Original Alexa skill will stop working on November 1, 2025

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Hi Will - I’ve seen your past posts on the topic and know that you knew this was coming, but now that Amazon has officially communicated the end of life notice, I thought I’d start a conversation about it.

Our family uses the original skill every day. It’s the way every TV in our house is turned on and off, and having it stop working in November is going to be rocky. I’ll start retraining the fam (including me) to use the Roomie voice control skill now… but just wanted to put my vote out there that I’d really like to see continued support for Alexa beyond November.

Thanks for what you do with Roomie, it’s a great product and I’ve been a user for ages now. Hoping we can find a way to keep things working with Alexa into the future.

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The “original” Alexa Skill is the one named “Roomie Remote”, and it is working fine, can be added for new users right now, and AFAIK will continue working fine for the foreseeable future. At the moment, it even works with Roomie 10 in development (in other words, we didn’t remove it). There are 4 people left using that skill at least as measured over the last week. The reason for that in my view as I’ve said for years is that Amazon completely nuked the user experience about 5 years ago for every Skill. Skills (and arguably Alexa) cratered in the years that followed. Now I barely know anyone that uses Alexa. For a while there, it was like having a microwave, a standard home feature. Because of various changes they made, Amazon Skills became near unusable (eg. reading out the entire company name of the vendor for every single skill interaction). So at that point you either migrated to some other voice solution, dropped voice, or you switched to the Smart Home Skill.

Around 2017, Amazon introduced a Smart Home Skill system, and we had briefly renamed ourselves to Simple Control, so we called that skill Simple Control. It is still named that. The Smart Home Skill API was very slimmed down, just intended really to turn on/off lights and shades and such. Not designed to control an AV system. We shoe-horned into that for simple use cases. Just recently, they removed all such skills for new users, and will remove them for even current users in November as you note. (and as covered in at least one other thread here recently)

Yes, they do have a new, totally different system now. We could indeed develop a totally new integration for that. There are some unknowns as to whether it is really just software development or may involve additional certification as the original process did indeed involve many months (I remember it as six extra months, but my memory may be foggy on that) of extra certification with a high cost. Perhaps the certification will just carry forward. One can hope.

Today, 23 people use that skill (this week). While I am often a sucker for little features with only a few users, we implement things often that I know this specific device or use case only has a very small user base, etc. But I can compare 23 versus every other device we support as an example. There are a bunch of random devices with fewer users than that, but safe to say 23 is in the bottom 5% of devices used.

So at the moment we’re continuing work on V10. That will continue uninterrupted until it is finished which is sometime this Fall. Roomie 10 does include the new iOS 26 Speech Analyzer support which is basically a quality upgrade with far-field voice support for the Roomie Voice Control we have. It is definitely an upgrade. If you can put an iPhone/iPad in your voice zones, it’s clearly superior, faster, etc than Alexa. It’s now 100% local and you don’t have to be right next to it.

Alexa’s advantage is cost because you can place it in more zones for lower cost. Which is a bit odd because Roomie is most often used to control an AV system where you would indeed normally have an iPad/iPhone, and the Smart Home Skill can’t realistically be used for control. That skill is used to turn system on, turn system off. It’s a very limited API (the new one has similar limitations). So let’s not imagine that it was ever great. It was not great and then they killed it. It’s not great even if we update to it. It essentially has 2 commands (see photo below). It does fill some needs for a small group. What would be truly great is extending Roomie Voice Control to HomePod. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet opened that up. That could change.

Anyway, to sum up, the business level motivation to update to a totally new system for Alexa (we do have a working Alexa Skill as noted) is pretty limited. The new system doesn’t improve the user experience, it’s simply Amazon changing everything. So it’s really just nostalgia to make it work just because for a small number of users. When roughly November rolls around, we should have time to analyze this in more detail. It’s possible that will result in an updated Smart Home Skill. I’m certainly not opposed to that. We support all kinds of things I don’t use. But it is unreasonable to treat this as a priority as in the big picture, Alexa isn’t that and hasn’t been part of the equation for most vendors for many years.

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Second vote for more Alexa support. I wouldn’t assume that lack of use indicates lack of interest. The existing skill(s) being unfriendly to use probably plays a role. Plenty of Alexa custom skills do not speak the company name. My understanding is you need to do something on your side to avoid that. Yes, they did break it on you. That is true. But it would be nice if you fixed it. I think the same tension exists with Alexa as with other features. You have a vision of how you want Roomie to work which is sometimes at odds with what Roomie users want. That’s your right. It’s your company. And, of course, anybody speaking up here might possibly have their post moderated away which leads to more of people not speaking up.

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Another thought. We used to use the Roomie Remote skill daily. Even for years after the “company name” bug. It stopped working for some reason about six months ago. Not sure why. Probably something on my side. But never bothered to reenable it. And there is no hard button remote support. So despite having Roomie I also have two hard button remotes in our main casual viewing room. Well four. Two for me. Two for my wife. I doubt that is the intended use case for Roomie but here we are. :slight_smile:

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Do you have evidence of this? This kind of seemingly false claim is why moderation exists imo. But if after all these years you have had the secret all along, please do tell. FWIW, here is an AI analysis of this from right now as I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.

