Amazon’s secret war on Android: The company has a plan to cure Alexa’s addiction to Google’s operating system.
Amazon’s Alexa division is cutting costs across the board, having laid off thousands of employees and reshuffled projects over the past 18 months. Another key part of that plan is to unify Alexa’s backend technology, which is set to result in some devices moving off of the Android-based operating system the company has used for years.
Internally named “Unified Alexa Device Software,” the project is aimed at delivering a “single Alexa Device Software codebase” that will help reduce operational costs and address various performance issues. The team in charge of the project expects to ultimately save almost 50% of its overhead costs.
The plan is part of a major revamp of the Alexa business. Alexa and the devices unit were among the first teams hit by Amazon’s layoffs in late 2022 after having lost billions of dollars. The unit has gone through a number of changes since then, including the hiring of the former Microsoft executive Panos Panay as its new leader.
In an email to BI, an Amazon spokesperson said the change in Alexa’s technology was part of a regular review process. “We regularly evolve our software architecture to continuously improve Alexa for customers,” the spokesperson said. “That’s what’s happening — to suggest there’s a massive cost-cutting campaign is a gross exaggeration.”
With the unified Alexa backend, Amazon plans to more actively use a new homegrown operating system named Vega for voice assistants, smart TVs, and wearable devices. Vega is a “new portable operating system for consumer electronics developed by Amazon.”
Fire OS is a so-called fork of Android. This happens when companies and coders take the Android open-source system and create a new version that isn’t officially approved by Google. Android forks have been tried many times over the years, with mixed success.
The feature-parity gap between Amazon’s own Alexa devices and third-party voice assistants using Alexa has long been a problem, both internally and externally. Some Amazon employees who worked on third-party devices felt as if the Echo was their biggest competitor.
With the new Vega OS, Amazon is reducing its reliance on the Android-based Fire OS. But the move wasn’t necessarily motivated by ditching Google’s technology. Instead, the goal was simply to be more efficient with resources and to improve performance.
“Android-based devices are going to stick around for a while,” one of the people said. One area that’s set to see less investment is tablets that come with Alexa capabilities.
Amazon has tried to unify Alexa’s software stack since at least 2016, but failure to do so has only deepened existing problems. Amazon, at one point, had four different teams supporting the same voice middleware technology across different devices, causing higher operational costs and inefficiencies.
The new unified Alexa foundation will significantly reduce these feature parity gaps, the internal documents predict. For example, prior to unifying the backend, one of Alexa’s wake-word-detection features existed only for the Fire OS, so Amazon had to separately build one for the Vega OS.
With this initiative, Amazon hopes to roll out Alexa features more quickly while eliminating feature-parity gaps among different devices. It also anticipates fewer performance issues and lower development costs.