Hey, everyone!
We’re happy to announce our brand new Alexa+ for Builders portal, a new developer hub for building services that plug into the Alexa+ assistant, with new tools now in preview including Model Context Protocol support.
We’re in Portland this week for Chain React, where Dev Advocates Giovanni Laquidara and Kourtney Meiss are leading a workshop on Harnessing AI, so we hope to see you there!
We published the Fire TV Streaming App Quality Blueprint, a six-part guide to living-room apps that start fast and play reliably, along with a bunch of other great blogs, including one by yours truly, so check it out!
And there’s a bunch more, so let’s dive in!
Dev Updates
New guide: Measure KPIs for Fire TV apps on Fire OS — A new App Testing doc walks through gathering latency and memory metrics on Fire TV; use it to check your app against Fire OS performance targets before you submit.
Announcements
Alexa+ for Builders launches, with new ways to build experiences
- The new developer hub offers three integration paths in preview — a Category SDK for experiences like reservations and booking, an MCP Toolkit that adapts existing MCP servers with minimal changes, and a Smart Home AI Toolkit that generates integrations from device docs — with built-in Amazon Wallet checkout and one integration reaching Echo, Echo Show, Fire TV, and the Alexa app.
Amazon Luna comes to Prime Video
- Luna cloud gaming is now built into the Prime Video app for Prime members on Fire TV in the US and UK, playable from a new Games tab with a controller or phone and no download or separate purchase.
Claude Opus 5 is now available
- Anthropic’s newest Opus-class model is available day one through cloud partners including AWS, reaching near-Fable-5 intelligence at Opus speed and cost, with strong gains in coding, reasoning, and agentic tasks.
Events
Chain React closes out July in Portland with a talk and a workshop from our team, and we’ll be at Gamescom in Cologne as August opens. The fall conference run then picks up across Europe, from IBC in Amsterdam to React Native Connection in Paris.
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 30–31 | Chain React | Portland, US | Developer 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, and we’ll be there. |
| Aug 4 | Ai4 | Las Vegas, US | One of the largest applied-AI industry gatherings in North America. |
| Sep 11–14 | IBC Show | Amsterdam, NL | The media, entertainment, and technology 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 | Developer 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 dropping in on. |
Dev Posts
Building High Quality Streaming Apps: The Blueprint opens a six-part series and it’s the one I’d read first, especially its framing of what a viewer notices in the first ten seconds. How to Use React Native Libraries in Your Vega App is the most immediately useful, sorting your dependencies into four buckets so you know up front what a port will cost you.
Building High Quality Streaming Apps: The Blueprint
By Anisha Malde
On a TV, quality problems are the kind viewers notice in the first ten seconds: a slow start, an awkward remote, playback that stalls. This post kicks off the Fire TV Streaming App Quality Blueprint, a six-part series for teams building streaming apps. The pillars that follow cover insight and telemetry, performance and efficiency, stability and resilience, living-room experience and accessibility, the streaming experience itself, and release and operations. It reads as a shared checklist you can hold your app against rather than a set of abstract goals.
Testing the Amazon Appstore Age Verification (GetUserAgeData) API — Developer & QA Guide
Now that GetUserAgeData returns live responses, this community guide is the piece you want before submission. It explains the four age ranges the API reports (0–12, 13–15, 16–17, 18+) plus parental-consent status for under-18 users, then walks through standing up a mock harness with TestContentProvider, switching between test and production authority values, running all eleven mock scenarios, and clearing a pre-submission checklist for integration, resilience, and compliance.
How to Use React Native Libraries in Your Vega App
By Moses Roth
Vega uses a fork of React Native, so not every RN library works out of the box when you port an app. This walkthrough sorts your dependencies into four buckets: libraries with Vega forks, libraries that depend on another forked library, ones that work unchanged, and ones you’ll need to wire in yourself. It also covers the Vega Module Resolver Preset, which swaps in Vega-ported equivalents of common libraries automatically, so you can spend less time untangling your dependency graph.
Building a Dev Content Strategy that survives Monday
By Anisha Malde
Developers can smell slop from a mile away, and once you’ve lost their trust a louder headline won’t win it back. Anisha argues that the job in developer relations isn’t to add to the pile but to earn enough credibility that people actually read what you publish. It’s a candid look at building a content practice that holds up week after week, useful whether you write for a living or just maintain a project’s docs and blog.
Scaling Your Pokémon Team: When Your AI System Outgrows Its Original Design
By Kourtney Meiss
Part three of Kourtney’s AI-orchestration series picks up where growth started breaking things. An orchestrator routing tasks to specialized agents sounds clean until edge cases pile up and expose gaps no single agent covers. She adds new agents for coding and debugging, works through the infrastructure changes that scaling forced, and is honest about the problems she didn’t see coming. A grounded read if you’re building multi-agent systems past the prototype stage.
VLC for Vega OS
By Jean-Baptiste Kempf
VideoLAN’s Jean-Baptiste Kempf walks through porting VLC to Vega OS, a fascinating counterpoint to the usual React Native path, since VLC is native C/C++ running libvlc 4 under a Qt 6/QML interface. Getting there meant writing a custom Qt platform plugin to render through the device’s OpenGL ES stack, wiring a zero-copy video pipeline into the hardware decoders for H.264, HEVC, VP9, and AV1, and fitting it all onto a 32-bit ARM device with 1GB of RAM. The cleverest bit is the workaround for Vega’s locked-down filesystem: with no USB or user-visible storage, VLC runs an on-device Wi-Fi sharing server over HTTPS (with a QR code) plus SMB and DLNA browsing to get media onto the box. It shipped as the first VLC 4.0 in production, on the Amazon Appstore, in under two months.
How Amazon Leo plans to connect mobile devices from space
Amazon Leo has filed with the FCC to deploy up to 5,105 new satellites that would use Globalstar’s spectrum to reach mobile phones directly, no dish required, for voice, data, messaging, and emergency service. The near-term hook for developers is the direction of travel: a low Earth orbit network built to talk to ordinary devices is connectivity you may eventually be able to build against, especially for apps that need to work where cellular doesn’t reach.
All-New Ring Peephole Cam 2K
Ring’s new Peephole Cam 2K is built for apartments and condos: it replaces an existing door peephole with no drilling, installs and removes just as easily, and steps the video up to 2K. For anyone building on Ring’s platform, it widens the set of renter-friendly devices your integrations and footage can work with.
Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week’s post? Let me know!