Performing Your Live Skill Update

You have just published your custom skill on the Amazon skills store and you would like to update it? No problem! This blog post will guide you step by step through the process. The developer console offers you all the resources needed to easily perform all desired updates to your skill after it was published.

As soon as your custom skill is reviewed and accepted by our certification team, you will notice in the main interface of your developer console that it has been marked “Live” and a green dot appeared near its name. At the same time, you will observe that a second version of your skill is available under the live one, marked with “In dev” and a blue dot. The “In dev” - development version - it is an automatically generated duplicate by our system and it contains the exact parameters available before your skill is published for the first time.

In the following image you can see the live version of the skill (green dot) and the development version of the same skill below it (blue dot).

If you click on the “Live” version of your skill you will be able to see all its analytics and parameters, like the skill’s name, invocation name, availability etc., but you will notice that all fields are greyed-out and non-editable. This is because all the updates of a live skill must be performed using the development version (In dev).

You may click directly on the skill’s name corresponding to the development version or you may select “Edit” from the drop down menu, as shown below. This way you will be able to enter the skill’s operational panel.

By entering the development version you can for example change your skill’s logo image, update your skill’s public name or description, add new language locales to it or change availability by country.

After you have applied the desired changes, you should navigate to the “Certification” tab and submit the modified version for review.

When you submit your new version for certification, both versions remain in your list until the new version is certified. The live version will be available as before, without any disruption for the users. Once the new version is certified, it becomes live and replaces the previous live version. After certification, the existing users will have the latest version of your skill and an updated development version will be created automatically in the developer console so that you can continue making updates to your skill with future versions.

You may of course repeat this process for as many times as you consider necessary to update your skill. Once you will start developing more skills, you should follow the same procedure for updating them, as every published skill will have its corresponding development version.

The same procedure applies if your skill was removed at some point and you decide later to have it again live on our store. Instead of the live version, a removed one (marked with a grey dot) will be available, also non-editable. You may then edit the development one and re-submit your skill for certification.