Amazon's Alexa app gets a major redesign focusing on smart home control

It's been 87 years… (okay, three), but Amazon has finally updated your Alexa app. The revamp is rolling out fully this week to iOS and Android devices, but it started this summer with some small changes you may have already noticed. The final result is a more optimized application adapted to smart home control. And while it's not appreciably faster (boo), it's considerably more intuitive and easier to use (yay).

I have not been silent about my disdain for the Alexa app's (lack of) capabilities. But this new app and the new Map View feature that launched last month, combined with the increased smart home control capabilities of the Echo Show 8 and the new Echo Hub, might convince me to try it again as my daily smart home controller.

According to Amazon smart home director Charlie French, the main focus of the redesign is to put smart home controls front and center. “We've seen a lot of momentum with the smart home. We now have millions of customers with more than 20 connected devices. So, it’s about making it as easy as possible to access your devices,” he said in an interview with The edge.

The new app is less cluttered and has fewer cheesy Amazon illustrations. Now it looks less like an attempt to be a personal assistant and more like a dedicated smart home app.

Here is a summary of the most important changes:

The Home tab now has a clear organization, unlike the random “most relevant” and “recently used” items it previously displayed. It's also customizable, so you can choose what you want to see and use, not what Alexa thinks you want to see.

There are now three distinct sections for smart home/Alexa control, all of which you can edit.

The top row of the Home tab is now a side-scrolling list of shortcut buttons for smart home devices and Alexa tools like Music, Shopping Lists, and Drop In. You can edit this and choose from around 17 different shortcuts.

Shortcuts for device types like lights, locks, and climate take you to a list of the devices you have in that category, where you can control them. The shortcut also shows the status of a device, such as how many lights are on and the current temperature. French says this information is currently limited to users with fewer than 20 devices, but will soon reach “power users.”

The Activity tab comes next; French says this displays time-sensitive cards for information like smart home alerts, timers, alarms, and any reminders he's set. You can expand this section, but it takes up less space by default than the activity section above. Additionally, you can discard the cards and the entire section will disappear completely when it is empty.

Favorites has been moved from the Devices tab and is now front and center on the Home tab, allowing you to instantly control devices like lights and locks with a single tap as soon as you open the app.

Tapping devices like thermostats and cameras opens a bottom sheet so you can adjust the thermostat temperature or see a live view without having to jump to another screen.

According to French, you can have up to 200 devices in your Favorites. However, I added 14 and it started to get a little unwieldy. Starting in 2024, Favorites will be able to include snapshots from up to six Ring cameras, with a Ring Protect Plan, says French.

Below Favorites is a row of ads for Amazon products and services. Yes, there are still ads. (This is Amazon, after all.) But they appear smaller and less intrusive than previous versions.

The app's bottom menu bar has been simplified to just three icons: Home, Devices, and More. More is where you'll find Settings, Activity History, and everything else the Alexa app has to offer (Routines, Music, Skills, Automotive, Assistance emergency, etc.).

Finally, the Home tab's Alexa bubble (which overlays most screens) now lets you type a text command to the assistant and speak to it.

The other big renovation is the Devices screen. Now that the Home tab is more focused on smart home controls, Devices has become more of a settings page: “It's a place you can go to do more complicated things,” says French, rather than using it for a quick control.

Groups, Alexa's version of Rooms, are now in a side-scrolling line at the top, and a list view of your connected devices takes up the rest of the screen. This might be a slight adjustment for those used to using Groups to control their homes.

You can now search your list of devices by name and sort them alphabetically, by date added, or by device type, including “other.” The latter is a big improvement for me personally. Previously, searching for a device that wasn't part of the main categories (like motion sensors) meant scrolling through all the devices, which, for me, is over 200. Now, the “other” filter reduces the clutter.

The alternative to the list view on the Devices screen is the new Map View feature. This apparently replaces the Groups feature in the app to control your home. You can access this by tapping the map icon at the top right. From here, you can interact directly with the devices on a floor plan of your home.

However, Map View is in closed preview at the moment and is only available on iOS devices. Also requires an iPhone 12 Pro or Max or later or an iPad Pro 4th generation or later to set up. It will come to the Echo Hub when it launches. I've been testing the interface for about a week and will review it shortly.

I've just started playing with the new app and as noted, I'm still experiencing some lags and occasional crashes. But overall, the improvements seem like quality improvements. It's time for Amazon to focus on improving Alexa as a smart home assistant, where it has the greatest potential to be useful.

Screenshots by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge