Last week it was revealed that Amazon is working on an in-house OS to replace Android on select products such as the Fire TV but, as it turns out, that process has already started on the Echo Show.
Amazon’s use of Android behind the scenes of many of its products is pretty well known across the company’s tablets and Fire TV devices. In fact, a good number of customer buy Amazon’s super-affordable hardware specifically to take advantage of Android to modify the software, sideloading apps and more. What’s lesser known, though, is that Amazon has also used its modified Fire OS skin on top of Android on smart home products including the Echo Show, it’s just much harder to modify those products due to how the skin is made.
Using Android on a smart display is, though, pretty resource-intensive, which is why smart displays were among the products mentioned as switching to “Vega OS” in last week’s big report.
As spotted by ZatzNotFunny, the Echo Show 5 third-generation (at least the Kids Edition) is currently running a new operating system as denoted by the “OS 1.1” marker in the product’s settings menu. While this doesn’t strictly confirm the use of the new “Vega OS,” that’s the most likely answer, and it at least confirms that this is no longer using Fire OS. Previously, Fire OS was directly mentioned in the settings, and even a few years ago it was at a version number over v6.5.
ZatzNotFunny further notes that Amazon has made changes to the open-source notices for Echo devices, and that this latest generation of the Echo Show 5 is not compatible with Netflix, which could point to Amazon’s new OS not yet reaching Netflix’s minimum threshold for support.
Amazon’s quiet shift to this new OS, which…
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