In December, Amazon introduced a way to shop its site from the Apple TV through a dedicated app designed for tvOS. That same app, which lets you search and browse Amazon products and make purchases using your remote, has now officially launched on Amazon’s Fire TV, too.
According to Amazon’s website, the app was released on May 24, 2017. However, news of its existence leaked out in April when what appeared to be a test version of the app briefly appeared online before being removed.
Similar to the Apple TV version, Amazon’s shopping app for Fire TV lets you search across Amazon by typing in text, filter your search results (e.g. by department), as well as browse the product listings on your TV.
When viewing an individual item, you can learn more by clicking through large product images, watching videos, seeing the star rating, checking out the “customer also bought” recommendations, as well as reading through the customer reviews on the product’s detail page.
The app additionally supports adding things to your Wish List if you’re not prepared to immediately make a purchase.
However, if you do want to shop from your Fire TV, that’s now possible.
The new app lets you check out right from your TV screen, allowing you to pick from the available shipping options, your saved payment methods and the addresses stored in your Amazon account. You can use your existing gift card and promotional balances, too, just as you can on Amazon’s website.
Also like the Apple TV app, the Fire TV shopping app will feature regularly updated “campaigns” as part of its experience. These are curated collections — like gift guides, or those that select the best items from a given category — which you can flip through for inspiration.
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At launch, for example, there are several campaigns available, including things like “Outdoor Living” ideas, those promoting Amazon products like Echo, one featuring Amazon’s “Handmade” collection and many more.
While the Apple TV application allowed customers to search items by voice using the Apple TV Siri remote, the Fire TV remote’s voice function only lets you search across the Fire TV platform (e.g. for apps, games, TV shows, movies, etc.), we found — it can’t be used within the app to save you from typing.
Though the app is only a few days old, and has not been officially announced by Amazon, it has still managed to attract a couple dozen reviews on its listing page on Amazon.com, where it now has a 4.3 star rating.
