Open the FireTV app store using DIAL

Fire Devices & Appstore Q&A
1

We have an iOS app interacting with our existing FireTV app. For our iOS users, we would like to provide a simple way to get the companion app installed on their Fire TV: ideally just pressing a button in the iOS app could bring up our FireTV app’s download page in the context of the FireTV App Store.

On paper, the DIAL protocol seems like a great place to launch the App Store on the FireTV, and passing some type of argument to show our App’s download page. Something like (using curl):

curl -d ‘’ ‘http://[firetv-ip]:8009/apps/<com.amazon.appstore>/<my.app.identifier>’

Questions:

  1. Does the Fire TV App Store support DIAL? If so
  • What is the DIAL launch ID for the App Store? (<com.amazon.appstore> in the example above).
  • What is the expected format for passing an app identifier as a parameter (<my.app.identifier> in the example)
  1. If DIAL isn’t supported by the Fire TV App Store, are there any alternatives to achieve the same outcome from the iOS app?
3

Hello Hugo,

Thanks for posting. We have messaged the appropriate team for further investigation and will let you know once we receive an update.

4

Thanks Emma - has there been any updates?

For context, we looked into Matter Casting, but we have no use for the casting functionality and given the rather complicated set up, Matter Casting looks wildly overkill for something as simple as prompting our iPhone/iPad users to install our FireTV companion app

5

Hi @Hugo ,

The DIAL spec does support installable applications, but we do not support this part of the spec due to security reasons and technical difficulties.

If you require an app-on-install functionality, it is provided by Matter Casting.

Could you provide feedback about why Matter Casting setup is too complex?

Thanks,

Moses

6

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