for whatever you built to fail and then trying out solutions until you find one that works.

7. Read and log everything

When you're building or troubleshooting your project, don't just look at the results, read everything the LLM says.

If you're doing a code-based project, turn on verbose logging and review that too.

You'll be shocked how often it points out an issue and then dismisses it completely, saying, "But now is not the time for that." And then it will never come back to it if you don't tell it to.

Give it instructions to never hand-wave an issue. Tell it to update the project memory or rules with those instructions and to always document problems it spots and create a new task or todo for any issue it spots.

8. I've got to admit it's getting better, a little better all the time

Months into using the harness and testing libraries, I was asking Claude about the results of a test and it said, "Let me check the screenshot to see what it shows."

Whaaa...?

We added a screenshot feature into the harness so we could review them, but now Claude was volunteering (without being asked) to independently check one and provide feedback about it.

That was something it just wasn't capable of when we first started the project in the distant past of 2025.

Agents are getting so much better literally every few weeks. Our harness now does things it never could have done at the beginning, building higher quality tests and judging them independently with a degree of accuracy that's shocking.

If you tried to do something with AI a year ago and failed, try it again. And ask your agent how it can improve your project, what new capabilities it has, and what else it can do.

9. Plan for new sessions

Sometimes your system will crash, or you'll need to restart to install a new MCP, or your context window will run out and you’ll feel like you’re talking to someone new.

Don’t get attached, plan for it.

Tell your LLM to create project memory and session handoff docs and tell it to include instructions to update them both consistently.

If you're thinking, "I don't know how to tell it to do that," just tell it to, using whatever words you would normally use. It's really that simple with an LLM.

Example prompt: Create project memory and session handoff docs, if they don't already exist. Update the memory doc to keep both the memory and the session handoff consistently updated.

When it does something you like or something you don't like, tell it to update its memory. If you're working on a long task, make sure it's documented in the session doc.

Sometimes one session will be much sloppier than another. Everything was going great last session and suddenly your LLM can’t stop stepping on rakes, deleting code, adding new bugs, making things worse.

That's because it's getting weighed down by too much context in the current session.

You can always start a new session, just be prepared.

10. Use open-ended prompts

I like to check in with the LLM occasionally with an open-ended question. If you get too focused on your narrow path, you can miss things. It remembers things you forgot, notices things it doesn’t mention because you never asked, even gets “ideas” of its own.

Example prompt: Have I forgotten anything or made any mistakes? Did you spot any issues that we haven't addressed? Is there anything I haven’t asked you about, but would be a good idea?

11. Don't just collaborate with AI, collaborate with other people

Remember when I said Gio caught the LLM being lazy with its testing? It wasn’t just the LLM being lazy, it was me. I told it to create a minimal working demo, it seemed to be working, and I didn’t want to dig any deeper.

Having Gio to come in with a separate perspective helped keep both me and the LLM honest.

Did you hear the story about the guy who let ChatGPT convince him he reinvented math?

That’s why you don’t just need robot collaborators, you need human ones too.

12. Have fun!

As a writer, I find the idea of AI incredibly disconcerting, like most people do.

Are we going to be replaced by AI or just drowned in slop? Either way, it doesn't sound good.

But here's the thing: I loved doing this project.

It's hard for me to believe, but it's the truth. I would stay up nights, work weekends, and be thinking about it when I wasn't working on it.

Building with AI, seeing the project come to life, and making it better was so much fun. What can I say? I caught the bug and I hope you will too.

What's it like to ship an app before the OS is finished?

Moses Roth — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:14:35 +0000

Building an app is always difficult, but what's it like when the platform hasn't shipped yet and is changing every day?

Last year Amazon shipped Vega, a brand new operating system, with hundreds of apps already live on the platform. How did that happen: so many apps already live and performant on launch day?

For developers, it was like trying to hit a moving target, standing on a moving vehicle.

I helped host a Vega meetup in Munich and three devs shared their from-the-trenches perspectives on this unique challenge.

