Why i am posting this?
This is in response to the latest announcement regarding the discontinuation of support of Alexa integration of Guard Plus with Ring. My intuition is that Alexa made this decision to generate revenue. This is not a great decision and will result in the opposite which is loss on Alexa devices/users. I hope this gets passed along to the PMs on both sides.
Why is this a wrong decision?
Alexa integration with Ring is the main reason I have both. I already had Alexa devices, used for home automation/smart speakers, so I decided to get Ring a few years ago because of the integration with Alexa. I enjoyed the home automation features in Alexa with Ring products plus the additional options like Guard features.
Alexa is not the smartest of its family. Google assistant is better in voice recognition and features. The main reason i didn’t like Google was their hostility toward 3rd party home automation earlier in the days and trying to monetize on google devices and services the same way you are trying to do with Alexa now. However, if Alexa is going to go that route, then it might be better to ditch Alexa and move to Google as they have gotten better in their integration and now offer better capabilities.
Last, this new emergency subscription you are proposing is not a good sell alone. The fact that many people enable/use Alexa guard plus is not an indication that they will buy it as a standalone subscription. The main reason they enable it is because it is included with their ring protect plan. I will let the people in the community to comment on that one, but I don’t think I would buy Alexa guard as a standalone subscription.