It appears this change occurred around early 2021, when Amazon began adding a developer attribution message (something like “Getting Roomie Remote from Roomie Remote, Incorporated”) before handing off to custom skills during one-shot invocations (e.g., “Alexa, tell Roomie Remote to [command]”). This is an Alexa platform behavior, not something in your skill’s code or configuration—Amazon likely implemented it for transparency or legal reasons, and it affects many third-party custom skills similarly.

It’s not your fault, and there’s no direct way for you as the developer to disable or modify this system-level message through the Alexa Skills Kit or console settings. However, you can mitigate it for users by:

  • Promoting your Smart Home skill more prominently in documentation and app integrations, as it handles basic commands (e.g., “Alexa, turn on [activity]”) without any verbose prefix—just a confirmation ding.

  • Updating your skill’s welcome message and help intents to explain workarounds, such as opening the skill first for multi-command sessions (e.g., “Alexa, open Roomie Remote” followed by commands like “turn on TV” without re-invoking each time, keeping the session active).

  • Exploring name-free interaction support in your custom skill (via the developer console) to allow more implicit invocations, though this may not eliminate the message for all one-shot use cases.

If users are triggering via routines with custom actions, that could exacerbate it—suggest they test direct voice commands instead. You might also reach out to Amazon’s developer support for feedback on the attribution, but based on similar complaints in forums, it’s unlikely to change soon.

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I have currently the following (see screenshot) enabled, l use Alexa routines with custom names to call a sequence of events which will call roomie remote activity…for instance if l say “Alexa movie time”…it will simply run an activity “movie time” which is in the HT room in RR…so from 1st Nov, shall I assume the old simple control skill will disappear but the new RR still will be there correct ? And my functionality will not be impacted?

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Oops, I should have waited for response, but out of curiosity l disabled simple control skill in Alex and kept the roomie remote skill, my Alexa routines calling on RR activities is broken…and further OOPS, l cannot find Simple Control skill any more in Alexa

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You are correct. I was right as a general use case where you force the skill’s session to remain open. But I was wrong in the use case of Roomie because it makes no sense for a Roomie skill to maintain a session since they are generally one-off commands spaced far apart in time. The end game is to migrate to a Smart Home skill which you have already opined on. If you don’t have it set already it seems that setting shouldEndSession: false would help with multiple commands in a row. This is what I had read about a couple years ago but misunderstood it. As for moderation, this kind of discussion is healthy for the product. Everyone becomes educated, informed, and in the loop. People being wrong, being corrected, and - in this case - admitting they were wrong - is sunlight.

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The Roomie Remote (not Simple Control) skill stopped working for me about six months ago. I never investigated why even though we were using it daily. I’ll see if I can get it working again.

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It was working for me until l disabled it and can eatable it again…l have 20+ routines which calls various RR activities with a custom phrase…my favorite was Alexa Touchdown…and it will call a RR activity which is a sequence of flashing lights, increase the volume etc etc…from the Alexa routine l am in deep trouble…the new Alexa still is not that user friendly, also don’t know how to call an activity from custom Alexa routine?

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Sorry for the typo, l meant I cannot enable any more

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Did you try? Also curious if there is a way to invoke RR activities from Alexa rountines using the RR Skill as simple control skill will be/is gone

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I looked at my Alexa account and both the Simple Control and Roomie Remote skills were enabled. I disabled the Simple Control skill since I know it is being dropped. Roomie Remote skill still would not activate on voice prompt. I disabled the Roomie Remote skill, reenabled it, linked it to my account, and the skill showed up as expected. However, the skill will still not activate on voice command. I tried the normal ones like “Alexa, tell Roomie Remote to turn on AppleTV in Family Room” as well as the simplest one “Alexa, launch Roomie Remote.” Neither were recognized by Alexa. I was able to go into the Alexa app on iOS, click the “Launch” button, select an Alexa device in the UI, and then the skill would come alive on the selected device (i.e., welcome to Roomie remote . . .), and it would accept a command.

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The RR Alexa commands works but are too long and it’s hard to say…on the other hand Alexa Routines with small voice command/phrases works great, imagine just saying “alexa turn on living lights” vs telling “alexa tell roomie remote to turn on living lights in living room”

all that we need is RR Alexa skill to add routines calling activities

I have made the following request via feedback:

Summary:

Past : Simple Control Alexa Skill

All activities that are checked to yes, will show up in Alexa as on/off devices

Then we can call these in Alexa routines

Current : RR Alex skill

None of the activities work, when we try to say on off, it’s says server not responding

Request : Add feature to RR Alexa skill to enable activities to show as one/off devices in Alexa

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Just imagine if l have 3 rooms, Living, Bedroom and Home Theater and each has an Apple TV and in each room l have an activity ”Watch Apple TV” which turns on the ATV, Switches on the TVs and Projector in HT, turn on the AMP etc etc how cumbersome it will be to use RR Skills

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