Amazon says there are now 40K Alexa Skills, up from 25K in December and 10K in February 2017, and makes in-skill purchases generally available in the US
Harry McCracken / Fast Company :
Context & Ripple Effects
The skills catalog has been Amazon's headline metric for over a year: just past 7K skills in January 2017, then [[a:920360|over 15K by mid-2017, when Voicebot counted Google Home at 378 voice apps and Cortana at 65]]. By December, Voicebot's 25K tally flagged that growth was slowing — which makes today's 40K announcement a reacceleration claim, paired for the first time with a real business model as in-skill purchases go generally available in the US.
The pairing matters because the catalog number alone was becoming an empty stat; attaching payments turns the skill store into something developers can price against, ahead of whatever rivals answer with.
First-order effects
- US skill developers can now charge inside their Alexa skills rather than relying on Amazon's incentives or external funnels, making the 40K catalog a potential storefront instead of a demo library.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's head start on voice-app payments pressures Google and Microsoft to build equivalent monetization rails for Home and Cortana, where app counts remain orders of magnitude smaller per Voicebot's counts.
- Skill discovery economics shift toward paid acquisition and games — the category that dominates Amazon's own year-end top-skills list once Voicebot logs the catalog at 56,750 entering 2019.
Third-order effects
- If in-skill purchasing holds, voice platforms consolidate around a take-rate model like mobile app stores, with Amazon positioned as first mover and third-party measurement firms such as Voicebot becoming the de facto auditors of platform claims.
The trend: Voice assistants are moving from free-utility catalogs to commerce-enabled app-store economies, with Amazon converting its skills-scale lead into developer monetization first.