Why Amazon is betting on a new TV OS

Black, unassuming, about the size of a pack of chewing gum: On the surface, the Fire TV 4K Select stick released in mid-October looks just like any other streaming device made by Amazon. Plug it into your TV, and you’ll be greeted by Amazon’s tried-and-true living room interface, complete with icons for popular streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video.

And yet, the Select streaming stick is unlike any of its predecessors.

That’s because the device is running Vega – a new, Linux-based operating system Amazon has quietly been building over the past couple of years as a replacement for its legacy, Android-based Fire OS. The company plans to eventually launch Vega across a wide range of devices, including smart displays, streaming devices, even car dashboards.

The adoption of Vega represents one of Amazon’s most ambitious hardware-related initiatives ever since the launch of the first Fire TV device over a decade ago. It also prompted backlash from consumers and lukewarm reception from developers. But for the company, launching Vega may be worth the pain.

“Amazon has always wanted to create its own software ecosystem,” says Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart. Betting on Vega allows Amazon not just to optimize the code running on its devices, but also to break free from Google and take control of its own destiny.

Android was developed to run on phones

When Amazon launched its first Fire TV streaming box in early 2014, it did so by using a version of Google’s Android OS that the company customized to its own needs. For that, Amazon decided not to license Google’s Play Store and other services available on officially Google-sanctioned hardware. Instead, it simply used open source Android code freely available to anyone, and built its own Fire TV app store and services on top of that foundation.

“Android (has) been and remains super, super important to our product lines – it is wonderful how Google has built and supported that platform,” wrote the outgoing Amazon devices executive Robert Williams in a recent LinkedIn post, adding: “However, we also felt that we could build something more purpose-built for consumer electronics devices that was faster and used more modern components and design.”

There are sound technical reasons for this approach: Android is, at its core, an operating system for mobile phones, and many of its components are either not required or not optimized for other kinds of devices. That’s why Google itself switched from Android to a new, custom OS called Fuchsia for its smart displays in 2021.

Similarly, Amazon first launched Vega on a smart display, the Echo Show 5, in 2023, albeit without publicly announcing the switch. “We started where we could have the biggest impact right away,” explains Tapas Roy, Amazon’s vice president of device software & services. “Vega’s integration with our custom-designed silicon accelerates AI query response times, such as for Alexa+, making our Echo lineup ideal for joint development.”

An insurance policy against Google

Other reasons for an alternative to Android are less technical. While Google has maintained the core Android code as an open source project, it has also long tightly controlled what device makers can and cannot do if they want access to the company’s Play Store, and other commercial Android components. Google in particular frowned upon efforts to build alternative, customized distributions of Android, something that’s known among open source insiders as forking.

Fire OS is the most popular forked version of Android in Western markets, leading to significant friction between the two companies. The conflict came to a head when Amazon began approaching third-party consumer electronics companies about making TVs powered by Fire OS a few years after launching its own streaming adapters.

At the time, Google told TV makers that they couldn’t use Fire OS if they also were using Google’s Android on other devices, including phones. Google justified this by arguing it was trying to prevent fragmentation, but the move also effectively kneecapped Amazon’s smart TV efforts. The conflict resulted in an antitrust investigation in India that got resolved with a settlement earlier this year. Google and Amazon separately came to an agreement on the issue, paving the way for manufacturers like TCL to build TVs powered by Fire OS.

Despite this truce, Vega OS can be seen as a kind of insurance policy against Google. If the search giant were to further restrict the use of Android in the future, Amazon wouldn’t be left empty-handed.

At least publicly, Amazon is committed to shipping devices with both operating systems for the foreseeable future. “We’re not moving away from Android,” says Roy. “We’re a multi-OS company, and Fire OS isn’t going anywhere. Creating and managing our own operating system lets us innovate across the whole tech stack within our devices where we need it.” Amazon has no plans to make Vega available to third-party device makers, Roy said.

Pushback from developers and consumers

Amazon has faced some pushback from consumers after launching the Vega-powered Select stick. While Android-powered Fire TV sticks are rated 4.6 stars and up on Amazon’s shopping website, the Select model currently has a 3.6 star rating, with a whopping 25% of reviewers awarding it just a single star.

Part of the backlash has to do with the fact that prior Android models allowed consumers to install their own apps from sources other than Amazon’s official store – a feature frequently used for apps designed to access pirated content. Vega does not offer a similar “sideloading” feature.

Amazon has also struggled to gain support from app developers and publishers for the device.

Smart TV app developers already deal with a very fragmented landscape, with devices made by Roku, Samsung, Google, and LG, all requiring them to build different versions of their apps. At launch, the Select Stick was missing native apps from a number of major publishers, including CBS, PBS, and BET.

To make up for those shortcomings, Amazon adopted a novel approach: For the time being, it is simply running the existing Android apps for services like these in the cloud. In most cases, consumers will notice little to no difference to an app running on the device itself. Some functionality, however, simply isn’t compatible with this approach. As a result, Select stick owners currently don’t have access to a Spotify app on the device.

Despite the initial extra investment, publishers could ultimately benefit from porting their apps to Vega. The operating system is based on technology that will, at least in theory, allow developers to consolidate their codebase across multiple operating systems. “Developers can reuse their … code from one project to another, within or outside of Amazon apps, to make the most of their time and efforts,” Roy says.

Aside from those practical considerations, developers do have another factor to contend with: With over 200 million Fire TV devices sold to date, Amazon is a giant in the streaming hardware space. If the company keeps shipping new devices running Vega, publishers may just have to fall in line and rebuild their apps for the new operating system.

“There are likely to be growing pains,” says Greengart, adding: “I would give Amazon extremely high odds for success with Vega OS.”