Today, Amazon announced the new Fire HD 8 with always-ready, hands-free access to Alexa. With hands-free mode, Alexa is always ready to respond – Alexa can start a video call with family, play music, launch games, read Audible books, and more.

Starting today, customers in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan will begin receiving the new Fire HD 10 with Alexa Hands-Free, available for order on Amazon.com, starting at $149.99.

Today Amazon announced the latest generation of our largest tablet, the all-new Fire HD 10. It’s a device that really lets your app or game shine, sporting faster performance, more storage, longer battery life, and a brilliant 10.1” display.

We’ve all read the declarations that tablets are dead. In reality, tablets—and smartphones for that matter—are just enjoying longer lifespans. Though shipments of tablets are down globally, the market remains considerably large.

In September 2016 we announced the all-new Fire HD 8 tablet, designed form the ground up for all-day entertainment. Among the many new features mentioned was support for Alexa, as quoted here:

"Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service that allows customers to play music and get information, news, sports scores, weather, and more—instantly, just press and ask. In the coming months, Fire tablets will also be able to connect to Alexa, enabling Alexa developers to extend their reach to Fire tablet users."

Today, customers can now access Alexa on Fire, Fire HD 8, and Fire HD 10 tablets by simply pressing down on home icon in the navigation bar and start talking. For Alexa developers, this not only extends the reach of your audience, it provides another scenario where voice-interactions can be complemented with a visual skill card to enhance the experience. When using Fire Tablets or Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, the visual cards appear immediately and can also be referenced in the Alexa app.

Skill cards contain a title, a text body, and optionally one image. These cards present information for easy consumption by customers.

Mobile and living room devices today present a varied landscape for developers to consider. One aspect that is particularly meaningful for your customers is where your app installs itself. Some devices, like the current Fire tablets and Fire TV have external storage through memory card slots. Other devices, like Fire TV Stick or older Fire tablets have only their internal flash storage. Running out of storage when trying to install a new app can be very frustrating for people who want to use your app. This frustration is compounded for customers who have added a memory card with lots of empty space and still get an error message that the device is out of space when trying to install. That frustration can quickly find its way into negative reviews for your app.

Luckily, for most apps, Android provides a simple solution. By specifying the installLocation in the app manifest, you can provide your user community with the best experience possible for whatever device they own. This doesn't mean they'lll never run out of space, but it helps best manage the space they have.

 xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:installLocation="auto" android:theme="@android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar" package="com.examplecompany.myapp" platformBuildVersionCode="23" platformBuildVersionName="6.0-2704002">  android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/> ¦ ¦

installLocation can be specified as any of the following:

The Amazon Appstore has always persevered to make apps more discoverable and to get you more downloads. To align with this goal we’ve introduced a change that will help customers see the most relevant reviews; reviews that reflect your hard work in app updates and improvements.

Customer Reviews Are Now More Contextual

Today, we are happy to announce our newly enhanced Ratings and Reviews system. Going forward, customer ratings and reviews will be more app-specific, taking into consideration the device type and app version, which ensures that customers see the most accurate rating for your app.

Previously, customers who read reviews on their tablets or other devices saw reviews sorted by helpfulness; reviews that received the most votes. Now these top votes reviews for past versions will no longer surface above latest version reviews. Instead, customers will more easily see reviews for the actual version they are downloading. This means reviews that mention past bugs will rank lower than reviews for the latest version of your app. This new sorting process will be visible on Kindle Fire tablets and  for Android Apps first. We expect to launch it on Amazon.com, FireTV and in the Developer Portal shortly thereafter.

On November 3^rd 2015 300+ attendees, two tracks about monetization and gaming, 13 sessions, multiple guest speakers and the Amazon Appstore evangelists animated a very successful developer-focused conference: the Amazon Appstore Developer Summit 2015, which took place at CodeNode, London.

The Amazon Appstore Developer Summit focused around unique insights into the Amazon Appstore ecosystem, emerging user interfaces and devices that are driving new user behaviors, like Fire TV and Amazon Echo, and new business models like Amazon Underground and Merch, which are opening up opportunities for customers and the developer community.

Here you can find the recordings of all the sessions, complete with slides, organized by topic:

Our App Testing Service (ATS) allows you to test your app’s compatibility on the Amazon Appstore for Android, Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV.  Today we’ve upgraded our existing Nexus 7 fleet of devices so you can now receive compatibility results for Android 6.0 Marshmallow apps and games.

Simply drag and drop your Android APK into the App Testing Service and in as little as 90 seconds you can receive a detailed report of potential issues that could affect your apps’ compatibility with the Amazon Appstore – including guidance on how to resolve them before publishing. You can view the test results which will include screenshots, logs, CPU and Memory utilization information from actual devices that we run the automated tests on using Amazon appXplorer. We will also detect and flag crashes during the automated tests that will help you identify potential compatibility issues of your app.

Unity 5 has some great tools to help build great 2D games for Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablets. Here are two videos that walk you through how to use Unity’s Sprite Animation tools and also how to set up complex Animation States. I walk through the foundation of setting up Sprite animations and then show you step by step how I link up different states such as walking, running and shooting together so you can control them via C#. Check out the videos here:

If you are looking to learn more about making 2D games with Unity for Amazon devices or game dev in general make sure to check out my daily Twitch stream from 9am to 12pm EST.

Publishing to the Amazon Appstore

If you are a first time game developer or a seasoned pro, the Amazon Appstore is the perfect place for your latest creation. Publishing to the Amazon Appstore is free and easy, especially if you are already building Android games. We offer some great tools and services to help make your game more successful like Amazon IAP, Ads, Merch, Underground and our collection of Fire OS devices. Here are some additional links to help you gets started:

• Register for a free developer account
• Submit your game
• Make the Amazon Appstore Your Game’s Home

- Jesse Freeman (@jessefreeman)