Voicebot data shows Alexa skills in the US grew to 56,750 in 2018, up 120% YoY; Amazon releases year-end list of Alexa's “top” skills made up of games and more
Amazon Alexa had a good year as a developer platform - at least in terms of the number of voice apps being built for Alexa …
Context & Ripple Effects
Voicebot's year-end count puts the US Alexa skill catalog at 56,750, double what it was a year earlier, and Amazon's own top-skills list answers the obvious follow-up question — what people actually use — with a roster dominated by games. That split between exploding supply and concentrated engagement is an old platform story: back when Nielsen ranked 2016's top apps by monthly uniques, Amazon's mobile app cracked the top ten on reach even as long-tail catalogs ballooned.
The same supply-side dynamic keeps recurring across platforms — most recently in Appfigures' finding that app releases surged 60% YoY, attributed to cheaper production via AI coding tools — which makes the 2018 skill boom an early instance of catalog growth outrunning attention.
First-order effects
- Skill developers now compete for visibility inside a catalog that doubled in twelve months, making Amazon's curated top-skills list — weighted toward games — the de facto discovery channel rather than search or browse.
- Amazon gains a headline metric (56,750 skills, +120%) it can cite to lock in developers and device buyers, while bearing the cost of surfacing quality in a flood of low-usage entries.
Second-order effects
- As Amazon later pushes upgrades like making Alexa+ free on compatible Fire TV devices regardless of Prime membership, the installed base skills compete over grows — raising the stakes of its curation choices for whoever ranks.
- Rival voice and app platforms face pressure to publish their own developer-supply numbers and top-app lists, turning catalog size into a competitive talking point the way monthly-uniques rankings did for mobile.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, voice platforms consolidate around app-store economics: supply metrics inflate while discovery, revenue, and usage concentrate in a handful of curated hits, leaving the long tail of skills as shelfware.
- The recurring cycle — from Nielsen's 2016 app rankings to Appfigures' AI-assisted release surge — points toward platform gatekeepers gaining durable power over distribution wherever creation gets cheap enough to flood the catalog.
The trend: Voice platforms are replaying app-store economics, where developer-supply counts balloon faster than user attention and the platform's curated rankings become the real distribution bottleneck.