The Fire TV home screen now features a new row called “Recommended By Your Apps.” This row shows content recommendations from your app (if the customer has your app installed and opened it at least once). Recommendations on the Fire TV home screen promote deeper engagement and loyalty for your apps by showcasing your content to users who have an active interest in your material.

Last December, we began rolling out a brand new user interface for Fire TV that puts your content front and center for customers. Customer reaction to the new UI has been overwhelmingly positive. With new features like the “Recommended By Your Apps” row we continue to innovate to bring new ways to drive deeper engagement with your apps and games.

How do recommendations work?

Recommendations allow locally-installed apps to display recommendations for their content on a dedicated row, so you can easily reengage users with your app.

Amazon’s recommendations use the standard Android ContentRecommendation.Builder API. As a developer, you have control over how the recommendation looks, with customizable attributes such as the recommendation title, description of the recommended content, recommendation image, etc.

In addition to using the common methods available from the standard Android recommendations API, you can incorporate Amazon-specific enhancements. These Amazon enhancements allow you to create recommendations that are better integrated with Fire TV and provide a seamless experience to customers.

For example, through Amazon enhancements, you can customize the text that appears in the launch menu when users select a recommendation card and click the menu button:

Enabling content recommendations

Review our in-depth documentation for exact steps on how to make your content recommendations appear on the Recommendations row.

For the Recommendations row to appear on a customer’s Fire TV home screen, there must be at least five recommendations sent from all apps. Additionally, the customer must not have any viewing restrictions set under Settings > Preferences > Parental Controls.

What should I recommend?

When thinking about what to recommend, remember to keep the content relevant to the user. Some things you can enable recommendations for include:

• New episodes for shows watched earlier.
• Encouragements to resume a show the user only partially watched.
• Content similar to the shows the user has watched.

For more help with creating engaging recommendations, see the following documentation:

• Recommendations Overview
• Send Recommendations that Include Amazon Enhancements
• Test Your Recommendations
• Best Practices with Recommendations

The sooner you start sending recommendations, the sooner customers will see your content populated on the “Recommended By Your Apps” row and engage with your material.

Developing for Fire TV

If you are already developing for Fire TV, your apps should automatically be eligible for submitting content to the “Recommended By Your Apps” row.

For new Fire TV developers, there are many development tools available, such as System X-Ray, which provides streamlined intelligence on app behavior and performance during testing.

If you haven’t submitted your app yet, we offer detailed documentation to help guide you through the publishing process. You can also learn more about the frameworks that will help you get started, with our Introduction Guide to Amazon Fire TV Development Frameworks.