Sebastian Mader, a senior smart TV developer at ProSieben, shares his journey bringing Joyn, the free ad-supported streaming service, to Vega. After his team's previous project was cancelled in March 2023, his team got their hands on a strange Fire TV stick in April, kicked off development in June on SDK version 0.4, and spent the following months watching each new SDK update break their app. The core lesson: React Native on Vega is not React.js, and when performance matters, sometimes the right move is to pull code out of React entirely. He walks through how the team rewrote Joyn's player as a plain TypeScript controller with a view-model bridge, cutting startup time by 50%.

Artur Morys-Magiera, a senior React Native engineer at Callstack, discusses the pitfalls of developing on a new, performance-sensitive platform. He walks through a five-step methodology: define, measure, analyze, improve, control. He also discusses the tooling landscape: Reassure for catching performance regressions in CI, OpenTelemetry, Embrace, and Sentry for production monitoring, Flashlight and React DevTools for dev-time inspection, and Callstack's own Ottrelite library for tracing across JavaScript, C++, Kotlin, and Swift.

Matthias Fesich, an iOS-turned-React-Native developer at DNA inc., shares his team's 18-month journey porting an existing audio/video streaming app onto Vega. Starting in January 2024 with just three developers, they took a codebase already shipping on iOS, Android, and web and rebuilt it in React Native for Vega, landing four to five weeks ahead of deadline. He discusses the three principles that kept the team moving while the platform kept shifting underneath them: move fast without breaking things, reuse code and logic from the sister apps, and anticipate change.

We also got a bonus talk from Christian Van Boven, Principal Product Manager at Amazon, who shares the upcoming roadmap for Vega:

Some details have changed since the talk, but it's still the best overview of where Vega is heading in 2026.

5 cool things from CES for Amazon Developers (plus 4 more!)

Moses Roth — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:23:36 +0000

CES is one of the biggest electronics shows in the world, and this year I got to go for the first time. The 2025 show just wrapped up and if you were there and stopped by Amazon’s showcase, you might have seen me or even chatted with me about Fire TV.

The show is huge. If you spent all week just checking out as many booths as you could, you still wouldn’t see everything.

So whether you were able to attend or not, here are 5 highlights for Amazon Developers (and a few other cool things too):

AI-enhanced voice search on Fire TV with Alexa

Amazon was demoing the new AI-enhanced search on Fire TV with Alexa, which will help you find a show or movie, even if you don't remember the title or don't know exactly what you want to watch.

You can try it now on your Fire TV at home, it’s already live! Here are some examples you might try:

“TV show about dragons”

“Tom Cruise sci-fi action movie”

“Movie where they say ‘life is like a box of chocolates’”

Try it out and see if you get the results you expect. I bet you’ll be impressed.

This is great news for developers, because it means customers can now find your content a lot more easily. As long as your show or movie is integrated in the Amazon catalog, it will appear in the search results.

Cars with Alexa and Fire TV integrated

Amazon is working on integrating Fire TV, AWS, and Alexa into cars and we had the Acura ZDX and the BMW X3 M50 on display. I got the chance to try it out by sitting in the car and giving Alexa commands.

Be sure to target Automotive devices, so that cars with Fire TV will be able to run your app.

Echo Show 15 and 21

One cool thing about the new, bigger Echo Shows is that they are like mini-Fire TVs. They come with a Fire TV remote and customers can play Fire TV apps and channels on them.

Don’t forget to target these devices, so you can reach a whole new audience with your app!

Fire TV 85" Omni Mini-LED and Soundbar Plus with surround sound

One of the most fun demos we did was Amazon’s 85“ Fire TV and Soundbar Plus with subwoofer and surround sound speakers. We took people into a soundproof room and played The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for them so they could feel the Dolby Atmos. Make sure your content is set up to take advantage of it, because it sounds awesome, and it will bring a whole new level of performance to your app.

AI-generated images on Fire TV

We were also showing off Fire TV’s new ability to create AI-generated images. You can try it right now on your own device. Just use your remote to say, “Alexa, generate an image of dogs jumping on the moon” or I’m sure you’ll come up with some ideas more creative than me!

