I submitted my audio player skill the other day and within the certification feedback received the following reply:
"Future versions of the Alexa Skills Kit may add new properties to the JSON request and response formats, while maintaining backward compatibility for the existing properties. When we invoke the skill with additional parameters, the skill is rejecting it when we expect this to be accepted. Your code must be resilient to these types of changes. For example, your code for de-serializing a JSON request must not break when it encounters a new, unknown property. Please see the following documentation for more information: https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/alexa-skills-kit-interface-reference"
Now I'm not too sure what this is about, however I looked at the cloud watch logs of my lambda function and can see the invocation errors that I'm guessing the certification team faced (I have not used the skill since sending it for request). The error is as follows: "2016-09-11T08:50:07.969Z bdab8ff9-77fc-11e6-9de9-7ba7ed11ed60 TypeError: Cannot read property 'System' of undefined
at exports.handler (/var/task/index.js:20:22)"
Now this error only seems to happen when you try to use the service simulator or test from the lambdas test function, at least this is what I'm lead to believe from the following forum post:
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/35586/error-with-audio-player-sample-project.html. A snippet from one of the replies on the post is below:
"The Service Simulator in the Developer Portal does not provide the System object to the skill backend when supplying a test utterance and so should not be used with Audio Skills. Instead, please test with an Alexa-enabled device."
When certifying my audio player skill, are the team using the service simulator? As per Amazons own recommendation (as seen above) it should only be tested on Alexa-enabled devices.
Which then leads me onto my next question. Are Audio Player skills currently being certified? Has anyone managed to get theirs on the skill store?