Happy Sunday, everyone!
I’m off to Berlin tomorrow for Next App Dev Con Berlin, where I’m giving a talk and my colleagues Anisha and Gio are leading a workshop, so the post is a little early this week. If you’re there this week, come say hi!
The big news is the all-new Fire TV Stick 4K, which runs Vega OS and ships with a redesigned remote. This is the best, fastest Vega stick yet. You can check out its device specifications.
There are also new Alexa+ features on Fire TV, Live App Tests that can now run up to five in parallel, and an update to our React Native multi-TV sample.
The Amazon Ads team relaunched its ad platform as Amazon Ads Agent and posted an article on viewers’ streaming habits and how they’ve changed.
On the agent side, Kiro shipped workflows for handing multi-step jobs to a group of agents, and Anthropic launched claude.dev, a new developer blog.
Don’t forget that our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is still running through October 23 with $190,000 in prizes. If you’re the kind of person who reads this newsletter, you’re probably the kind of person who could create something cool, so I hope you all do!
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Parallel Live App Tests — Live App Testing now runs up to five tests per app in parallel, each on its own track so testers and in-app purchases stay isolated, and the Live App Testing FAQ has a new “Multiple LAT tracks” section on how to use them. -
Changes to Available Amazon Data Portability LWA Scopes — The “Digital software and video games downloads” scope was removed effective September 25, so drop it from your consent flow if you request it (the purchase and subscription scopes are unaffected). -
React Native Multi-TV App Sample — Our one-codebase TV sample for Fire TV (Fire OS and Vega OS), Android TV, Apple TV and web now builds against Vega SDK 0.24 (it declares the target OS version the SDK requires and adds the Babel plugins Reanimated needs), and Android TV remote keys are forwarded correctly so select works again.
Fire TV launches an all-new, faster Fire TV Stick 4K and a new remote
- The new Fire TV Stick 4K runs Vega OS 2.0 with Alexa+ built in, and it’s the device most new customers will open your app on. Its device specifications are already live, covering codec, HDR, DRM, memory, and marketplace support, so add it to your test matrix now.
Alexa+ is making Fire TV smarter, from your TV to your phone
- This fall’s Fire TV update brings Alexa+ into content discovery: search reasons across a viewer’s subscriptions and watch history, a new Alexa+ hub suggests what to ask, and the Fire TV mobile app saves recommendations to the watchlist, which changes how viewers will find the titles in your content app.
Introducing Amazon Ads Agent
- Promoting an app on Fire TV, Prime Video, or Twitch? Our unified ad buying platform, renamed Amazon Ads Agent at unBoxed 2026, now handles campaign planning, targeting, and reporting through agentic chat, with Full-Funnel Campaigns live for US advertisers and DVA+ rolling out in late October.
Completely redesigned Kindle family
- Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, and Kindle Colorsoft were rebuilt from the ground up on what Devices VP Kevin Keith calls a first-ever display construction for e-readers, a useful case study for anyone building reading or content experiences across our device family.
Introducing Kiro workflows
- Kiro workflows let you hand a multi-step job to a group of agents and leave the runtime to finish it, with each step in its own fresh session so a reviewer judges the work without inheriting the coder’s reasoning, and a process that works can be run again as is.
claude.dev: Anthropic’s new developer blog
- Anthropic launched claude.dev, where its own engineers write about agent design, context engineering, and how the Claude Code team uses its own tool. Check out Addy Osmani’s LinkedIn post for details about the launch.
Our Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is underway online, so jump in and build something before the deadline. In person, you’ll find us at Next App Dev Con Berlin, where Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel and co-leads a workshop with Giovanni Laquidara and I’m giving a lightning talk. Then at later this month I’m also giving a talk at CityJS Athens, and AWS re:Invent 2026 is also happening in Las Vegas, and we hope to see you there!
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31 – Oct 23 | Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon | Online | Our first global developer hackathon: build on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee across four tracks for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits, with submissions closing October 23. |
| Oct 7–9 | Next App Dev Con Berlin | Berlin, DE | Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel and co-leads a workshop with Giovanni Laquidara, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk. Mobile and app-platform conference at Berlin’s CityCube, with workshops, talks, and platform announcements. |
| Oct 21–23 | CityJS Athens | Athens, GR | Dev Advocate Moses Roth is giving a talk. Athens edition of the CityJS conference series, covering modern JavaScript and frontend frameworks. |
| Oct 21–22 | NAB Show New York | New York City, US | East-coast edition of NAB Show, the broadcast, media, and entertainment-tech industry conference, at the Javits Center. |
| Oct 22–23 | AGNTCon + MCPCon North America | San Jose, US | Linux Foundation conference for the open agentic AI ecosystem, with MCP and agent-systems tracks for builders, contributors, and enterprises. |
| Oct 23–26 | React Advanced London | London, GB | Annual advanced-React conference in London for senior practitioners working with the framework at scale. |
| Oct 28–29 | GitHub Universe | San Francisco, US | GitHub’s flagship two-day event for developers, maintainers, and technical leaders, focused on collaboration and workflows in the agentic era. |
| Oct 29–31 | React India | Goa, IN | India’s largest React conference, covering web, mobile, and emerging React platforms. |
| Nov 9–12 | Web Summit | Lisbon, PT | One of Europe’s largest tech conferences, with broad coverage across AI, devices, startups, and platforms. |
| Nov 10–12 | AI Engineer Code Summit | San Francisco, US | The code-focused summit in the AI Engineer conference series, on agent and LLM development. |
| Nov 30 – Dec 4 | AWS re:Invent 2026 | Las Vegas, US | AWS’s flagship annual conference, with 1,000+ technical sessions, keynotes, workshops, and the largest cloud-community gathering of the year. |
Start with Emerson Sklar’s AI Innovator Series conversation with Canva’s Anwar Haneef on why Canva built its own design model. If you ship a streaming app on Fire TV, the Amazon Ads research on streaming simplicity is next, and Laura Salinas shows Kiro and Agent Toolkit for AWS getting the AWS parts right on the first pass.
