HN user
Follow-up, this post getting love on HN seems to have helped us get their attention. We had a conference call with them where we were able to work through a lot of the issues we were facing:
http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/the-certification-saga-problem...
That may be true, but to be clear, I love the things Amazon produces in general - I just take specific issue with this one team over the last couple months. I can't speak for the other two people cited in the story, but for my part I can say that I absolutely didn't start a rant in Amazon's developer community for the purpose of someone else blogging about it and getting karma on HN.
I'm more interested in the frankly absurd notion that there is this software giant who is supposedly super good at web services, yet is incapable of doing the simplest possible things to sustain its development community. It's an incredible dichotomy - the Mighty Amazon of Prime Now Shipping vs. the Meek Amazon of "How Do We Certify Like Apple?" - but it's one that needs to go away.
It's scant on the details of the rejection because it wasn't his skill that got rejected. His article is specifically about the uproar among the community at the terrible job they're doing.
As happenstance would have it, though, it was MY skill that got rejected that started the forum thread that he pulled quotes from. If you are actually interested in more details, I can provide them, but the point wasn't really about my specific rejection - it was that this has been an ongoing and growing pattern recently across the entire development community. These issues are well documented and individually enumerated (so as to not just be anecdotal, per your concern) on the Amazon developer forums, if that is what you're looking for.
Regardless, the title may be emotionally driven, but it is not sensationalist. They (the Alexa team) literally do not have a good understanding of how to run this app store. I think the context missing here is that we don't mean that in the sense of "we're angry because our opinion does not match Amazon's". We mean that in the sense that we (and every time I say "we" here I mean the Alexa developer community) has had to hand hold the Alexa team into doing even the most basic things just to get the skill "store" where it is now, because it has not been a focus of theirs.
The original title is correct in the literal sense - it is not an embellishment. There is ample evidence to support this assertion, and all of it is accessible in the Amazon Developer Forums. If you would like to make the claim that the OP is editorializing, the burden of proof is on you to show that Amazon does understand how to properly run this app store. Good luck with that, though.
Put the original title back.
The weird thing about the title change is that the new one isn't even true - they've been running the Kindle app store for quite a while...
The user "dang" posted further down in the comments saying that he changed it because the title was "over the top", which didn't seem like a good reason to me (but then again, I'm not a moderator). I can understand the desire to avoid sensationalism, especially if the belief is that this anger over third party Alexa skills is only about the problem in the article. In reality, though, this is just one of many issues that currently has the community up in arms, so I don't think the original title was as hyperbolic as they believed...
Man, that's weird, I wonder what was different between our implementations. Our original POCs were about 4 months ago, and they were on EC2 at the time. We had plenty of other technical issues (don't get me started on SSL), but running on EC2 was never one of them.
That said, I'm curious how you managed to get an email conversation going with the team - the whole crux of the original article by Lawrence (and the forum thread which it cites) is that there's no way to have a direct conversation with anyone representing Alexa, so certification is a crapshoot.
I'm the same "Galactoise" quoted in the original story. I'm really happy to see the conversation that cropped up here, about the lack of value around trying to certify a mutable black box, and hopefully the power of HN is enough to get some action from the Alexa team.
I also wanted to pass along a blog post I threw together on the topic. http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/on-the-topic-of-certification
It's pretty long, but the tldr is as follows: We're all worked up about this idea of having to build switches into our code to meet arbitrary certification guidelines, only to turn them off the moment we are live in prod. It's worth noting, though, that Amazon pulls these sort of antics (bait-n-switches) on us regularly and without remorse, and that there's really no way we can even know it happened. This is arguably even more destructive to the quality of our products than trying to build for a set of capricious guidelines.
The solution is to not try to verify the content of a rest service.
There is a lot of good that Amazon can do with their certification process - things like helping a developer figure out appropriate example phrases, or making sure that all of the appropriate fields are filled in (like providing a thumbnail for the appstore, etc).
Their weird pedantism about an arbitrary set of rules, however, serves only to scare off those of us who are actually interested in advancing the default user experience. Out of the box experimentation is frowned upon, and the result is that they're basically handing the ecosystem to the shovelware creators.
This is incorrect - you can absolutely host in EC2. Our two skills are running off of a single EC2 micro instance.
There is one really weird thing where you can't use US West to do an Amazon Lambda passthrough to your server, but as far as I know EC2 instances in any region should work for Alexa to call out to.