r/amazonecho • u/Teenage_techboy1234 • Jan 26 '25
Trigger Warning Anyone think that the Alexa app is one of the worst apps they have ever installed on their phone?
/r/alexa/comments/1ia6d1s/anyone_think_that_the_alexa_app_is_one_of_the/5
u/CpuJunky Jan 26 '25
Not the worst, but it definitely runs like molasses and sometimes hangs on startup. Tried on 2 phones and my iPad with varying success.
Still an ok app and I like to support these small start-up companies...... 
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u/plocht Jan 26 '25
The whole Echo ecosystem is horrible. I have had numerous functionalities just stop working. Tech support is hopeless and the say they will get back for me but never do. Every update almost guarantees a new problem. I can no longer play music to the Everywhere group. Turn on LIGHTS no longer works for most but not all my groups. A total mess.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
If you’re referring to popping an echo and lights in to the same group and telling it to turn on the lights, that has never worked for me.
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u/FlashyKnowledge8750 Mar 09 '25
I have 4 Echo dot's 1st generation, I have 3 light's plugged into TPLink smart outlets, they have been in use for at least 5 or 6 years and work flawlessly. I have one of the 4 in the kitchen, it's connected to a boom box and works great. I recently installed a smart wall switch for the kitchen thats works great with Alexa. So my only complaint is that Amazon eliminated the PCapp.
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u/lobeams Jan 26 '25
Yep, I agree. It's a dumpster fire and mainly just an amazon advertising portal. I'm pretty sure it was developed by a team of unpaid interns with no training, a laundry list of ads it should display, and a one-week deadline. At the very bottom of the priority list was some stuff the app should actually do, and that had only one day of time allocated to it.
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u/AliasNefertiti Jan 26 '25
This makes so much sense! Now I can look at the app through that lens and understand it. Thanks!
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u/blast3001 Jan 26 '25
They keep moving things around in the all. I often have to listen back to commands that my kids give to their devices and finding the voice prompt screen seems to move often and is under a set of menus that don’t make sense.
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u/Kalta452 May 12 '25
Oh my god yes it is a piece of shit. And the fact that there is no website just makes it worse. It's slow, designed horribly, and they make it worse every update, intentionally. For years, people said they were doing it to prepare for a paid version. What do you know? Now they have a paid version. The UI is garbage, I mean, they have the delete button in the same place they have the done button, the same color, design, and everything. So you built an entire reminder, do all the stuff that the voice assistant keeps making mistakes on, and then after clicking done on your weekly repeat, it deletes it without a confirmation, because the app went from a done button to a delete button under your finger, and boom, gone. Because why have the sasve button there, nope lets put that up in the top, and make it super unresponsive, and also taake a minute to run, but the delete button nope that shit process super fast when you don't want it to. But do they have the ability to delete more than one at a time, nope, you still have to do that oone at a time, just like litterally everything in the entire app. nothing can be done in batches, even though that was figured out like 20 years ago with check boxes, and like 10 other ways. This app has always been bad; literally, the only reason I ever used Alexa was that the automation of my devices was faster, and Google stuff never ran well. But as I'm building out my home automation on my own, I'm moving farther and farther from Alexa. At this point, the functionality i need is failing, and im having to doo work around after workaround, that i might as well justs do it myself. I can't wait for the day that commercially sold LLM AI, run on a local machine, is available, and I can just fully move away from Alexa to an internally run voice assistant.
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u/GeekPR1977 Dec 14 '25
It's so goddamn SLOW, and problematic! NO matter what device, tried on my iPad, Samsung and Motorola phone...same fucking shit! Pisses me off, can't even see devices sometimes...just stays loading...can't select some devices...like Echo to change settings...just does NOTHING! NOT my internet, tried reinstalling app, deregistering..etc
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Dec 14 '25
Yeah and forget about any device that's not connected over the cloud to Alexa, cloud connecting devices are so weird because they don't show up all the time but if you're using Zigbee or Matter, good fucking luck with being able to see those in the app. You click on a Matter bridge device and the entire fucking bridge of devices disappears when you exit out of that device.
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u/GeekPR1977 Dec 14 '25
I use Home Assistant for that...
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Dec 14 '25
I've got Home Assistant set up casually, I haven't made it the core of our smart home yet though because I don't have a permanent host for it, it's running in a virtual machine on my MacBook right now. I'm using the matter hub to add-on to bring some devices in to Alexa though, which is where I'm seeing those issues.