How Canva’s strategy has built a visual engine for AI
In this AI Innovator Series conversation, Alexa Chief Evangelist Emerson Sklar talks with Anwar Haneef, Canva’s GM and Head of Ecosystem, who argues that a model that can generate an image still can’t produce good design on its own. That gap is why Canva trained its own first-party model on typography, layout and brand intelligence. Anwar unpacks how that model fits into a bigger rethink of the creative process, which is useful to anyone building AI features where output quality matters more than output volume.
Consumers want streaming simplicity. Here’s what that means for your next campaign
By Matt Miller
New research from Amazon Ads and Horizon Media, shared at unBoxed 2026, finds viewers settling on one main streaming destination and discovering everything else through bundles and add-on channels. AMC Networks is the worked example, reaching new households through Prime Video Channels. If you ship a streaming app on Fire TV, it’s a useful read on where your next viewers will come from.
Ship Without the Guesswork — Kiro + Agent Toolkit
Laura Salinas builds a personal portfolio site from scratch to show what changes when a coding agent works from current AWS documentation and tested deployment procedures instead of stale training data. The demo is small on purpose, so the payoff is easy to see: Kiro gets the AWS parts right on the first pass. Anyone who has watched an agent confidently write an out-of-date AWS config will appreciate the fix.
How VTV Digital Tackled Vietnam’s Live Streaming Bottleneck Using AWS
Vietnam’s national broadcaster moved its HD, multi-channel live streaming onto AWS to clear a delivery bottleneck and reach viewers across the country. For a Fire TV or streaming app that has to push live video to a big audience at once, it’s a compact case study in what scaling that delivery takes.
Getting Started on AWS Just Got Easier
AWS developer advocate Darko Mesaroš demos the new AWS sign-up flow, which drops a new account straight into a ready-made project with $100 in free credits, and most new customers won’t need a credit card. A single prompt connects your coding agent to the account. New to AWS: Learn AWS without a surprise bill goes deeper on the free plan and spend limits.
New to AWS: Learn AWS without a surprise bill, start free, build your first app
AWS’s revamped signup lets most new customers start on the free plan with no credit card and up to $200 in credits. This guide takes on the fear that keeps a lot of developers from ever opening a console, a forgotten resource running up a bill. It breaks down how the free plan and the optional project spend limit protect you, along with the tradeoffs a spend limit brings, then lays out a first project you can build with your coding agent through Agent Toolkit for AWS. A low-risk place to start that backend for your Fire TV, Alexa, or Vega app.
Invite Your Teammate to Your AWS Project
AWS Developer Advocate Lucas Swanson and Solutions Architect Fabricio Flores demo AWS Projects by building a real app together, showing how one shared project lets a whole team work out of a single account. Still passing credentials around or setting up separate accounts just so a collaborator can deploy? This short video shows a simpler way to start building together.
A Builder’s Guide to AWS GenAI and Agentic AI Repositories
AWS keeps hundreds of GenAI samples on GitHub, and picking the right one to start with is harder than it should be. This guide sorts them by where you are, from your first Amazon Bedrock model call, to building agents with Strands, to running them in production on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, with MCP tooling and RAG patterns further along. Find your stage and skip the searching.
What is Agent Focus, and how can you accelerate development
Sr. Dev Advocate Erik Hanchett demos Agent Focus Mode, a layout that puts chat at the center of Kiro and brings in diffs and specs only when you need them. It’s built around agents running in parallel, with the editor one switch away when you want it back, a good fit for anyone already juggling several agent sessions at once.
Inference for Agents | Tejas Bhakta, Morph | Built to Scale, Episode 3
On Built to Scale, Valentina Escudero talks with Tejas Bhakta, founder and CEO of Morph and a former Autopilot engineer, about why coding agents often do better with small, specialized models than with the biggest frontier model, especially now that benchmarks are saturating. Tejas shows how Morph merges LLM-generated edits into real files quickly, gives a plain explanation of speculative decoding, and names what he sees as the hardest unsolved problem in the agent stack. Anyone wondering where agent inference speed and cost actually come from will get a clear answer from someone who has pivoted three times as a solo founder.
Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week’s post? Let me know!