I recently got my hands on Amazon’s new Fire TV Stick 4K Select, which is the company’s first TV device running Vega OS instead of the legacy Android-based Fire OS. All in all, the experience looks and feels just like using any other Fire TV device, with a few differences.
Perhaps the biggest downside: There is no Spotify app for the Select stick. Instead, consumers are being asked to install an app called “Spotify Connect.” This app then prompts them to ask Alexa to “Connect to Spotify” and then cast music from the Spotify app on their phone, if they want to listen to something on their TV.
Alternatively, consumers can also use the Alexa Spotify integration with the device, according to Amazon spokesperson Melanie Garvey. “Both options provide full access to your Spotify content,” Garvey told me via email.
The absence of a full-blown Spotify app is nonetheless confusing, and highlights some of the challenges Amazon is facing as it strives to transition from Android to Vega for its streaming devices.
With Vega being a new, Linux-based OS, Amazon has been encouraging publishers to rebuild their apps for the new platform. However, many publishers already have to build bespoke apps for a myriad of different smart TV platforms, and some major companies appear to be hesitant to throw resources at Vega until they see significant traction.
To make up for that, Amazon has come up with an interesting band-aid: Popular apps that haven’t been ported to Vega yet are simply being run on an Android instance hosted in the cloud, and then streamed to consumer devices. This cloud streaming approach works remarkably well: I noticed no real latency differences between browsing the video catalogs of native Vega apps and a cloud-hosted Android apps.
However, cloud-hosted apps don’t support all of the features that native apps do, with local network control being notably amiss. Amazon could have theoretically run the Spotify Fire TV app in the cloud, but consumers wouldn’t have been able to cast to the app, add songs to its queue from their phone, and more. Instead, the company built a custom app for Spotify Connect, the music service’s local networking protocol.
It’s a clunky solution, made worse by the fact that this isn't a system-level integration of Spotify Connect. While your Echo speaker will always show up as a playback target in your Spotify mobile app, you’ll have to frequently relaunch the Spotify Connect app on the Fire TV Stick 4K Selec to make casting work. Clearly, Amazon is hoping Spotify will eventually port its full-blown app to Vega.
Will the music service do so? “We're committed to working with all our partners to deliver great experiences," said Spotify spokesperson Farrin Jay when connected for this story, while declining to share further details.
“We’re continuing to work closely with our partners to build their apps for Vega,” added Amazon’s Garvey. “Native versions of apps will be added as they are completed.”
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