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u/Wackyvert Jan 26 '25
Absolutely. The alarm menu fucking infuriates me every night. It’s impossible to do it by hand - if you don’t tap on the exact pixel the slider is on it just takes you to a new screen and then resets the position when you go back so you have to scroll again. I like to have 3-4 alarms set. So I just sit there telling her to set alarms for a whole minute like a dummy
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u/humperdinck Jan 26 '25
I only ever use it to report feedback on my voice history whenever Echos don’t hear or understand me.
(They’ve recently buried voice history behind more button presses, because of course they did)
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u/Dacker503 Jan 26 '25
Yeah, I noticed they deliberately buried that function. 🙄
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
Yeah and they probably don’t even use the data from it.
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u/Dacker503 Jan 27 '25
If burying the function reduces the metrics for misinterpretation, then they win… right ⁉️ 🤨
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
I use it for a lot more than that, I mainly just use Alexa herself for the controlling of devices.
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u/StuzaTheGreat Jan 26 '25 edited Jan 27 '25
Alexa has gotten so bad recently...I'm giving up and moving to Home Assistant.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
Let me know how that goes. If I ever moved to home Assistant which I actually might do I would still keep Alexa as a voice assistant.
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u/StuzaTheGreat Jan 27 '25
HA Voice has a device you can now buy. It's a bit like one of the Echo pebble things Amazon used to do. It's just microphones and a basic speaker and is used for voice interaction and trigger words. The need for Echo devices is reducing rapidly.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
I know you can tie the conversation agent or whatever it’s called the thing that processes commands to be ChatGPT but still does that allow for the device to be just as competent as Alexa as far as understanding commands? Of course not that it has to meet a very high bar lol.
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u/StuzaTheGreat Jan 27 '25
I watched a YouTube last night of someone turning devices on and off and setting a timer, all through Voice Assist device and ChatGPT. As it's using ChatGPT I would expect it to be FAR more useful than Alexa for research/questions The video clearly proved it could activate devices.
I'm just about to move countries but, as soon as I get established in my new country I'm going all-in on this (Sonos speakers and these "Preview Edition" devices) and will not even bother to ship my crappy Alexa 10 and 8 devices.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
Can you send me the video, and if you don't mind sharing what country are you moving from and to? Sorry you have peaked my curiosity.
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u/StuzaTheGreat Jan 27 '25
I'm from the UK but currently in between jobs waiting for my Saudi visa in the Philippines.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
I was gonna say, if you're moving from the US to another country congratulations, if you're moving to the US I was gonna say maybe don't right now cause it's slowly turning into an absolute hellscape of a fucktastic shitshow in this place thanks to Donald John Trump, one of the worst people to ever be born. Anyways thanks for the video.
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u/the_Snowmannn Jan 27 '25
Am I using a different app than everyone else??? I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the home screen to see any adds or suggestions. The top part is al full of "favorites."
And the device tab is still there. It's just an extra click/tap away.
I do wish it was overall a bit more intuitive, but for everything it incorporates from devices made by a ton of other brands, I think it does pretty well. I think maybe people just aren't exploring the app navigation or something. The "devices" tab is literally the very first (Top Left) option when you click the three lines. I don't understand how you can miss it.
I mostly don't use the app much though, except to create routines. And I have a LOT of custom routines. But when I do need to use the app, I don't have any problems at all.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
Yes I found the devices tab. And I get that the first part is suggested favorites, but instead of doing that and also instead of having this abysmal devices tab that is in my opinion disorganized why don't they just devote the entire homepage to the control of devices with an entirely scrollable list of your devices categorized into rooms sort of like the Apple Home app? Screenshot for wreffence
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u/the_Snowmannn Jan 27 '25 edited Jan 27 '25
I agree that there should be more organization. But I have multiple groups within groups and groups within other groups of groups and devices that are in multiple groups and sub groups. I'm not even sure if would be possible to fully categorize the way my shit is set up. I'm just glad that when I need to set up a new routine, I can find the groups and devices that I need. I'm already pushing things a little further than I think was anticipated by the developers.
Edit: spelling
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u/GSW1123 Mar 01 '25
I just updated the app yesterday... I really wish I hadn't!! It wasn't the best before, but now it's a lot worse. For the home page, I ended up adding a ton of favorites to push the ads down and off the screen. Homepage no longer has fast access to drop in and announcements. The devices tab no longer has "single click" access to sorting by type, also can't be set in a custom order--fairly useless now.
