Hi dev team!
The big news this week is the new lineup of Alexa devices: the Echo Show 16, a new Echo Dot and Echo Studio with Home Camera, Echo Time, Alexa Photo Frame, and Alexa Home Map. Alexa+ is also rolling out in early access in Japan.
A bunch of Vega updates this week: the Vega beta has ended and Vega 2.0 is out. Anisha walks through the upgrade to React Native 0.83 for Vega OS and Barak explains the new Vega native APIs with two sample apps: a native UI component and a periodic background task, and there are new hands-on Vega workshops. If you're moving a Fire OS app over, there's a guide to porting it to Vega with ADBT, and Zattoo shares how it unified its TV apps.
On the events side, Kiroween 2026 has started and Kourtney is headed to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas to lead a workshop on Bee.
- 📲 In-App Purchasing: EU subscription refund window — In-App Purchasing's Types of Purchases page now notes that EU customers can cancel a subscription within 14 days of sign-up and get a refund.
- 🛠️ Just Walk Out for physical stores: new authorization docs — The Just Walk Out technology docs for Amazon physical stores add pages for bringing your own shopper authorization: considerations, device registration, device heartbeat, Start Auth and Process Auth, plus fixes across several existing pages.
- ⚛️ Vega: new sample apps and workshops — New on the Amazon Developer GitHub: a native UI component sample for building C++ UI components in a React Native for Vega app, a periodic background task sample for running scheduled JavaScript after the app closes, and hands-on workshops on upgrading to React Native 0.83 and shipping one TV app across Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, and web.
⚛️ Vega 2.0 general availability
- If you've been putting off a React Native upgrade or a Fire OS port, Vega OS 2.0 and the Vega SDK 2.0 are now generally available, with a much newer React Native, new native APIs, Amazon Devices Builder Tools for AI to help with the move, and breaking changes limited to one major release a year so minor SDK updates won't mean rework.
💬 The newest lineup of Alexa devices
- If you build Alexa skills, smart home devices, or Fire TV apps, your customers will soon be using our newest Alexa+ hardware: the redesigned Echo Show 16 with Fire TV built in, the Echo Time nightstand clock, the Alexa Photo Frame, and a new Echo Dot with a built-in smart home hub, plus an Echo Studio with Home Camera, all tied together by Alexa Home Map, a 3D view where people control connected gear by tapping where it sits in the room.
🗾 Alexa+ arrives in Japan
- If your skill or connected device serves customers in Japan, Alexa+ started rolling out there in Early Access on October 29 as a conversational assistant we built for Japanese rather than translated, across Echo, Fire TV, and the Alexa app, joining a dozen countries including the U.S., UK, Germany, Brazil, and Australia.
🤖 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore CLI version 1.0
- Building AI agents from the terminal just got faster: AgentCore CLI 1.0 is now generally available, with quicker startup, a consistent command structure, guided menus, direct access to memory, identity, and gateway resources without wrapping them in a project first, and a migration path for existing projects.
This season we're heading to AWS re:Invent 2026 in Las Vegas, where Dev Advocate Kourtney is leading a workshop, "Turn a Bee wearable into your re:Invent notetaking companion." Web Summit in Lisbon, the AI Engineer Code Summit in San Francisco, and the online Kiroween 2026 hackathon are also worth a look, and we hope to see you in Vegas!
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 30 – Dec 4 | Kiroween 2026 | Online | Kiro's annual Halloween-themed hackathon: build a new app with Kiro in one of four categories for a share of $100,000+ in prizes, with submissions due December 4. |
| 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." |
Vega developers get a new release and a migration guide this week: React Native 0.83 for Vega OS and From Fire OS to Vega: Porting your TV app to React Native for Vega with ADBT. Zattoo walks through its own move in How Zattoo Unified Its TV Apps with React Native and Vega OS. There are also new pieces on Ring cameras for small businesses, prompt optimization in Amazon Bedrock, home robots, connecting your coding agent to AWS, and Kourtney's talk on keeping up with AI without burning out.
📽️ How Zattoo Unified Its TV Apps with React Native and Vega OS
Zattoo was one of the first apps on Vega OS. On DEV Chat, Bogdan Plieshka, Principal Frontend Engineer at Zattoo, tells host Chris Traganos how a native team with no React Native background rebuilt its TV experience on one codebase it shares with web and mobile. He's candid about keeping playback fast on streaming sticks that people keep for years, and about how AI moved his team's time from writing code to reviewing it. If you're thinking about moving to Vega, this is a practical look at what that switch involves. If you'd rather read it, the written case study covers the same move.
📰 React Native 0.83 for Vega OS
By Anisha Malde
If your Fire TV app is still on React Native 0.72, this is the upgrade guide to read first. Anisha Malde lays out the jump to 0.83, why it's smaller than eleven releases sounds (Vega has run on the New Architecture from the start), and how the upgrade skill in the Amazon Devices Builder Tools MCP plans the migration with Vega-specific knowledge instead of a generic diff. She also covers what you get once you're there, including React 19, a faster Hermes and modern DevTools, and links a hands-on workshop if you'd rather learn by doing it on a demo app.
