Amazon Vega OS and Vega Developer Tools (developer.amazon.com)

I'm assuming they've basically replaced the walled garden with a greenhouse with these changes to Vega OS?

At least it (hopefully) means no more stupid "cracked fire TV sticks" on the local market. The end-user-support experience is downright awful and I'm sick of having to explain to people I can't help with them.

What is this Vega OS ?

Is it a custom OS (custom kernel and everything) ? Is it a linux distribution?

https://developer.amazon.com/docs/vega/0.21/vega-overview.ht... does not say much...

I'm wondering if this is what they themselves use for developing the Prime Video app? At least on LG, it's by far the slowest, laggiest and most broken app our family sometimes use.

I find Amazon’s software for streaming much slower and buggier than other providers. The streams too also seem to have more issues.

Reminds me of the Sony Wega televisions.

Looking at the sample apps… I think I pass, not liking much what I see, either generated by LLM or by an intern

I bet thats gonna last for a couple years until amazon abandons it again.

I read that as AMD Vega OS and Vega developer tools.

So bye Android fork?

Amazon rolling their own OS for TV add-on devices instead of the re-skinned Android TV OS they've been using until now basically means I won't consider their devices any more. The last thing I need is yet another non-standard moving target to support in my house. Which is unfortunate because I bought their catchily-named "Fire TV Stick 4k Max (2nd Gen)" and, once you de-cruft the advertising riddled OS and sideload standard Android TV apps (eg SmartTube, Plex), the hardware is decent at a fair price (~$50). IMHO, all the broadly available TV streaming devices from major manufacturers are under-powered but the more recent, higher-end ones like the Fire TV 4K Max and Google Chromecast (aka "4K Streamer") can be basically usable once de-crufted.

Unfortunately, the only more powerful alternatives are from offshore manufacturers and thus have spotty Android TV support and may not be "authorized" (ie whitelisted) by all encrypted streaming apps (Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, etc). It's bizarre that the most powerful dedicated TV streaming device available today is by far still the NVidia Shield which is essentially a 2015 era design (it got a very minor refresh in 2019 https://androidtvnews.com/nvidia-shield-differences/). It sucks because there are a lot of useful things a TV streaming device could do if it had a little more CPU/GPU headroom (AI upscaling, de-mosaicing, casual and retro-gaming).