Smart Home Add-on Certification Overview
After you build and test your smart home add-on, you're ready to certify and publish it. To receive certification, your add-on must meet Amazon requirements and pass a certification process.
During the certification review, the certification team evaluates your smart home add-on based on criteria that includes device discovery, directive handling, account linking, policy, and security. After your add-on receives certification, you can publish your add-on in the Alexa+ Store and pursue Works with Alexa (WWA) certification for your devices.
Review the submission checklist and the smart home certification guide.
Submission checklist
To prepare your add-on for the certification process, review the following certification requirements.
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Policy Requirements – These policy guidelines make sure that your add-on is appropriate for all customers. Adherence to these guidelines guards the privacy and welfare of Alexa users.
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Security Requirements – Customer trust is important to Amazon. To protect customer data, your add-on must meet these security requirements.
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Add-on certification requirements – Add-ons must adhere to the following smart home requirements:
- Account linking – Your add-on must implement account linking to connect the user's device cloud account with Alexa.
- Device discovery – Your add-on must respond correctly to
Alexa.Discoverydirectives and return accurate device capabilities. - Directive handling – Your add-on must handle all directives declared in your discovery response (for example, TurnOn, TurnOff, SetBrightness) and return appropriate responses for success and error.
- Response latency – Your add-on's Lambda function must respond within the required time limits for smart home directives.
Submit for certification
After you review the submission checklist, you can submit your add-on for certification. During the certification process, you can track the review progress of your add-on in the Alexa developer console. Allow at least five business days for the certification process to complete. Smart home add-ons may require additional time for device-specific testing depending on the number of capabilities and device types your add-on supports.
After the certification review completes, you receive an email at the company email address associated with your Amazon developer account. The company email is what the account owner sets on the Settings > Company Profile page. If you don't receive an email, check your spam folder or update the email address associated with your company profile. Also, you can view the progress of certification testing in the Alexa developer console.
If the add-on doesn't pass the certification process, you have the opportunity to fix the issues and resubmit the add-on. The certification team lets you know why the add-on didn't pass and the changes to make to correct the failure. For more details about certification failures, see Troubleshooting Certification Failures in Smart Home.
Works with Alexa (WWA) certification
After your smart home add-on passes certification, you can submit your devices for Works with Alexa certification. WWA certification verifies smart home products for responsiveness, functionality, and compatibility with Alexa. When your product receives certification, it can carry the WWA badge on product packaging, on the product detail page on the Amazon retail website, and as a notation in the website search. For requirements, see WWA Certification Requirements.
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