Amazon Alexa

Review by eFreeware

Amazon Alexa is the free companion app from Amazon Mobile LLC for people who own, or plan to own, Alexa-enabled hardware. It is where devices get set up, where smart home gear is controlled, and where the everyday business of lists, timers and music lives. It has been on Google Play since November 2014 and sits past 100 million installs with a 4.1 average from more than 5.7 million ratings, which tells you it is less an optional extra than the default way into Amazon's voice ecosystem.

The reason to consider it is straightforward: without it, an Echo speaker or a compatible light, lock or thermostat is harder to bring into service and harder to manage once it is running. With it, those jobs are gathered in one place, and the app doubles as a remote for the house when you are away from it. If your home already leans on Alexa, this is the piece that ties the hardware together.

Setting up devices and keeping the house in order

The core job is setup and management. The app suits people who want to set up Alexa devices on their network and control compatible smart lights, locks and thermostats from home or away. That remote angle matters more than it first appears: a thermostat you can nudge from a different room, or a lock you can confirm is shut, is the sort of thing that makes the app worth keeping on the home screen.

Routines take that further. They let you automate several smart home devices as one action rather than adjusting each separately, which suits a household that has accumulated a few bulbs, plugs or locks and wants them to behave together. The developer's recent redesign puts smart home controls, Echo management and other features on the Home page, with a Devices page offering customizable views, so the controls you reach for most are meant to sit closer to the surface.

What I like about this arrangement is that it scales with the hardware you own. Start with one speaker and the app is a setup tool. Add lights, a lock and a thermostat and it becomes the control panel. The catch is the same one that applies to any hub-style app: its usefulness tracks how much compatible hardware you have.

Music, books and multi-room audio

For listening, the app connects to services including Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn and iHeartRadio. You pick a song or playlist in the app and it plays on your Alexa-enabled devices rather than through your phone, which is the sensible division of labor for a speaker sitting in a kitchen or living room.

Speaker groups are the feature I would expect people to get the most out of once they own more than one Echo. Grouping compatible devices lets the same music play across rooms at once, so a track can follow you from the kitchen to the hallway without reaching for anything. It is the sort of capability that is easy to ignore when you have a single speaker and hard to give up once you have three.

The home feed also picks up where you left off with recently played music and books, alongside lists and shopping. That is a small convenience, but it is the kind that makes an app feel like it remembers what you were doing rather than starting from a blank screen each time.

Lists, news and talking to the house

The daily utility side is broader than it sounds. Shopping and to-do lists can be viewed and edited on the go, so an item added at the store is waiting at home and vice versa. The same section covers weather and news updates, plus timers and alarms, which is the unglamorous half of the app and probably the half you will touch most often.

Drop In turns compatible Echo devices into a two-way intercom you can reach from the app, which is genuinely useful in a large house or for checking in on a room where someone is working. Calls and messages to supported Alexa-enabled devices are also available at no additional cost, so reaching another room or another person does not require a separate service.

The more you use Alexa, the more it adapts to your voice, vocabulary and preferences, according to the developer. The app also surfaces personalized feature recommendations and recommended skills you can enable, and the home feed gathers those suggestions in one place. I would treat the recommendations as a discovery aid rather than a reason to install on their own.

What you need before it does anything

This is not an app that stands alone. It is built to set up and manage Alexa-enabled devices, and most of what makes it interesting assumes you have at least one, plus compatible smart lights, locks or thermostats if you want the control features to mean anything.

Setup itself is described as part of the app's job rather than a separate step, and the recent redesign is aimed at making devices and features quicker to reach, with the Home and Devices pages doing most of that work. Beyond that, the practical requirement is simply that your devices are Alexa-enabled and compatible with the features you care about.

Who the Alexa app makes sense for

The clearest fit is a household that already runs on Echo speakers, or one that is about to. If you have compatible lights, locks or thermostats, the app is where they get set up and where you check on them when you are out. Add routines and the house starts behaving as a system rather than a collection of gadgets.

Music listeners with more than one Echo are the second group I would point to. Speaker groups and the ability to send a playlist to the hardware instead of the phone are the features that justify keeping the app installed once setup is done. People who keep shopping and to-do lists will find the on-the-go editing quietly useful, particularly when the list has to be shared with someone else in the house.

The app is free, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases, so there is no cost question to weigh. The trade-off is scope: it is a companion for Amazon's hardware, and its value rises and falls with how much of that hardware you own.

A companion worth installing if you own the hardware

My recommendation depends almost entirely on one question: do you have Alexa-enabled devices? If you do, the app is close to obligatory. It handles setup, remote control of compatible smart home gear, routines, music routing and the small daily jobs of lists, timers, weather and news. The redesign puts those controls within easier reach, and the install base and rating suggest a lot of people have settled into it as a habit.

If you do not own any of that hardware, there is little here to hold your attention, and no amount of skill recommendations will change that. The app is best understood as the control layer for a set of devices rather than a standalone destination. For Echo households, it is the sensible first install; for everyone else, it is a preview of hardware you have not bought yet.

What's new in version 2.2.718227.0

Our new design has made it easier to access your favorite features and devices. The Home page offers quick access to smart home controls, Echo management, and numerous Alexa features. The Devices page offers customizable views to manage your devices.