Fire TV devices offer a variety of entertainment options for the over 50 million monthly active users worldwide. With so many choices available, simplify content discovery with recommendations. Your app can send recommendations to users about the movies, shows, music, and games that you want them to watch.
Recommendations appear on a "Recommended By Your Apps" (ReYA) row on the Amazon Fire TV home screen and shows all recommendations from apps the user has currently installed (and opened at least once).
ReYA in Fire TV is based on the Android Recommendations API, which in turn, is based on Android notifications. Amazon extends the Android recommendations API to provide deeper integration with Amazon Fire TV.
If developers have optimized their apps for Fire OS 5, they may see their recommendations are missing from the ReYA row on Fire OS 7 devices; this is because Fire OS 7 is built on Android 9, which introduces changes to the recommendations engine. The Fire TV home screen, therefore, displays recommendations in two different ways depending on the version of Fire OS running on the device:
- Fire OS 5 and 6: Older Fire TV devices are on Fire OS 5 (Android 5.1, API level 22). Before Android 8.0, Android shows all recommendations in a single recommendations row that always appears on the screen. Fire OS 6 is based on Android Nougat (Android 7.1.2, level 25), so the ReYA row will still show up correctly on these devices with no changes from Fire OS 5.
- Fire OS 7: In Android 8.0 (API level 26) and later, apps can show recommendations in one or more channels that appear on separate rows. One channel (the default channel) always appears. Hence, in Fire OS 7, which is based on Android 9.0 Pie (API level 28), notifications that any app sends must be assigned to a channel (since recommendations are a kind of notification). If an app sends notifications or recommendations, then it must create a channel and associate the channel with the notification. A notification without a channel ID will be dropped.
To be able to show recommendations on all versions of Fire TV, apps should implement both recommendation APIs, i.e. for Fire OS 5 and 6 and for Fire OS 7.
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