Counting the Days: What Alexa+ Customers Experience While Alexa Skill Issues Remain Unresolved

Alexa+ customers do not see platform boundaries. When an Alexa Skill stops responding the way it used to, the product they chose simply no longer works, and the complaint lands with an Alexa developer who cannot change the behavior from their side. This post revisits the most pressing open issues affecting Alexa Skills customers in Alexa+, and counts how long each has remained unresolved.

The View From the Customer's Side#

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Also published on LinkedIn.

Customers do not see platform boundaries, and there is no reason they should. When the ocean sounds an Alexa+ customer falls asleep to every night stops responding to their invocation name, or a grocery item quietly lands on a list nobody checks, the Alexa+ customer experiences one thing: the product they chose no longer works. Many of these products are third-party Alexa Skills, and the Alexa developers behind them report receiving customer complaints every day about behavior they cannot change from their side of the Alexa+ platform.

The scale of this became visible when SkillDevs.io asked the Amazon Alexa Users Group on Facebook, a community of more than 50,000 members, to share their experiences with Alexa Skills in Alexa+. The thread drew numerous detailed replies, most of them long, personal accounts of what no longer works. Alexa Skills are still used by hundreds of thousands of Alexa+ customers every day and their experiences do not describe isolated edge cases.

This post revisits the most pressing open issues affecting Alexa Skills in Alexa+, shows the customer-side impact in their own words, and counts how long each has remained unresolved. Alexa-related accounts on social media and community forums often mirror the issues listed here and may provide additional context or user perspectives.

When Saying the Skill's Name Stops Working#

The most reported issue in the Alexa community is also the most fundamental one. Natural invocations, “play ocean sounds” or a one-shot request like “ask Big Sky for the weather”, are increasingly answered by Amazon's own offerings instead: the built-in weather answer, Amazon's own ambient sounds. Alexa+ customers report this happening even when they name the exact Alexa Skill they enabled, and in many cases pay for. Adding the word "skill" to the phrase, as in “open Big Sky skill”, typically still works though it is less natural and intuitive for Alexa+ customers to remember.

The behavior has been reported since Alexa+ began rolling out in early access on March 31, 2025, and is filed as an invocation consistency issue in the community tracker. Customer reviews of Sleep Jar Skills describe the receiving end (review 1, review 2):

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A related behavior deepens the confusion. Alexa+ sometimes responds that an Alexa Skill is not available at all, for example "Sorry, Ambient Visions is not available on this device", observed most often on Echo Show devices. Rephrasing the request with the "skill" suffix starts that same Alexa Skill on that same device, so the statement is not accurate. An Alexa+ customer who hears it draws the reasonable conclusion that the experience was discontinued.

That conclusion has consequences beyond a single failed request. In Amazon's own Digital and Device Forum, a customer describes that after upgrading to Alexa+, asking for the weather no longer opens Big Sky unless they explicitly say “open Big Sky”. On Reddit, customers petitioned to bring back a game Skill they believed had been removed; it had not been. And in many feedback emails Alexa developers receive every day, customers regularly explain that they had cancelled their paid subscription because they believed the Alexa Skill had been discontinued.

The same outcome also appears in public reviews, and the one-star rating attaches to the Alexa Skill, not to the invocation behavior that caused it:

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Amazon acknowledged the invocation issue on February 12, 2026:

Since then, the Alexa developer community has not observed visible progress. The essential point for Alexa+ customers: none of this can be addressed by the Alexa developer whose Skill is affected. Invocation routing happens on the platform side, before a Skill ever receives the request.

The Same Introduction Before Every Session#

Every time a customer starts an Alexa Skill in Alexa+, regardless of how often they have used it before, Alexa+ first reads the same preamble: "Here's {skill name}. Say Alexa, exit, to get back to Alexa+." The announcement is added by Amazon; Alexa developers cannot shorten, change, or remove it.

For sleep Skills, the timing works against the entire use case: a dark bedroom, someone already half asleep, and a spoken announcement before the sounds begin.

