Amazon’s Alexa has been struggling to gain traction with developers and users alike. Once hailed as a revolutionary technology, the voice assistant has failed to yield the robust ecosystem of apps that Amazon had envisioned. The company had offered rewards programs to incentivize third-party developers to build Skills for Alexa, but these programs have now been discontinued.
According to a podcast from Skills developers Mark Tucker and Allen Firstenberg, dozens of third-party devs are contemplating whether it’s still worthwhile to develop Alexa skills. This suggests that there is little interest in the Skills incentives programs offered by Amazon. In fact, Bloomberg reported that “fewer than 1 percent of developers were using the soon-to-end programs,” per an Amazon spokesperson.
The top Alexa skills, in order, are: Jeopardy, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and Calm. These basic tasks are not exactly what one would call a futuristic list of must-have technological feats. For years, people have wondered when the “killer app” would come to catapult Alexa’s popularity, but now it seems like Alexa’s only hope at that killer use case is generative AI (a gamble filled with its own obstacles).
Third-party developers found it hard to make money off Skills, with a rare few pointing to making thousands of dollars at most and the vast majority not making anything. As a result, Amazon has reduced the amount of money it paid out to third-party developers, an anonymous source told Bloomberg. The source noted that the apps made by paid developers weren’t making the company much money.
Come 2024, the most desirable things you can make Alexa do remain basic tasks, like playing a song and apparently trivia games. Amazon hasn’t said it’s ending Skills, but with minimal incentive and little interest in developing new Skills, it seems that the platform is struggling to gain traction.
The writing on the wall is that Amazon doesn’t have the incentive or money to grow the Alexa app ecosystem it once imagined. Voice assistants largely became money pits, and the Alexa division has endured recent layoffs as it fights for survival and relevance. Meanwhile, Google Assistant stopped using third-party apps in 2022.
For now, developers can still make money off Skills with in-app purchases, but the incentive is minimal. Amazon’s notice to devs said, per Bloomberg, “Developers like you have and will play a critical role in the success of Alexa, and we appreciate your continued engagement.” However, it remains to be seen how “critical” Amazon treats those remaining developers once its generative AI chatbot is ready.