Monthly Progress Updates

A running journal of community progress on open Alexa Skills issues, sent monthly to Amazon and published here in the same form for transparency. Latest entry on top.

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This post is a running journal of community progress on open issues affecting Alexa Skills in Alexa+, tracked in the community issue tracker. Once a month, the community compiles observable progress (or the absence of it) on each tracked item, shares the report directly with Amazon leadership, and publishes the same report here. The aim is a steady, predictable cadence of communication, regardless of whether responses are received.

September 2, 2026#

TL;DR. Two issues first reported in July were resolved: the In-Skill Purchase (ISP) entitlement and offer delivery regressions, and the APLA reliability issue, the latter traced with diagnostic work contributed by an Alexa developer. Amazon published further Alexa+ add-on documentation covering monetization, with access to the underlying features still invite-only.

Summary

• ISP entitlement and offer delivery. Alexa developers continued to report the entitlement lookup and offer delivery issues first raised in July. In early August the community published a request to Amazon for clarification and a timeline for resolution. Roughly two weeks later, Amazon's Alexa+ chief evangelist reported the issues as resolved. No further reports have been filed since.

• APLA reliability. Reports of intermittent APLA errors continued from July. DeLonn Crosby, co-founder and CEO of SayKid, whose game Alexa Skills were affected, carried out detailed troubleshooting and shared the resulting data. Amazon then reported the cause identified and a fix scheduled. No further reports have been filed since.

• Customer feedback collection. Alexa developers began collecting and sharing the Alexa+ customer feedback they receive, much of it arriving daily. A first set of these accounts appears in Counting the Days, which documents the customer-side impact of the Alexa Skills issues that remain open. These are voluntary public reports. They show what has been reported, not how common it is.
• Alexa+ add-on documentation. At the end of August, Amazon published further Alexa+ add-on documentation covering monetization. Access to the related features remains invite-only and is not available to Alexa Skills developers.

Both resolutions this month followed direct exchanges between Alexa developers and Amazon, one of them opened by data an affected developer collected and shared. The community remains open to dialogue on the issues that are still open.

August 3, 2026#

TL;DR. No official updates or observable improvements on the open Alexa Skills issues, with three new reports from the community covering UK access, APLA reliability, and In-Skill Purchase (ISP) entitlement and offer delivery. Amazon published the first public developer documentation for Alexa+ add-ons following an invite-only partner summit in Seattle, and a direct conversation between Amazon's Alexa+ chief evangelist and the community lead took place at the end of the month.

Summary

• Open issues. No official updates and no observable improvements were recorded on the issues tracked in the GitHub issue tracker, or on the broader questions the community has raised.
• UK access. Alexa developers in the UK reported issues accessing and using their Alexa Skills. Access was restored within days. An informal comment from an Amazon employee indicated the issue had been addressed. No root cause has been published.
• APLA reliability. Alexa developers reported that Alexa Presentation Language for Audio (APLA), used to compose richer audio responses, was returning errors intermittently at elevated rates. Amazon technical support acknowledged the reports and indicated that work was underway. The community began tracking it as issue 16.
• ISP entitlement and offer delivery. From mid-July, several new reports described ISP issues affecting entitlement lookup and offer delivery: customers could not be presented with an offer, or an existing entitlement was absent from API responses, which returns a paying customer to the free tier. An informal update from Amazon indicated that some offer-screen issues had been addressed for specific Alexa Skills. No further detail was shared.
• Game sessions ending mid-play. Alexa developers of game Alexa Skills reported an increase in customer reports of sessions ending before the game was finished. The customer-side account is documented in Counting the Days.
• Alexa+ partner summit. Amazon hosted an invite-only Alexa+ partner summit in Seattle. The community is not aware of any Alexa Skills developers receiving an invitation. A comment from an Alexa developer on a LinkedIn post about the event recorded more than 80,000 impressions.
• Alexa+ add-on documentation. Alongside the summit, Amazon published developer documentation for Alexa+ add-ons, the first public technical detail on how add-ons are built. Access to the SDK and tooling remains invite-only, no timeline has been shared for when Alexa Skills developers will be able to build on it, and no channel has been available to raise questions about the documentation.
• Direct conversation with Amazon. At the end of July, Amazon's Alexa+ chief evangelist and SkillDevs community lead Kay Lerch spoke directly. The conversation was constructive, and Amazon reaffirmed its intent to continue working on improvements.