"when you're sleepy or trying to start the skill quietly and it keeps on talking, it defeats the purpose of the skill." (Amazon customer review)

Immersive Skills are affected differently: games and storytelling experiences use their own voices for atmosphere and identity, and the platform announcement now sits at the front of every session. Ziggybot, a screen-free learning robot for kids with Alexa built in, deliberately uses a gender-neutral voice for its games; each session now opens with Alexa's preamble instead, a confusing transition for a child.

The preamble is read even when an Alexa Skill answers with a single response and closes on its own, as Big Sky does with a weather report. The customer returns to Alexa+ automatically, so the exit instruction describes a step that never needs to happen. Ronen H., an Alexa+ customer from the Boston area, wrote:

"[...] I was finding it ironic that Alexa; when you tell Alexa to open Big Sky" she says "here's Big Sky—say Alexa exit to exit back to Alexa+" as if it doesn't happen by itself!"

Amazon acknowledged this issue on February 12, 2026 as well, and described a solution as already existing:

The preamble still plays on every Alexa Skill launch.

By Amazon's own statement, a solution for the preamble exists and is being evaluated. For the community, that makes it the most puzzling open issue, and the questions are correspondingly plain: what does evaluating an existing solution involve at this timescale, and if the solution is ready, what prevents it from reaching customers?

The AnyList Case#

This pattern does not come from Skill developers alone. AnyList, a widely used list and recipe app, documents the same behavior from its own support volume in a public support article, Problems with Alexa in Early 2026.

Starting in March 2026, the command “Alexa, tell AnyList to add apples” began failing at scale. Instead of reaching the AnyList Skill, the item is added to Amazon's own built-in shopping list. AnyList reported the behavior to Amazon on March 20, 2026. Amazon has said it is investigating; no timeline has been shared.

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AnyList explains to its customers that Skill invocation is entirely in Alexa's hands: a third-party developer only receives a command after Alexa has decided to route it to them. AnyList also reports that Amazon customer support has been redirecting affected customers back to AnyList for a fix that is not on AnyList's side: the complaint arrives at the party that cannot resolve it.

The “tell AnyList” phrasing itself goes back to an earlier platform change. In July 2024, Amazon shut down the API that let third-party apps sync with Alexa's built-in lists, which made the explicit Ask/Tell syntax necessary in the first place.

Whether it is sleep sounds, a weather forecast, or a grocery list, the reported pattern is identical: the customer names the product they chose and paid for, and the request is answered by Amazon's built-in offering instead.

When a Session Stops Mid-Puzzle#

The issues above concern how customers reach an Alexa Skill. A more recent set of reports concerns what happens after they do. In August 2026, customers in the Facebook community around Puzzle of the Day, a daily puzzle Alexa Skill used by thousands of Alexa+ customers every day, describe sessions that stop and restart mid-game.

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Community members read the simultaneous reports across unrelated games and Skills as pointing to a platform-level cause, and Alexa Skill session handling, like invocation routing, is not something Alexa developers control. In the same community, daily player counts declined from around 3,300 to around 2,600 over the same period.

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When sessions stop working smoothly, most customers do not file bug reports. They quietly stop coming back.

When Finding a Skill Becomes Work#

Voice is only one path to an Alexa Skill, and the others have narrowed as well. Our companion post When the Platform Joins the Competition documents the friction around discovery and access in detail. The short version for customers:

• In the Alexa+ mobile app, Alexa Skills sit inside the "Alexa+ Store", a section organized around invite-only "add-ons" built by Amazon-selected partners such as Uber and Yelp. The only Alexa Skill with spotlight placement is "Hey Disney!", published by Amazon's business partner Disney. Every other Skill is reached through a small "Browse Alexa Skills & Games" panel that occupies less than five percent of the storefront and appears only after scrolling; reaching an ambient sound Skill takes at least four steps.
• On Echo Show, the Widget Gallery's default "Popular widgets" view consists exclusively of Amazon-owned widgets. Third-party Skill widgets are still listed, but only after deliberate navigation into a category.
• On May 13, 2026, Amazon discontinued the Alexa Routines Kit, the most documented way to embed Alexa Skills into customer routines, with no successor announced. Amazon's own page noted that monthly engagement of customers using a Skill in a routine runs up to three times higher.