4 other things...

Obviously, it wasn’t just Amazon at the show, so here are 4 other cool things I saw at CES that impressed me.

Delorean

Clarios somehow managed to get a Delorean from Back to the Future to the show. Pretty cool.

Boring Company/Tesla loop

CES is huge. To get around the 3 parts of the Las Vegas Convention Center, they offered free rides in Teslas through Boring Company tunnels. Very cool.

Holograms

Hypervsn was showing off this crazy 20 foot tall hologram. The photo doesn’t quite do it justice, but it was impressive.

Zoox robotaxis

Okay, this one is technically part of Amazon, but I had to mention it too. Zoox is currently testing its automated taxis in Las Vegas, and they were offering demo rides for those lucky enough to get one.

That was my CES experience and I’m super glad I got the chance to go. Let me know if there was anything you loved at CES that I missed, and hopefully I’ll see you there next year!

Testing the startup time for your Fire OS app

Moses Roth — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 17:53:47 +0000

The first time you start up an app is like the first time you meet someone. Is it love at first sight? Or do they have a stain on their shirt and bad body odor? It’s the same with an app, does it start up quickly and smoothly? Or does it have long loading times and crash? Your customers will expect your app to be fast and responsive, and the best way to demonstrate that is with a quick startup, so that your app always makes a good first impression.

The FireOS Performance Test will help you measure First Frame (Time to Initial Display) to test how fast your app will get up and running.

Set up

To get started you’ll need to:

Install Java 8 or above
Install Java Development Kit 17 or higher
Install Android Studio (with Android SDK (API Level 34))
Install Maven
- Hint: The instructions on Maven’s website can be a bit confounding, so:
  - If you’re on a Mac, use Homebrew to install it by running brew install maven in the terminal
  - If you’re on Windows, check out this blog post
Set up ADB
- Hint: If you’re on a Mac, this blog can help with the command not found: adb error

Install

Once you’ve done that, you can install the performance tester with these steps:

Clone the performance tester repository by running this command in the terminal:
```
git clone https://github.com/amazonappdev/fireos-perf-testing.git
```
Navigate to the project directory:
```
cd fireos-perf-testing
```
Build the project and create the JAR:
```
mvn clean install
```

Run the test

You can then run the test with the following steps:

Locate the ZIP file FOSTTIDPerfTesting-distribution.zip file in the 'jar' folder
Unzip it
Navigate to FOSTTIDPerfTesting-distribution > Input > APK folder
Copy the APK file you want to test into the APK folder
Rename the APK file Input.apk
In the terminal, navigate to the new FOSTTIDPerfTesting-distribution folder
```
`cd FOSTTIDPerfTesting-distribution`
```
Decide which kind of test you want to do:
- cool
- warm
- latency (which does both cool and warm tests)
Plug your device in to your computer (if you haven’t already) and select "Allow USB Debugging" (if you haven’t already)
- Be sure that ADB has been set up correctly
Get your device serial number (if you don’t already have it on hand) by running
```
`adb devices`
```

Run the test with this command:

java -jar PerformanceKpi-jar.jar <Test Type> <Device Serial Number)>

If you decide to go with the full latency command, it should look something like this:

java -jar PerformanceKpi-jar.jar latency GCC2DM000000000S

The full latency test can take about an hour to run, so be patient!
You’ll find the test results in a folder called test-output in the FOSTTIDPerfTesting-distribution folder.

That’s all there is to it!

For more details, check out the github repo for the FireOS Performance Test. And if you want to dig even deeper into tests you can do on your app, check out the App Health Insights Dashboard, where you can test app latency, memory use, fluidity, and stability.

If you have any questions or feedback, join us in the the Amazon Appstore Community Space and let us know.

Retention Offers for Amazon Apps

Moses Roth — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 15:51:24 +0000

Developers who have released an app on Amazon Fire TV and tablets now have the option to set up Retention Offers, which offer limited-time discounts to customers who are considering unsubscribing.

The campaign configuration is simple and only takes a few minutes to set up. See the Retention Offers technical documentation for more information or visit the Promotions dashboard in the Developer Console to start setting up a Retention Offer for your app.

