Hot on the heels of Google announcing the third and final version of the Android 6.0 Marshmallow developer preview earlier this morning, which by the way is now capable of being downloaded and installed so long as you have a supported device, Amazon has announced some new details in regards to their next developer preview of their Fire OS which powers the Amazon Kindle Fire devices as well as the Fire Phone. Specifically, Amazon is announcing that they’re bringing the developer preview of Fire OS 5 to the Fire TV set top box they launched last year which allows users to stream all kinds of content to the big screen.
For those that may be unaware, the Fire OS 5 Developer Preview is based on Android 5.1 Lollipop. It might seem a little bit late in the game for Amazon to be releasing a dev preview which is based on software that initially started releasing earlier this year, especially when you consider that the final build of the Android 6.0 preview just released this morning. Amazon’s devices though, like many others, are typically a little behind when it comes to version software. You also have to consider that Fire OS is Amazon’s own flavor of the Android operating system and is a forked version of the Android OS, so that likely takes some extra time to get things developed and up and running.
Now that Fire TV is joining the mix, the dev preview for it will be alongside the Fire OS 5 dev preview that Amazon released for the Kindle Fire HD 6 and the Kindle Fire HD 7 which they sent out into the world just a couple of months ago back in June. Amazon wants to get this version of the OS into the possession of as many developers as possible so they can prepare their apps and games for the major OS update. Currently Fire TV sits on OS version 3, so this is quite a huge jump. There are more than a couple of changes developers will want to look out for, but Amazon highlights two major ones as being support for the v17 Leanback library as well as support for Android TV. Other changes include Android 5.0 behavioral changes Android 5.0 APIs.