The access paths documented above differ materially for Amazon's first-party offerings and the invite-only add-ons built on the Alexa+ SDKs: they hold the spotlight placements in the same storefront, fill the default widget view, and are integrated directly into Alexa+ rather than reached through it. For customers, the result is simple. The products they already chose have become harder to find, harder to build routines around, and easier to replace without noticing.

No General Access to the Alexa+ SDKs#

A reasonable question at this point: why don't Alexa developers simply modernize their Skills for Alexa+? There is currently no generally available way to do so. On February 26, 2025, Amazon announced AI-native SDKs for Alexa+. Since then, the new SDKs remain in an early access program limited to selected partners. AnyList, and other impacted Alexa developers with large customer bases, applied for early access but weren't accepted as of this writing in August 2026.

When Customers Turn Alexa+ Off#

The strongest signal of how much friction has accumulated is which workaround the community actually recommends for Alexa Skill issues in Alexa+: turning Alexa+ off.

AnyList officially recommends the command “Alexa, disable Alexa+” to affected customers, noting in the same support article that the Ask/Tell commands work more reliably on original Alexa.

Amazon's own forum shows the same instinct. A February 2026 thread titled How do I go back to the "old" Alexa collects customers who wanted to revert within an hour of upgrading. Amazon staff in the thread confirm that reverting is possible on Echo devices, while noting that Alexa+ remains active in the Alexa app and on alexa.com.

In the Universal Devices smart home community, a March 26, 2026 thread titled Don't upgrade to Alexa+ !!! includes a customer reporting that Amazon support confirmed to them on a call that Alexa+ "does not play well with" some third-party skills.

TechRadar reports that Prime members are being upgraded to Alexa+ automatically, with no option to decline the upgrade itself, and that many customers revert to original Alexa afterward, citing missing functionality.

No one is well served by this. Customers lose functionality in either direction, Alexa developers lose users in either direction, and every customer who disables Alexa+ works against the platform transition Amazon is rolling out. Resolving the Alexa Skill experience inside Alexa+ is the one path where customers, Alexa developers, and Amazon all benefit.

What Customers Receive Instead#

Even when a rerouted request technically succeeds, customers receive a materially different, and in the examples below less feature-rich, experience than the product they requested. The built-in offerings that answer these requests are documented products, so the comparison does not need adjectives; the feature lists speak for themselves.

Weather: Big Sky and the built-in forecast

Big Sky documents hyper-local forecasts tied to the customer's street address, hourly detail up to 48 hours out, live worldwide radar, air quality, pollen, and barometric pressure data, custom extreme weather alerts, and up to four labeled saved locations (feature overview, FAQ). CNET listed it among its seven essential Alexa skills, PCMag and Wired have called it the best weather source on Alexa, and its data partner Tomorrow.io reports 4.6 stars across 8,000+ reviews with 100,000+ monthly active users (Tomorrow.io). Tom's Guide's comparison of Alexa's built-in forecast reaches a simple verdict: it answers the question, without approaching Big Sky's depth.

Customers who say “ask Big Sky for the weather” have already chosen the more capable product by name. The invocation issue means that request does not reliably reach it.

Lists: AnyList and the built-in shopping list

AnyList holds a 4.9 star rating across roughly 75,000 App Store ratings and documents real-time shared household lists, automatic category sorting matched to the customer's store layout, recipe import, meal planning, and notes and photos per item. The built-in Alexa list is what customers were directed toward when the list API was shut down in July 2024, and the failure mode is silent. A customer essay documents what that looks like at home: the old command produces no error, Alexa confirms the item was added, and the items "end up on the Alexa list without anyone noticing". The household discovers what is missing at the store.

