Can I send my Alexa skill users a one-time notification when they load the skill for the first time after I've updated it?

Question

I have a pretty dumb skill in the Alexa Skills store that I plan on releasing an update for. I couldn't find anything in the documentation about one-time update notifications, is there an OOTB way to let customers know (once) that the skill has been updated, without creating a persistence layer to track each individual user and if they've launched the skill or not?

Answer 1

If you plan to send a message to every user that uses your skill after the update, it's possible somehow.

In every Alexa request you get the userId and deviceId , you could store these in a DynamoDB table or any other storage system, associating to every user a simple flag that gets checked at the first request after the update. The simplest way to do this would probably be a .csv file stored locally, however this depends on how your code is run and where it's stored.

After you stored this information, in your code just read the user data and respond appropriately if the flag is checked or not.