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.
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