Amazon Announces Subscriptions for Alexa Skills

Smartphones may have gotten predictable and boringly mature, which perhaps explains why it has become more or less a sideshow for Google after having set high benchmarks with its Pixel phone last year and is busy plotting new ways to get inside every aspect of your life centered around its AI-focussed Google Assistant. So is the case with Amazon, which built Alexa as the Trojan horse to get around the Android/iOS ecosystem barrier and has fast become the popular interface for all sorts of communication on smart Internet of Things devices. Taken in this context, Amazon's new strategy of letting third-party skill developers implement their own ways of monetising voice apps through monthly subscriptions makes perfect sense. If Apple and Google's app stores can do it for third-party smartphone apps, why not Amazon?

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