4 tips to update your Amazon Developer account

Moses Roth — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 16:19:43 +0000

You’re an app developer and you want to spend your time developing apps, not managing your account. That said, sometimes a little account maintenance is necessary. Maybe you need to update your name or add some new users. The good news is we’ve just added some new features to make updating your account easier and completely self-serve!

Here are four tips to make updating your Amazon Developer account as simple as possible:

1. How to update your developer name

What if you’re regretting that name you thought was cool last week, but now feels outdated, boring, or maybe a little embarrassing? As we discussed recently, having a great name is crucial to your app’s success. It’s the way customers will know who you are, learn to trust you, and find all your apps. It helps your customers easily find and recognize you and your apps.

So if you want to change your name, do you need to close your account and open a new one? No you do not! You can update it right from the Developer Console.

Updating your account name just became a whole lot easier. It’s now self-serve:

The owner of the account can sign in to the Developer Console.
On the top navigation bar, select Settings.
Select Company Profile in the sub-navigation bar.
Click Edit.
In the Developer name or company name field, enter the new company name.
Click Save.

2. How to add new users

Did somebody new join your company? Are you bringing on new collaborators for app development, marketing, or accounting? Giving them their own login can help streamline collaboration and make managing a team more efficient.

Any administrator can add a new user like this:

Sign in to the Developer Console.
Go to Settings > User Permissions.
Click Add New.
Type the user's email address and select their role.
After you finish adding users and configuring roles, click Save.

After you add a user, the Developer Console sends an email invitation to them, which they just need to accept.

3. What are user roles?

Speaking of administrators and roles, what are those?

There are four roles that each user on a company’s developer account can have — Administrator, Marketer, Developer, and Analyst — and each role has its own set of permissions.

Administrator: This role grants complete access to all sections of the developer account, including reporting and payment information. Most importantly, any account administrator has the ability to manage user permissions, including inviting or removing users from the account.
Developer: Outside of an Administrator, this is the only role that gives users the ability submit and adjust application files.
Marketer: Outside of an Administrator, this is the only role that gives users the ability to edit the content associated with apps (for example, descriptions and images) and IAPs. Like the Analyst, this role also gives access to sales reports.
Analyst: Outside of an Administrator, this is the only role that gives users the ability to view earnings reports. Like the Marketer, this role also gives users access to sales reports.

4. How to transfer ownership of your account

What if you’ve sold your company (congratulations!), or you’re moving a new role at your company, or you’re changing email addresses?

Do you need to create a new account? No you do not!

You just need to update the account owner and, just like updating your developer name, this experience is now self-serve. This ensures continuity in account management without the risk of lost customers, data, or payments, which can come with closing an account, opening a new one, or transferring an app.

The account owner is the only user on your Amazon Developer account that cannot be removed by another account administrator and it is the only user that can close the account. Every Amazon Developer account will have a single account owner. By default, this is the user that created the account.

To change the owner of the developer account, you must currently be the owner. You can only transfer ownership to another account administrator.

Just follow these steps:

Sign in to the Developer Console.
On the top navigation bar, select Settings.
Select the User Permissions in the sub-navigation bar.
Next to an administrative user, click Change ownership.
To assign a new owner, select the radio button next to a user, then click Save.

That’s just a few of the tips we’ve put together about updating your Amazon Developer account. To see the rest, go to our Amazon Developer community space and check out the appstore-account topic, which we’ve added to all our related articles.

If you have any account-related issues or question, be sure to let us know!

Related resources

My visit to Chain React 2024 (and some tips for going to conferences)

Moses Roth — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 21:25:00 +0000

My visit to Chain React 2024

I got the chance to go to Chain React for the first time this year, an annual React Native conference in Portland, Oregon. I’m a developer evangelist for Amazon Apps and Devices and it was exciting to check it out and let the dev community know that we are doubling down on RN support for Amazon devices.

