How to start developing for Amazon Fire TV?

Question

I was requested to develop an Amazon Fire TV app, but I find difficult to understand the steps required to get on track.

As specified by the Amazon documentation, the previously available Fire TV SDK add-on is now deprecated, and they suggest to just use the Android v17 Leanback Library.

To date, I do not have (yet) a Fire TV, and the official documentation is very poor and rather confused; I'm not able – then – to understand whether "pure" Android TV apps are fully compatible with Fire OS 5, so that developing for the Fire TV is actually the same as developing for a generic Amazon TV (from the SDK, to the virtual testing process). In the case it isn't, what are the different steps I have to take into account?

Answer 1

You should start with using Android v17 Leanback Library. There is a sample app available from Google that uses leanback library. Few things you might need to check for firetv like speech recognition (SearchFragment in the leanback library) is currently unsupported

Fire OS 5 includes both support for Android TV functionality and the leanback support library. Speech recognition (SearchFragment in the leanback library) is currently unsupported.

and global search which is not customizable for individual apps for firetv

Global search is provided system-wide and is not customizable for individual apps. Developers may implement their own in-app search, but it is not included in the global search function.

Also try to follow pre-submission assessment guidelines and developer FAQs when developing for a firetv.