The Echo is ready for a killer app – 5 ways Amazon can help developers build it

That's interesting indeed, thanks for sharing.

If you're interested in the genre, "Hunt the Yeti" is a new adventure game that was released a few days ago and seems to be well received based on the reviews (I have not yet played it).

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/4x2jfc/introduc...

I hope they don't all end up being locked into the Echo platform - there's no reason such games couldn't work just as well on a smartphone. Although I suppose Amazon's platform may boost a better and easier-to-use speech recognition engine.

There are lots of apps that connect to established third parties that Amazon is likely not to build, e.g., home automation with SmartThings, music with Pandora. And also several silly but fun things that they may not wish to maintain, e.g., jeopardy game or the fart app.

But yeah, I don't blame you for being cautious of their intentions. Developers have been burned in the past on these big platforms (e.g., Twitter [1]), but I have hope that they will realize the pie is bigger if they make their platform attractive to 3rd party devs.

[1] http://nordicapis.com/twitter-10-year-struggle-with-develope...