Hey dev team, I hope you’re all having a good week.
It’s a big one for Fire TV devs, a lot of new launches.
First we have the Vitals API in open beta. This lets you pull the App Health Insights programmatically, including Crash, App Not Responding, and Low Memory Kill reports.
Live Device Interaction with virtual devices is a new way for you to test your Fire OS apps on virtual devices.
Senior Dev Advocates Giovanni Laquidara and Anisha Malde have created our first Agent Skills for coding assistants.
Fire TV’s redesigned home screen is now shipping by default on new devices worldwide.
And Dev Advocates Kourtney Meiss and Giovanni Laquidara will be speaking and leading workshops all over the US this month, check out the list of events we’ll be showing up at.
Let’s dive in!
Dev Updates
Vitals API is now available in open beta — programmatic access to Crash, ANR, and LMK rates that used to live only in the App Health Insights Dashboard, so you can wire app-health data into alerting, regression checks, and CI/CD using your existing Security Profile credentials.
Live Device Interaction with virtual devices is now open to all developers — in Appstore Quality Central, you can now remotely test on cloud-hosted Fire TV devices, sideloading APKs, driving a virtual remote, making in-app purchases, capturing screenshots and logs, and sending ADB commands, without physical hardware.
Tell us about your Vega SDK v0.23 experience — if you’ve upgraded to last week’s Vega SDK 0.23, the team opened a thread to collect feedback on the release, so drop your notes on what’s working and what isn’t.
Expo SDK 57 brings React Native 0.86 — a small, non-breaking release whose whole point is shipping RN 0.86 as the easiest Expo upgrade yet, and a signal Expo wants to keep RN versions moving with light upgrades between its bigger releases.
Announcements
New Amazon Developer GitHub repo: devices-agent-skills
- Installable Agent Skills for coding assistants, starting with one for migrating Vega OS apps to a multi-platform React Native monorepo (Android TV, Apple TV) and one on RN TV UI best practices like focus management and D-pad navigation.
Claude Sonnet 5 is now available on Amazon Bedrock, in Kiro, and from Anthropic
- Anthropic’s most agentic Sonnet model yet plans, uses tools, and runs autonomously at levels that used to need a larger model, narrowing the gap with Opus 4.8 at lower cost; it’s day-one on Bedrock and already selectable in Kiro.
Fire TV’s redesigned home screen now ships by default worldwide
- All current-generation Fire TV Stick devices, the Fire TV Cube, and Amazon Ember smart TVs sold globally now come with the redesigned UI preinstalled, rather than only via a software update.
Introducing Agent Focus in Kiro
- Kiro’s new Agent Focus keeps an agent working within a defined scope, so long-running tasks stay on the files and context you point them at.
Introducing Amazon AgentCore Local Blocks
- AgentCore Local Blocks let you build and test agent components on your own machine before deploying them, tightening the local dev loop for Bedrock AgentCore.
Introducing the Claude apps gateway for Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud
- A self-hosted control plane for running Claude Code on Bedrock, adding corporate SSO, centralized policy, role-based access, and per-user cost tracking from a single stateless container.
Events
The summer calendar stays busy on the developer-conference side, and we’re on the program at three of them. droidcon USA and DevRelCon NYC both have our team on stage, and Chain React closes out the month in Portland with a talk and a workshop from us.
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 16–17 | droidcon USA | Orlando, US | The US edition of the global Android developer conference, where our Senior Developer Advocate Giovanni Laquidara is speaking. |
| July 22 | DevRelCon NYC | New York City, US | A developer-relations conference for the people who build and run developer communities, where our Developer Advocate Kourtney Meiss is speaking. |
| July 30–31 | Chain React | Portland, US | Dev Advocates Giovanni Laquidara and Kourtney Meiss are leading a workshop on building an agent harness for your React Native app. |
| Aug 1–31 | Gamescom | Cologne, DE | Europe’s largest games event, where we’ll be on the ground for gaming and partnerships. |
| Aug 4 | Ai4 | Las Vegas, US | One of the larger applied-AI industry conferences, with 8,000+ attendees across enterprise AI tracks. |
Dev Posts
Two reads I’d pull out of a video-heavy week. Inside Amazon Luna: Cloud Gaming at Scale is the one for anyone curious how a low-latency streaming platform gets built, and From OpenAPI/Swagger specifications to test suite in seconds with Kiro is as close to copy-and-run as the title suggests. The Fire TV clips below are short tours of the redesigned experience.
Redesigned Fire TV Experience
Fire TV’s newly redesigned home screen is built to get you to apps and content with less searching and more watching.
Alexa+ on Fire TV
The new Alexa+ on Fire TV rolls an entertainment guide and a personal assistant into one on-screen experience.
Inside Amazon Luna: Cloud Gaming at Scale
By Jyothish Nalinakshan
A look at how Amazon Luna, the cloud-gaming service, is engineered to stream games to Fire TV, phones, and browsers at scale. Worth a read if you’re curious how a low-latency streaming platform is built on AWS.
Fire TV Smart Home
Fire TV’s new Smart Home features let you control more than the TV right from the home screen.
From OpenAPI/Swagger specifications to test suite in seconds with Kiro
By Sumitha AP and Rajdeep Mukherjee
A walkthrough of using Kiro to generate a complete, runnable Node.js integration test suite straight from a Swagger/OpenAPI spec, including a mock Express server, a mock-versus-live toggle, and HTML reporting, with no external test framework. The useful part is that Kiro reasons over the spec to write real assertions rather than templating, and the same flow drops into CI/CD via headless mode.
Fire TV AI Art
When it’s not an entertainment hub, your Fire TV doubles as a personal AI art gallery.
Set up your Fire TV Stick HD (2nd generation)
A step-by-step guide to setting up the Fire TV Stick HD (2nd generation), from plugging in to powering on.
Can Alexa Change the Way You Shop? (Ft. Amazon’s Alexa VP Daniel Rausch)
Brew Markets talks with Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s VP of Alexa and Echo, on how Alexa+ changes shopping: an assistant that can act on your behalf rather than just answer.
Jamie Siminoff on Why Shark Tank Didn’t Save Ring (and What Actually Did)
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff on building Ring: the Shark Tank rejection, what really drove its growth, and the founder mindset he’s bringing back to Amazon’s home-security business.
Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week’s post? Let me know!