Sleep and ambient sounds: Sleep Jar and Amazon's own sounds

Sleep Jar, which describes itself as trusted by millions of Alexa customers, documents more than 200 sounds across its Skills, sound mixing with over 5,000 combinations, guided meditations and stories, custom sleep timers, and 10-hour gapless loops (Ambient Sounds listing, FAQ). A customer review makes the quality comparison directly:

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Many of these customers pay for what they chose: Sleep Jar Premium, Big Sky Premium, and AnyList Complete are paid subscriptions. When an invocation is rerouted, the customer keeps paying for a product their request no longer reaches, and receives a less feature-rich substitute instead.

Ambient visuals

The ambient video comparison on Echo Show is documented in our companion post, When the Platform Joins the Competition: The third-party Alexa Skill called Ambient Visions alone provides over 1,300 ambient video backdrops with seamless loops up to twelve hours, while Amazon Audio currently holds a limited set, such as a fireplace or a beach view. In the ambient category, “play” and “start” phrases now route to Amazon Audio with only a handful of exceptions, while "open" and "launch" still reach the Skills, and active use of ambient Skills has fallen roughly 70% across the Alexa+ rollout window.

Games: no replacement at all

Games make the comparison simplest, because there is nothing to compare. Games and trivia form one of the largest categories in the Alexa Skills catalog, built entirely by Alexa developers, and Amazon offers no first-party gaming replacement on Alexa+ as of this writing. In every category above, a rerouted request at least lands somewhere. When a game Skill cannot be reached, the Alexa+ customer is left with no game at all.

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The reliability question

There is one more dimension to the substitution: how reliably the replacement itself performs. In January 2026, Business Insider reported on an internal Slack channel of more than 6,400 Amazon employees who beta tested Alexa+, where dozens described everyday tasks that "quickly broke down", and one called the behavior "unbearably erratic" (coverage via Yahoo Tech). Amazon acknowledged the reporting and noted that the tested build predated the public release.

The assessment has since moved from internal channels to the tech press. In August 2026, veteran technology journalist David Pogue published a review titled Alexa+ is a buggy embarrassment, reporting that roughly half of the 135 tasks he tested did not complete successfully and describing paying customers as "unwitting, unpaid beta testers".

The observable result is that some requests for mature, customer-chosen Alexa Skills are instead being routed to built-in experiences whose reliability Amazon's own testers and independent reviewers have raised questions about. That is why "just use the built-in version" does not answer what Alexa+ customers are reporting. Restoring reliable Alexa Skill invocation would.

We Are in This Together#

This is where the open issues stand, counted in days from their documented anchor dates:

SkillDevs.io exists because Alexa+ customers and Alexa developers are experiencing the same issues from two sides of the same platform. The community keeps doing the two things it can do: documenting these issues carefully, and encouraging engagement on the ones with the widest customer impact.

If you are an Alexa+ customer: when an Alexa Skill invocation does not work, say “Alexa, feedback” right afterward so diagnostic information reaches Amazon (the same step AnyList recommends to its customers). To share your experience, join the community discussion on Facebook.

If you are an Alexa developer: report your observations and upvote the issues that affect your customers in the community issue tracker. The more precisely these issues are documented, the easier they are to act on.

The SkillDevs.io community remains ready to engage with Amazon, including its leadership, on solutions that make the Alexa+ experience better for the customers who use Alexa Skills every day. That offer stands as it has from the beginning: we will share what we observe, test what changes, and help validate fixes across devices and Alexa Skills. The counters on this page will keep running until the issues they track are resolved, and we will keep updating them, documenting new reports, and ensuring customer experiences receive the attention they deserve. Everyone with an interest in making Alexa+ a better product, inside Amazon or outside, benefits from the same outcome: Alexa Skills that customers can reach, use, and trust again.

This post documents customer reports and community observations about Alexa Skills in Alexa+. Quotes and screenshots are reproduced verbatim, with links to public sources where available. Day counters are computed from documented dates each time the page loads.