Amazon Fire TV I Will Own You

I find myself with what under normal circumstances would be a fun project for an engineer like me. I have to build an app for the Amazon Fire TV. We know exactly what we need — it needs to read the RSS for our video feed and provide an interface that allows users to browse by category, search, and ultimately watch the videos. Advertising is a necessary component, but first things first.

Amazon actually makes a template for this called the Fire App Builder. There’s documentation. So far so good.

Here’s problem number one — the last release of the code is from 2018. The actual commits are about a year old.

Here’s problem number two — it doesn’t seem to work on the Fire Tablet (which we need). If you check out the project and build without changes, it will work fine on your Fire Stick. But on a Fire Tablet the videos never play, attempting to do so just reboots the app. I spent days debugging my additions to the code trying to figure that one out. Hopefully writing it here saves somebody else the trouble. It’s not you.

I’m honestly not even sure if it’s supposed to work on the tablet or it’s a stick-only thing. The documentation does say, in preparation for submitting to the app store, that you should make sure it runs on tablets.

I have no idea if this is still maintained, if I’m supposed to be using it, or if anybody else out there is using it. Attempting to google for solutions has been challenging. Searching anything related to “amazon fire tv” brings back 90% news articles about what the device does and where to buy it and/or configure it. Very little, even on reddit, about how to develop for it. In theory “it’s just an android TV device” but clearly the specifics of the hardware factor in someplace, given that the code works on the stick but not the tablet. Somebody somewhere has to add some proprietary Fire TV knowledge to the discussion.

I just made this discovery, so I don’t have much to add yet. Documenting here as a starting point. When I learn more I’ll add more.