📽️ From Token Maxing to Token Frugaling: The Local Model Cliff | OkThink
Margaret Pieczkowski, co-founder of OkThink, lost track of her work once she had more than ten AI coding agents running in separate terminals, so she built Firehose to manage them. At AgentConf 2026 in Warsaw, host Chris Traganos asks her how she stays in charge of the decisions while the agents write the code, and why she thinks cutting token spend and talking to agents by voice come next. If you're running more than a couple of agents yourself, she has practical advice on where that workflow starts to break.
📰 Enhance your React Native App with Vega native APIs
Sometimes JavaScript and the community libraries aren't enough, like when you need a view that draws and animates in native code, or work that keeps running on a schedule after your app closes. The Vega SDK now lets you write those pieces in C++ and use them from React Native like any other component or module. Barak breaks it down with two sample apps, a native UI component and a periodic background task, so you can see how the wiring works on both sides before you try it in your own app.
📽️ A Home That Maintains Itself: iRobot's Vision for Home Robots
On the latest AI Innovator Series episode, Adam Pope, VP and Chief Engineer at iRobot, joins Emerson Sklar (Alexa Chief Evangelist) to unpack how Roomba moved from reacting to a room to anticipating it, and why the goal is AI that takes chores off a customer's plate rather than adding features. If you ship a connected device, the useful part is how they decide what belongs in voice and what stays in the mobile app, and how the Alexa+ integration surfaces settings owners never knew their robot had.
📰 From Fire OS to Vega: Porting your TV app to React Native for Vega with ADBT
Newer Fire TV sticks run Vega OS, and your Fire OS APK won't run on them. That makes porting a real planning item for any TV team. This guide shows how Amazon Devices Builder Tools gives your coding agent a phased App Porting workflow that turns an existing Fire OS codebase, whether it's a web hybrid, React Native, or native Java/Kotlin, into a buildable React Native for Vega app. It also covers where you have to step in yourself: the review checkpoints the agent won't stop at unless you ask, and the files that tell you what still needs a human. If a Vega port is on your roadmap, read this before you point an agent at your repo.
📰 AWS launched hard spend limits. Here's how they work.
AWS now lets you put a hard ceiling on what a single project can bill you. On the AWS Developers channel, Ana Cunha demos the new spend limit. It starts at $20 per project, pauses the project when it reaches the cap, and sends alerts before you hit it. She also shows how to bring a paused project back. This walkthrough of how hard spend limits work explains how a limit differs from a budget alert, which only sends an email, and what to check before you set one. With a limit in place, you can try out an Alexa skill backend or a Fire TV companion service without watching the meter.
📰 App Development Opportunities: What small business owners told us they need from their Ring cameras
The Ring team spent months interviewing restaurants, salons, retail shops and other small businesses about what they wish their cameras did, and the answers point to app ideas for the Ring Appstore. The pattern repeats across them: owners can see what happened on camera, but they still have to scrub through footage by hand to work out what it means for the business. If you're deciding what to build for Ring, this is first-hand research on four problems owners already spend their own time on, with example alerts that show what a useful answer would look like.
📽️ Spotlight on streaming TV with Horizon Media and AMC Global Media
Sarah Baehr talks with Michele Siravo and Chima Ogbuokiri about joint research from Horizon Media and our Amazon Ads team on why viewers are re-bundling their streaming subscriptions, and what that looks like for AMC Global Media, a content provider whose shows live inside bundled hubs. If you build a streaming app for Fire TV, this is useful context on how audiences now find content through aggregated surfaces as well as your own app, and where ad-supported tiers fit. It's audience research to study rather than something to build against, but it should shape how you think about discovery.
📰 What's new in Android developer tools and performance at Android Dev Summit
Adarsh Fernando, Group Product Manager for Android Developer Tools, rounds up the tooling news from Android Dev Summit. The theme is building alongside AI agents: Android Studio now works with the coding agents and models you already use, and a new command-line path opens up the Android toolchain to terminals and CI. For anyone building for our new Alexa Tablets, which run Android with Google Play, these changes reach the same Studio and build pipeline you ship with today. The post links out to the summit sessions on each area, so it works as a map of what to try first.
📽️ Optimize Your Prompts with Amazon Bedrock
A prompt that runs thousands of times a day pays for every wasted token. In this AWS Developers channel video, Steph Gooch demos Bedrock's built-in prompt optimization, which rewrites your prompt for the model you've picked so you get better output and spend fewer tokens overall. She covers the one-click rewrite and the deeper evaluation-driven mode that tests a prompt across several models, then shows how to version the results and add the step to a CI/CD pipeline. If you're shipping a Bedrock-backed feature and haven't checked what your prompts actually cost, this one is worth your time.
📰 How to connect your coding agent to AWS
By Ana Cunha
A coding agent can write your code, but it can't work in your AWS project or know what has changed in AWS since its model was trained. This guide sets up the Agent Toolkit for AWS so the agent you already use, whether that's Kiro, Claude Code, or Cursor, can check current AWS docs and work in your project with the same permissions you have. It all starts from one prompt you copy out of the console, and you finish by testing the connection without creating anything, so it's an easy first step if you're building a cloud backend for your app.
📽️ Keeping Up Without Burning Out: My AI Workflow for DevRel
In a lightning talk at DevRelCon 2026 NYC, Dev Advocate Kourtney Meiss shares the workflow and mindset she uses to keep up with AI without burning out: her current toolbox, and the questions she asks before handing a task to AI or doing it herself so she actually learns. If a new AI tool every week feels like more than you can follow, it's a practical way to set a pace you can keep.
📬 Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week's post? Let me know!
