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question

thingamagig avatar image
thingamagig asked

How to test my skill against devices with out-of-date APL max version support?

I bought some refurbished Echo Show 5s for my beta testers, and because they were out of service for a while, some of them had APL max version below 1.3 which is the minimum for my skill.

I told my testers to update their Echo Shows and everything started working again, but I need to handle old APL devices more gracefully.

The problem is, I can't really test that because new Echo Shows are up to date out of the box, there's no way to downgrade (as far as I know) and refurbished ones update themselves quickly. I guess I could buy a refurbished one, hope it's out of date and then quickly unplug it before it has a chance to update. But that seems suboptimal.

How do I pretend I'm using an out-of-date APL device to test my skill so i can be sure I'm showing the user a "please update" message?

alexa skills kitecho showapl
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1 Answer

Andy Whitworth avatar image
Andy Whitworth answered

Use a local, unit-test framework like bespoken's virtual alexa to test your "please upgrade" logic. You can manipulate the input JSON to simulate a legacy APL version.

That's what I do to test hard-to-engineer real world scenarios.

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