Hi dev team!
Blink just debuted its first 4K, spotlight, and pan-tilt cameras, along with an expanded XR lineup.
Amazon Polly got a major upgrade to its Generative engine. And AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities is now generally available. Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+, and it includes KDP audiobooks. Ring launched an Appstore Challenge for college students with $500,000 in prizes, and Kiro now has memory in its IDE and CLI.
Elsewhere, there are two new Sidewalk application notes and fresh releases for the Bee CLI and the Ring Appstore API. Two reads dig into how Kiro fixes itself. On video, a few of our leaders talk about AI and ambient computing, and the recording of my next app devCon talk is up too.
GitHub Universe and React India both kick off this week. Further out, we'll be at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas at the end of November, where Kourtney Meiss is leading a Bee workshop.
Have a good week!
- ⚛️ Vega Studio: Accessibility Inspector — Vega Studio 0.24.2 adds an A11y Inspector that flags accessibility issues in your
.tsxand.jsxfiles by severity, with Fix, Preview, and Explain actions and a whole-workspace scan. - 🔘 Ring Appstore API: account linking token exchange — The Ring Appstore API docs now detail the token exchange request and required response for account linking; each refresh invalidates the previous refresh token.
- 🤖 Amazon Polly: Generative engine upgrade — The Amazon Polly Generative engine is now more expressive and accurate at low latency, adds 14 voices, and brings Hindi and Finnish to GA.
- 🧩 Kiro: memory in IDE and CLI — Kiro IDE and CLI now keep memory across sessions, so they remember your preferences, repo conventions, past corrections, and approaches you've already ruled out.
- 🐝 Bee CLI v0.9.0 — Bee CLI v0.9.0's sync command now saves your insights as markdown files and bumps the handlebars dependency to 4.7.10.
- 📡 Amazon Sidewalk: SID API Revision A.5, Protocol A.3, and new app notes — The SID API Developer Guide adds registration over a wired link, factory-registered endpoints, and LoRa data-rate and keep-alive options; the Protocol Specification adds LoRa Profile C for continuous RX; the Test Specification adds BLE connection-policy tests; and new application notes cover Registration over Wire and Gateway Session Keys, which arrive in Sidewalk SDK 2.0.0.
📷 Blink debuts its first 4K, spotlight, and pan-tilt cameras, plus an expanded XR lineup
- For smart home builders, here's a sign of where camera hardware and AI summaries are heading: Blink is launching five new cameras, including its first 4K, spotlight, and pan-tilt models plus long-range XR models for gates and outbuildings, and the 4K model adds Video Descriptions, AI-written summaries that tell owners what happened without making them scrub through clips.
🔘 Ring Announces Appstore Challenge with $500,000 in prizes for college students
- If you know student builders, Ring's Appstore Challenge invites teams from eligible U.S. colleges to build an app for the Ring Appstore and launch it to real Ring customers, with four prizes totaling $500,000 ($250,000 for the Grand Prize); applications close November 20, 2026.
📢 AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities is now generally available
- If your backend runs on AWS, you can now turn days of security triage into a review queue with AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities, generally available today, which uses AI to find, confirm, and rank the real issues in your code and then opens pull requests with fixes for you to review.
📚 Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+, with KDP audiobooks included
- Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+ on Amazon.com, at the same $11.99 a month, and the subscription now includes audiobooks: KDP audiobooks made with Virtual Voice (invitation-only at first) and ACX audiobooks, with KDP Select audiobooks enrolled automatically.
This season we're heading to Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2026, and the calendar is also packed with gatherings like React Advanced London and AI Engineer Code Summit. If you're at re:Invent, come say hello; we hope to see you there!
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | Android Dev Summit 2026 | Online | Google's Android developer event returns with a live keynote on October 28 at 10am PT on new products and features across the Android ecosystem; watch the livestream. |
| 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. Dev Advocate Kourtney Meiss is leading a workshop, "Turn a Bee wearable into your re:Invent notetaking companion." |
The Kiro team explains how Kiro fixes itself and keeps those fixes honest. There's also a run of new videos, including my next app devCon talk on building where your customers are.