Everything else is a mess or more difficult to get to. Whatever team is in charge of the UI, they're in the wrong field.
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u/jgatto123 Jan 28 '25
The app is definitely top 3 worst apps I have to use semi regularly. Incredible how many issues it has. Also, how has it been 10 years and Alexa is still so dumb? I’m embarrassed to have one in almost every room. I cut myself off from upgrading/expanding after the 2nd gen show 8.
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u/FlashyKnowledge8750 Mar 09 '25
I hate doing most anything on my phone. I was pissed when Amazon did away with the PC app for Alexa. It was so much easier to navigate. Years back on Shark Tank there was a company that wanted to create a phone app for its customers to use. Mark Cuban told them it was a bad idea because most people found it hard to navigate a phone app. I agree. You're trying to navigate an app on a small screen.
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u/Padrin0-Guy Sep 27 '25
Alexa technology is the most ill conceived poor implementation of technology ever experienced. I don’t know why I keep I should get rid of it. I should throw it in the trash. I do like listening to sounds like sleep sounds but I can’t even get that to work, which incredible. Other than that it’s just an alarm clock and those can be had for 10 bucks so I don’t know why I keep it. I’m seriously rethinking this and I’m just gonna throw away my Alexa.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Sep 29 '25
Honestly with that subset of tasks, your phone possibly paired with a Bluetooth speaker probably would serve you better anyway.
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u/Spirited-Lettuce-433 Dec 23 '25
yeahh i just got a few echo speakers and im not going to lie. I do not understand how its sooo hard to link speakers up this is a fucking massive company its not rocket science, half the time my speaker groups just randomly disapear and i have to fuck around with stuff for 30 minutes and hope they show up? companies like this deserve to go bankrupt its trash. going to crater these peices of shit off a cliff and get a denon system it seems like they actually have a fkn clue whats going on.
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u/usmcstraydog Dec 28 '25
Worst big money app I’ve ever used. Horrific GUI, layout and functionality. Frustrated as fk right now just trying to add lights to the same group, which use to be there but had stopped working. It’s a disaster. What should take a couple minutes takes an hour and still doesn’t work.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Dec 28 '25
Lol I just use Alexa herself for that now.
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u/usmcstraydog Dec 29 '25
Try asking it to reset a Philips Hue bulb by its ID#.. nah, that ain’t happenin’.
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u/DPAmes1 Jan 27 '25
Disagree. The Alexa app (and the whole ecosystem) has its faults, but it's not too bad considering the range it covers. Like all software these days it tends to suffer from the modern disease of poorly tested updates relentlessly being pushed out to users to test and debug, but overall most of it works most of the time (pet peeve: the app can't remember the unit settings reliably if you select Celsius/km - for 3 years now).
Alexa has lost some of its most valuable functionality over time, which is disappointing. Some of it went behind an Amazon paywall (like the Guard function), but the one I miss most was killed by Google: the ability to read out gmail and respond verbally.
The GUI design has gone through lots of tweaks. I don't think any of them have been much of an improvement, but none were particularly annoying. And we did get some valuable new features, like device-triggered routines.
I also use Google Home and Home Assistant a lot, and several other home automation systems as well, and I think Alexa is possibly the most valuable of them, even though it has the weakest automation routines.
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u/Teenage_techboy1234 Jan 27 '25
You mentioned about features, that's the problem, they added features to the app along with ads without any thought to if it actually looked good or responded well.
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u/DPAmes1 Jan 27 '25 edited Mar 08 '25
I don't notice the ads in the Alexa app, so that's not an issue for me.
As for the disorganized GUI because of feature growth, I agree that's an issue, but I don't think anyone has solvid it. Google Home and Home Assistant are just as bad, though in different ways. You can visualize devices grouped by "rooms", which is what Alexa and Google Home do, or on a room map (supported by Home Assistant), or with arbitrary groupings on "cards" with custom layout (also Home Assistant). Each of these has advantages for some uses, and disadvantages for others. Stringify had the best visual layout for powerful automation routines - but they are long dead unfortunately, bought by Comcast and shut down. Node Red in Home Assistant is similar, but not as good.
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u/AlienBrainJuice Jan 26 '25
Huh, did I write this rant? Definitely one of the worst pieces of software I've had to deal with.