Amazon Alexa Radio Skill Requirements: Everything Your Internet Station Needs

Amazon's certification process rejects radio skills for predictable, mechanical reasons — and nearly all of them are about the station's inputs, not the skill's code. After years of submissions, the pattern is unmistakable: skills built on a clean HTTPS stream, a proper invocation name, and a compliant logo pass essentially every time. Skills with any one of those three wrong fail, resubmit, fail, and burn weeks.

Here's every requirement, why it exists, and where each one typically goes wrong.

Stream Requirements: HTTPS, Stable, and the Right Codec

HTTPS is non-negotiable

Amazon requires the audio stream over SSL/TLS. The rejection note reads something like "the skill's audio stream does not use a secure connection." There is no workaround, no appeal, no grace period — HTTP streams simply cannot be certified. If your stream URL starts with http://, that's the first conversation to have, before anything else about the skill.

The stream must survive testing

Amazon's testers play your stream at intervals across a 1–2 day review window. A station that was up when you submitted but dark Tuesday night — encoder crashed, AutoDJ gap, provider maintenance — fails for unavailability. Streams with known dropout patterns should be stabilized before submission, because Alexa listeners will hit the same dropouts.

MP3, AAC, or HLS only

OGG Vorbis and Opus — common defaults in Icecast and AzuraCast setups — are not supported and fail certification. The fix is adding an MP3 or AAC mount point and pointing the skill at that. MP3 at 128kbps remains the most universally compatible choice across every Echo generation ever sold.

Invocation Name Rules

The invocation name is what a listener says to reach you, and Amazon polices it tightly:

• At least two words — single words are rejected unless a distinctive trademark
• Nothing generic: "music station," "radio player," "jazz radio" all fail
• No trademark conflicts with Amazon or major brands
• No special characters or symbols
• Must be unique among existing skills

Logo Requirements

Two sizes: 108×108 and 512×512, both PNG. The background must be solid — transparent backgrounds are a classic rejection. Test your logo at thumbnail size before submitting: if the station name is unreadable at 48 pixels across, it's unreadable in the Alexa app, where it will mostly be seen.

Store Listing Requirements

• Skill name matching or closely tied to the invocation name
• One-line description: 60–160 characters
• Full description: up to 4,000 characters — what you play, who it's for
• Three example phrases ("Alexa, open [Station]")
• A privacy policy URL — a plain page on your website satisfies this
• Category: Music & Audio

The Technical Side Your Developer Handles

The parts you never see in the console — the AudioPlayer interface, stream start within 8 seconds of the launch command, graceful handling of interruptions, background playback continuation, no errors across Amazon's standard test scenarios. If you're using a service or a developer who has built radio skills before, these are solved problems. If you're DIY-ing your first skill, this is where the learning curve actually lives.

Timing and Rejections

Certification runs 3–5 business days. Rejections come with specific feedback by email; you fix and resubmit, and the clock restarts. The fixes are usually quick — an HTTPS change is a day, a logo swap is same-day, an invocation name change is a day or two. The expensive part is always the waiting, which is why getting the requirements right before the first submission is worth obsessing over.