On September 30th Amazon made a big announcement of a new operating system for their Fire TV devices — Vega OS, along with the new Fire TV Stick 4K Select, which is the first device to run Vega. Today we’re proud to announce that Software Mansion is an official Vega-supported agency, and that we’ve had the opportunity to partner with Amazon to help develop Vega.

It’s been an exciting and at times challenging journey, and most of all, an incredibly valuable opportunity for us to gain knowledge and hands-on experience developing apps for Vega and to deepen our understanding of how the platform works.

React Native on Vega OS

Unlike the system which currently powers the majority of Fire TV devices — Fire OS, which is based on a fork of Android, Vega is based on Linux and created with the Amazon devices in mind. That means better memory management resulting in smaller footprints, faster app launches and smoother navigation. It includes support for two technologies that can be used for building apps: Vega WebView for web based experiences and React Native (also referred to as React Native for Vega or RNV for short).

Vega is not just another platform supporting React Native, but a platform where React Native is a first class citizen:

The native code for React Native itself, as well as the native implementations of many common dependencies — such as React Native Reanimated, Gesture Handler or AsyncStorage — are already pre-compiled and included in the system. For us as React Native developers, this means smaller app bundle sizes and faster builds. Vega also supports the (New) Architecture allowing developers to use Turbo Native Modules and JSI in their apps and libraries.

Vega OS is entirely different from Android and iOS, and uses C++ for the native development. Libraries that include native code and support the two systems don’t work right away on Vega and have to be ported.

How we helped bring React Native to Vega?

We’re happy to have helped port the core building blocks of React Native apps like react-navigation, react-native-screens, react-native-reanimated and many of the Expo packages which are already available to use out of the box. Apart from porting libraries, we’ve also worked on the core of React Native for Vega.

First, let’s focus on the libraries. The React Native libraries mentioned above are the core building blocks behind high-quality app experiences. Certain parts of an app’s experience (like animations, gestures, or icons) have become so natural that we often overlook them. But creating them in React Native would be really difficult without these essential libraries.

That’s why, if a platform wants to treat React Native as one of its official development technologies, it must support the most important libraries. Together with Amazon, we made sure that the React Native libraries maintained by Software Mansion:

• react-native-reanimated
• react-native-gesture-handler
• react-native-screens
• react-native-svg

Along with:

• react-navigation
• @react-native-masked-view/masked-view
• Selected Expo libraries (e.g. expo-file-system, expo-image)
• @sentry/react-native
• react-native-mmkv
• @shopify/flash-list

are fully supported on Vega.

This process included extending the implementations of the libraries with all required native modules and components and adding any adjustments required by the specificity of the platform (such as extending react-navigation components to support the TV remote or integrating the Expo libraries with resources available in the OS). It helped us to better understand how libraries interact with React Native and the system on Vega.

As React Native is truly native under the hood, all components and APIs eventually have to call into native implementations. Since Vega OS is separate from Android and iOS, it has its own implementation of React Native. We’ve taken part in multiple initiatives revolving around the core of React Native for Vega, helping to ensure it works without any issues and offers the same relevant functionalities developers know from Android and iOS. Those initiatives were incredibly valuable learning experiences for us, helping us understand how RNV interacts with the system to run and render apps. The collaboration also allowed us to further extend our knowledge of React Native internals.

If you need help with migrating an existing FireOS app to Vega or want to develop a new application, you can always reach out to us at [email protected]. As the official Vega-supported agency and a long-time Amazon partner, we’ll be happy to use our first-hand experience to help you build your Vega OS app.

We’re Software Mansion: multimedia experts, AI explorers, React Native core contributors, community builders, and software development consultants.