Amazon acts likes its doing us a big favor by allowing us to develop for the Alexa platform

Eric, A.K.A Galactoise, has more to say about the broken certification process that Amazon offers for Alexa:

But the corollary is that in granting them this capability we have also granted them carte blanche to decimate our interface, and we would’ve had no idea that it was happening if it weren’t for the fact that we were slogging through a daily manual test process. If we caught them breaking us, we have to assume that they’ve broken other skills as well and nobody was the wiser.

This is simply not a sustainable model. To bring things full circle, I think the takeaway is that this is not a two-way street between the Alexa team and the development community. They’ve designed a paradigm wherein we, as developers, are not able to make decisions about the best way to implement our own code, while at the same time they’ve undertaken a weirdly silent and proprietary approach that doesn’t allow us to account for the changes they force on us.

It feels very much as if they don’t actually want us there – as if they feel they are doing us a service by opening up for development, but that it’s a service they absolutely disdain.

It’s not hard to see the poison seeping into their new Alexa ecosystem day by day, and that’s a real shame.