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Xamarin forms: How to develop applications for Amazone Fire TV

We are planning to create an application for amazon fire os devices like Amazon Fire tablets, Amazon Fire phone, Amazon Fire TV and the Amazon Fire TV Stick using Xamarin forms. I research about this and found this blog. But I am using visual studio for the development. So is there any NuGet packages available for this? I checked the Android SDK Manager, like the blog not found amazon fire tv SDK under API 17. Also, How can I use the Amazon Fire TV component?

Our app is a simple app for listing the videos based on the category, also has a login page. Is it possible to use the same project for Chromecast and rokoo players? Should I include other packages or components for them?

Please provide me with a starting point for what I have to do.

Update:

Hi @Ryan

I have some queries regarding this:

  1. Which type of project do I need to create for this? Xamarin forms project or Xamarin Android project?
  2. Also, we planned to use the same app for Apple TV, for supporting Apple TV is there any additional settings?
  3. How I can test the app when developing? Is there any simulator? Fire TV is not available with me now?
  4. On which store I need to upload the app? Amazon Appstore or Google Play Store?
  5. Which NuGet package or SDK I need to add for developing a fire tv app? (or any component)

Could you please include answers to the above questions in your answer?

Solution

  • You won't be able to use that comoponent as Xamarin closed the component store in favour of nuget a long while back.

    However, as far as I am aware you should be able to use the Android TV development tools to make a Fire app, see this article: Android TV on Amazon

    Here is a short article about developing for the Fire TV - as you can see, it is no different to any other Android platform really Android on Fire TV with Xamarin

    All of the Google SDK stuff is available when you use Xamarin, you use the same tools to manage them as you would a native app, just go to Tools/Android/AndroidSDKManager in Visual Studio.

    Developing for the Fire phone is also just done using the normal Android tools that you find in any Xamarin project. Here is an example project : Xamarin Android TV Sample

    The main thing to be aware of is that you won't have access to Google Play services like Maps etc, so you either need to use Amazon's libraries exclusively or if you intend to release on Google as well then have some kind of build config to switch out implementations.

    Submitting to the store is quite a different experience to Google Play and unless they have changed it then their rules about bundled data are very different (I had an exercise app with a lot of video content, Amazon let me upload it as-is wheras Google made me split the media into a dlc pack as it was over 100MB).