That being said, they announce partnerships with more and more services every month. Things are looking up.
More importantly, they have done a good job (leagues better than the competing voice services) of opening their service to developers thru Alexa Skills, which has enabled hundreds of added features including things like ordering an Uber.
E.g. Alexa, Ask recipes how do I make an omelet? instead of: Alexa, how do I make an omelet?
I imagine it's to prevent conflicts but I'd like the option to put some services in the default namespace as it were.
So the product is quite open. That being said, the third-party experience could be smoother - it is a minor pain to have to specify "with Spotify" every time I want the Echo to play music.
Overall I'm happy with my purchase, though.
Alexa and AWS Lambda are two of the things I'm most interested in these days (disparate, I know) but they're also things without open source equivalent. I'd love to see that change.