The agenda featured React Native workshops and talks from devs like Meta, Microsoft, and Shopify and it was great to meet and learn from them. For those who didn’t get to go and are curious about it, or if you were there and you want to hear my perspective, here are 7 things I got to do:

1. React Native Workshop

Justin Poliachik leading the React Native Essentials workshop

I participated in the React Native Essentials workshop, where we went step-by-step building a multi-screen mobile app. Check out the github repo if you want to try it out for yourself. I also got some of my other teammates to share the githubs repos for the Intermediate and Master Native Code workshops.

Two hints for anyone thinking about attending a workshop:

Check out the repo beforehand and get your environment fully set up, it’s really easy to waste an hour or two just getting set up when you arrive.
Even if you do the beginner course, it’s never really beginner, they’re more like halfway between beginner and intermediate, so do an online course before attending. I really love CodeAcademy’s Learn React and Learn React Native, and they are not paying me to say that. I like them because they are interactive, whereas a lot of the courses you find online are more instructional (i.e. they give you an article or video and then tell you to do it yourself), and the interactive style makes it much easier to retain information (much like a workshop).

2. Some great talks

My teammate Eric Fahsl giving his talk on how to Build a React Native App for TV in 15 minutes

There were a bunch of other good talks, in addition to the one by Eric. The recordings are coming soon, right Infinite Red? Bug them, not me. I’ll update this post with some links once they go live.

Update: The recordings are now live!

If you’re interested in building a React Native app for TV, here’s a guide to help you get a Hello World app up and running in just a few minutes and a github repo React Native Multi-TV App Sample, both of which Eric used in his talk.

I also thought Chiara Mooney from Microsoft’s talk was great:

3. Product demos, including VR headsets

Meta demonstrating their Quest 3 headsets and my teammate Oscar Padilla checking out Sentry’s Session Replay demo

One of the coolest parts of these conferences is getting to play with toys like Meta’s Quest 3 headset and Apple’s Vision Pro (which Callstack had for demo). It was my first time playing Horizon Worlds on Meta’s headset, which was super fun, although it did make me a little dizzy. We’re not quite at Snow Crash level yet (maybe that's a good thing), but it’s closer than I thought.

Like Oscar (see the pic above), I also thought Sentry’s Session Replay was pretty cool. It lets you see video of what a user was doing when they encountered a bug or error, which is super helpful. Again, I promise they are not paying for this plug. Here's the video of their talk:

4. React Native panel

The React Native Panel and my boss Chris Traganos saying something unbelievably profound and brilliant

Another perk of going to a conference like this is to see a panel with reps from Meta, Microsoft, Expo, Infinite Red, and of course Amazon. We’re waiting for Infinite Red to post this one too, and I’ll update when they do.

Update: The recording is now live!

5. Chat with some other devs at the booths and around the conference

My teammates talking with the the Software Mansion and Callstack teams

One of the best parts of going to a conference in person the chance to meet and chat with other devs. That’s the main reason to get out of your chair and not just watch the talks online. You never know who you might bump into or what opportunities might come out of it.

It was great seeing Ada Gawrysiak and Michał Chudziak from Callstack again, after meeting the Callstack team at React Conf a few months ago, and meeting Paulina Macuga and Magdalena Retman-Rakoczy from Software Mansion.

A lot of people are there looking for work and it can be a great opportunity to talk to hiring managers and make an impression, so you’re not just another name in a stack of applications. Hit me up on LinkedIn if you want to connect or chat.

6. Parties!

My teammates around the Amazon after-party

Somehow during a two-day conference they managed to put on three parties, don’t ask me how. There was the Thursday after-party (put on by us) and then the after-after-party and then another after-party on Friday.

7. Practice my photography skills

My teammates managed to sneak a couple of photos of me grabbing photos

I used Chain React as a chance to work on my personal hobby, photography. Of course there were official photographers around and everyone was grabbing photos with their phones, but for me, I love the chance to use my DSLR. It helps me get versatile with my photos, including the zoom length, depth of field, and aperture size.

Of course, that’s just my hobby. You have your own things you're interested in and passionate about, but you never know what opportunities are available to do something a little unique and cool at a conference.