This tutorial will show you how to add touch interactions to Android-based Fire TV apps along with touch-based UX best practices. 

Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Gen) and Fire TV Stick Lite have a new user interface (UI) for improved content discovery and expanded voice navigation with Alexa. 

We sat down with Germany’s market leader for IPTV, waipu.tv, to learn about their app success with Fire TV and how features like the Video Skills Kit (VSK) for voice control and Live TV Integration adds value for their customers.

Your app can send recommendations to users about the content (movies, shows, music, games) that you want them to watch. Recommendations appear on a "Recommended By Your Apps" row on the Fire TV home screen.

In this article we will provide you with a step by step guide for the integrations process.

The German Government is temporarily reducing value added tax (VAT) from July 1^st until December 31^st this year. The German tax rates will change from 19% to 16% (regular VAT rate) and from 7% to 5% (reduced VAT rate). It is the aim of the German Government that retailers pass on the reduction to customers through lowered prices.

While this is not a required action for your published apps on the Amazon Appstore, you may choose to update the List Price of your apps and in-app purchasable items sold in Germany for the duration of the VAT reduction.

Before you apply any changes to the List Price for your apps and in-app purchasable items sold in Germany, please take note of the following:

• Changing the List Price for the “Amazon.de” Marketplace will also impact the calculation of Royalties for apps sold in Austria (AT), where at the moment there is no VAT reduction.
• If you plan to update the List Price for a subscription, please make sure to carefully read the documentation on how to Update Subscription Price on the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal. The system behavior for a given subscriber depends on the price that the subscriber is currently paying.

If you would like to lower the list price for your apps, you can follow the steps below on the Amazon Developer Console:

• Go to “App List” and select the app where you would like to lower the list price
• For Paid Apps, go to “Availability and Pricing” and edit pricing for the “Amazon.de” marketplace
• For editing In-App Items, go to the “In-App Items” tab. For each In-App Item, edit the list pricing for the “Amazon.de” marketplace.

If you have any additional questions, please contact Amazon Appstore Developer Support.

Amazon Appstore Team

Starting September 2019, new EU regulations require on-line transactions to go through 2-or-more steps Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), also referred to as Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). In this article we’ll see how developers can verify their apps correctly handle MFA.

Starting today, it’s even easier to add GameOn to any game created with GameMaker Studio 2 thanks to the Amazon GameOn plugin created by YoYo Games, the maker of GameMaker Studio 2.

In the Amazon Developer Podcast, I discuss technologies and trends in the mobile, apps, and games developer world with guest speakers and influencers from all over the world.

Learn how to enable in-app voice control by integrating the Android Media Session API. 

This eBook will guide you through the steps necessary to add IAP to your Android app. Together, we will implement, from scratch, an Android application that uses the Amazon In-App Purchase APIs to allow in-app purchase of a magazine subscription.

In our upcoming webinar, will deep dive into the peculiarities of developing for the 10-foot experience and how developers can leverage Amazon Fire TV developer tools to create a compelling TV experience.

Last week, we presented a webinar about How to Add In-App Purchasing and Subscriptions to your Android Apps. We demonstrated how easy it is to use the Amazon IAP and Subscription API in order to offer subscriptions and digital content in your Android Apps.

Do you want to add in-app purchasing (IAP) or subscriptions to your apps but don’t know where to start? Join me on Friday, July 28^th, to learn how to integrate these monetization features into your apps and games.

On February 23rd we presented a webinar focused on using Amazon Web App Starter Kit (WASK) to build and test web-based Apps for Fire TV. WASK is a web-based template designed for the 10-foot user experience and includes UI controls, support for the Fire TV remote, sample UI components, support for various data formats and more. To get started, all you need is a feed from Youtube or Brightcove or a media RSS or JSON feed. Then you can customize the look and feel of the app using CSS tags and add/remove features using the Javascript files included in the project.

During the webinar we covered these topics:

In our upcoming webinar, Build and Test Web-based Apps for TV using Amazon Web App Starter Kit, Amazon Technology Evangelist, Mario Viviani will share how easy it is to deploy a fully fledged TV app on Fire TV using WASK.