📽️ 62% of Students Use AI Daily. Cengage Is Redesigning Education Around Them
On the latest AI Innovator Series episode, Emerson Sklar (Alexa Chief Evangelist) talks with Ghazal Badiozamani, SVP of Product & Content at Cengage, about designing AI that builds understanding instead of handing out answers. They dig into using Socratic conversation as a form of assessment, and into learning paths that follow a student across devices, Alexa included. If you're designing conversational or multimodal experiences, it's a useful look at how a large education publisher thinks about retention, trust, and where voice fits.
📰 How Kiro fixes itself, and how we keep the fixes honest
By Myeongsoo Kim, Patrick Chapman, Chang Liu, Mingwei Zheng, Berk Cirisci, Sam Mayers, Joe Hsu, Liam Bouayad-Agha, and Shweta Garg
The Kiro team explains how Kiro fixes itself, with the agent finding quiet flaws in its own harness, like a misleading line in a tool description that no user would ever report. The more useful half is about judging those fixes: a change that looked like a clear win turned out to be one lucky run, and splitting the results apart is what stopped it from shipping. In a follow-up essay on AWS Builder Center, Andriy Drozdyuk draws the broader lesson. An agent can propose its own fix, but something independent has to decide whether the fix worked, such as fresh control runs, contamination checks and a human sign-off.
📽️ Build Where Your Customers Are - Moses Roth | next app devCon 2026
At next app devCon 2026, I made the case for taking Android, web, and React Native apps past phones and browsers to the Amazon devices where customers already spend their time: Fire TV, Alexa+, Bee, and Ring cameras. The session looks at how other developers are shipping multi-device experiences and how to get started right away, then rounds up our AI builder tools, device SDKs, and open-source samples. If you've built for mobile and want to know where your app can go next, start with this talk.
📰 What Is a REST API? Build a Dad Joke API on AWS in 5 Minutes
On the AWS Developers channel, Erik Hanchett starts with a working dad-joke API and works backward to what makes an API RESTful, then builds his own with Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS SAM. The companion write-up on AWS Builder Center walks through the same build step by step, and its concepts half needs no setup at all. If you've called APIs from a Fire TV app, Alexa skill, or Vega app but never stood up a backend of your own, you finish with a working serverless endpoint you can grow into the service your app needs.
📰 What are MCP Apps? Building Apps that run on Claude & ChatGPT!
On the AWS Developers channel, Ashita Prasad explains MCP Apps, an extension to the Model Context Protocol that lets your MCP server return interactive UI like dashboards, forms, and charts that render right inside a Claude or ChatGPT conversation. The companion write-up covers the architecture and the sandboxing model that keeps those embedded views isolated from the surrounding chat. It then builds a small sales analytics chatflow end to end and deploys the TypeScript server on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. If you already run an MCP server, it's a practical look at giving your tools a front end inside the chat, and the sample repo gives you a working starting point.
📽️ Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Reinventing Amazon for the AI Era
Our CEO Andy Jassy sits down with a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to explain why AI demand is still outrunning the infrastructure we're building, and why cheaper inference could be what opens AI up to the broad set of companies that haven't adopted it yet. The conversation also turns inward, covering how smaller teams are shipping products faster and how we're rethinking Alexa. It's a useful hour if you want to understand where we're investing and what that means for the platforms you build on.
📽️ What Comes After the Smartphone? Amazon’s Panos Panay on AI and Ambient Computing | Disrupt 2026
On the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 stage, Panos Panay, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services, talks with Julie Bort about how AI could move everyday computing off the phone and into ambient devices that work in the background. If you build for Alexa, Fire TV or Ring, it's a direct look at where our devices leadership sees the hardware your apps run on going next.
📽️ The Fire TV Remote (2026 release), Button by Button
The Fire TV channel tours the 2026 Fire TV Remote one button at a time, including the button changes that come with this release. If your app handles remote input or shows on-screen key hints, the tour is a quick way to check your navigation and labels against the remote your viewers are holding now.
📬 Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!