The community remains open to dialogue and anticipates near-term progress on these issues.

June 3, 2026#

TL;DR. No observable progress on the 12 open Skill issues over the past month. In-Skill Purchase (ISP) conversion across Skills remains at its lowest level since the checkout flow updates, and hand-back rates from the Amazon-owned purchase flow into Skills fell to all-time lows, pointing to added checkout friction that affects Skill retention as well as conversion. Amazon announced a checkout-screen bugfix on May 7; community testing observed no improvement, and test results including screen recordings were shared with Amazon. The GameOn SDK (API, developer console, and documentation pages) appears to be available again after a reported multi-day outage, without official confirmation or explanation. SkillDevs.io published a new post, When the Platform Joins the Competition.

Summary

• Open issues. The community is still tracking 12 open issues on the GitHub issue tracker, none of which have official updates or observable improvements over the past month.
• ISP conversion and retention. Conversion across affected Skills remains at its lowest level since the checkout flow updates documented earlier this year. A further signal emerged over the past month: hand-back rates from the Amazon-owned purchase flow into Skills fell to all-time lows. Fewer customers who enter the purchase flow return to the Skill they were using, which points to added friction on the checkout screens that affects Skill retention, not only conversion. The companion post on the ISP offer screen has the detailed timeline and charts.
• Checkout bugfix. On May 7, Amazon announced a bugfix release for the checkout screen. After further testing, the community could not observe any improvement to the issues previously reported. The community shared its test results with Amazon, including screen recordings, showing that the technical issues on the ISP checkout screen persist. The offer screen issue and the additional confirmation steps issue remain open.
• New analysis post. In the past month, SkillDevs.io published When the Platform Joins the Competition (also on LinkedIn), which examines the situation around Amazon Audio and the ongoing friction surrounding Alexa Skills in Alexa+. It places the discovery, invocation, retention, and monetization conditions tracked in this journal in the broader context of first-party and third-party offerings sharing the same platform.
• GameOn SDK. The GameOn SDK, including its API, developer console, and documentation pages, appears to be available again following what has been described as a multi-day outage. Amazon has not published confirmation of the outage or an explanation. Two questions remain open from the community's perspective: how critical service disruptions of this kind appear to go unsurfaced by internal monitoring, and how a single incident affecting SDK infrastructure extends to associated web interfaces such as the developer console alongside CMS-hosted documentation pages. GameOn affects scores, leaderboards, and persistent state for game Skills, so its reliability matters to a large part of the catalog.

Enlarge

The community remains open to dialogue and anticipates near-term progress on these issues.

May 4, 2026#

TL;DR. 12 open Skill issues with no official updates or observable improvements. Recent changes further increased checkout friction, turning it from a 1-step into a 3-step process, with a ~50% week-over-week drop in conversion for Skills. The impact appears to affect first-party digital checkout on Alexa+ as well (Music, Photos, Audible).

Summary

• Open issues. The community is currently tracking 12 open issues on the GitHub issue tracker, none of which have official updates or observable improvements since initial reporting four months ago. Key items include the removal of the Alexa preamble on Skill launch, the deprecation of the Alexa Routines Kit (ARK), invocation reliability without the "skill" suffix, and critical regressions in the In-Skill Purchase (ISP) flow.
• ISP checkout. Recent ISP changes increased checkout from a 1-step to a 3-step confirmation across Alexa+, with an observed ~50% week-over-week drop in offer conversion for Skills. The impact appears to extend beyond third-party Skills to first-party digital services as well (Amazon Music, Photos, Audible). A detailed account of the checkout regressions is available in our companion post on the ISP offer screen.
• External visibility. A recent SkillDevs.io post, A Signal of a Larger Pattern in the Alexa Ecosystem (also published on LinkedIn), has gained external visibility and outlines the cumulative impact on third-party confidence and investment in Alexa+. The post has driven increased attention to these issues across the developer community.

Amazon's statement. In response to inquiries about the recent ISP changes, Amazon shared the following statement on May 5, 2026:

The community remains open to dialogue and anticipates near-term progress on these issues.

If you build Alexa Skills, your observations help strengthen this picture. Read and upvote the issues already filed, add your own, or share this post with others in your network. New entries are added to this journal each month.