Fire App Builder, a Java-based framework that you can use to build streaming media Android apps for Amazon Fire TV, has a new release that allows you to send recommendations to the Fire TV home screen. Recommendations appear on the “Recommended by Your Apps” row. 

By pushing recommended content to the home screen, users are more likely to engage with your app.

Two types of recommendations

Fire App Builder allows you to send two types of recommendations:

• Global recommendations are sent when your app launches. Good choices for global recommendations include new media in your app or other content you want to promote.
• Related recommendations are sent when a user watches a specific video. Related recommendations should be related to the media the user has already seen, such as content within the same genre or tag.

Configuring recommendations through the feed

Fire App Builder is flexible in adapting to nearly any media feed structure you have. To configure recommendations, you target a globalRecommendations element in your feed. To configure related recommendations, you target a recommendations element in your feed. When you target these elements, you use the same Jayway Jsonpath or XPath expressions that you used when you initially configured your media feed. 

After your app starts sending recommendations, users will see media thumbnails in the “Recommended by Your Apps” row. (The user must have downloaded and opened your app at least once to see the recommendations.)

To learn more, see the Fire App Builder documentation:

• Recommendations
• Sending global recommendations
• Sending related recommendations
• Customizing recommendations with Amazon extras

Release Versions

The recommendations feature was introduced in version 1.0.2 of Fire App Builder. Other additions in the 1.0.2 release include an enhancement/simplification in customizing the appearance of your app, additional events tracked in analytics, sample XML feed integration, a smarter Login/Logout button, and more. See the 1.0.2 release notes for full details.

Two releases (1.0.3 and 1.0.4) followed the release of 1.0.2 to fix minor issues (see the release notes for details).