"And this is where we run into the first bit of craziness. Amazon decided that they should model the Alexa app store after the iPhone app store. So there is a certification process to get your app into the store. But think about the difference: you are not uploading a binary file to the Alexa app store, you are simply registering an URL. So Amazon has no real control over your software. You could get an app approved, and then you could swap out the app for any other app, and the Certification team at Amazon would never know. They don’t control your code. Your code is not in their store, so they have no control over what you do. And yet they modeled this process after the iPhone store, where Apple does have control over your app."
But that doesn't get at how crazily broken the certification system. You have to read the quotes from the other developers to understand that.
But the big deal that no one talks about is that Alexa is not compatible with EC2 backends, this is the most bizarre limitation I've ever seen, you can host An Alexa app on your own PC at home, but not on EC2.
Source on this? I know last time I played with it, they weren't doing SNI (in 2015, what?) but I've never heard of it not being able to hit EC2 IPs.
And at the end they gave up and said that yeah its something deep in the implementation and I should use something else.
I don't want to post the mails but anyone can try it out !
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.
But I have the mail conversation here (10 people at least and dozen of back and forth).
This was 2 months ago and I gave up on it for this specific reason.