Yesterday, DanielRausch, vice president of amazon smart home, announced Alexa’s stats at IFA: globally, Alexa already has 50,000 features, is compatible with 20,000 devices, and works with more than 3,500 brands.

It is understood that at the beginning of 2018, Alexa’s published data is still only 4000 devices, 1200 brands. In a matter of months, the numbers have risen rapidly.

GoogleCEO Sundar at Google I/O in May 2018. According to picha, GoogleAssistant is now available on more than 500 million smart devices, 40 car brands and 5,000 home devices worldwide. This data compared with Alexa, appears to be smaller.

So while smart speakers aren’t as hot as they were in 2017, and competitors like GoogleAssistant have entered the market, it doesn’t dent Alexa’s first-mover advantage.

Hundreds of thousands of developers

On the developer side, Alexa currently has hundreds of thousands of Alexa feature developers from 180 countries. At the beginning of 2017, Alexa was estimated to have fewer than 15,000 developers. In about 20 months, the number of Alexa developers increased at least 14-fold.

Also, interest in Alexa development is not limited to countries where language localised versions are available. Many of these developers use languages that are clearly not their native language, or are variants of the supported language, but are not localized. Hundreds of thousands is a lot less than the millions of Android and iOS developers, but it’s a lot.

The large number of developers has to do with Amazon’s commitment to helping developers monetize. To attract developers, Amazon has introduced two new ways to make money: offering in-app purchases and allowing some developers to sell premium content or digital subscriptions within the App.

40000 features

On May 3, Fastcompany spoke with amazon Alexa vp Steve abuchin, who talked about how amazon already has 40,000 features. Alexa’s number of features only hit 20,000 last September. That adds up to 10,000 new Alexa features every 121 days. Alexa’s current 50,000 features are global and not broken down by country.

As of August 30, Alexa has 66,410 combined features in the US, UK and Germany. If you add Japan, India, Australia and Canada, obviously there are more. However, many functions are repetitive, especially for the US, UK, and other English-speaking countries. Amazon’s 50000 should have the duplication removed.

Now, the total number of Alexa features far exceeds that of rival Google Intelligent Assistant, indicating that Alexa’s platform has a lot of support.

Compatible with 20000 kinds of equipment

In the current trend of AI+IoT, intelligent voice assistant will not only be installed in smart speakers, but also in smart hardware such as cars, smart TVS and refrigerators.

Alexa is now compatible with 20,000 devices and 3,500 brands. In January 2018, Google reported 1,500 products for 225 brands. At the beginning of the year, Amazon was compatible with 4,000 devices and 1,200 brands, which meant a 400% increase in about eight months, and Alexa compatibility has quickly become the industry standard.

At IFA, we saw new devices powered by Alexa, including Huawei’s AICube smart speaker, Asus ZenBook laptop and Yale’s Sync home alarm system. Amazon is already adding Alexa to cars, office Spaces and restaurants.

Alexa has made a lot of efforts to support different smart hardware. In January 2018, Amazon launched a developer tool called “AlexaMobileAccess Kit,” which allows developers to enable Alexa to be used in wearables via Bluetooth, such as headphones, smart watches, fitness trackers and other smart devices.

In contrast to amazon’s AVSDevice DK, which amazon launched last year, smart devices no longer have Alexa built in, but instead purchase Bluetooth to pair with amazon’s Alexa app. Amazon explains that this is more aimed at people who need a more relaxed approach to building mobile products because it skips a lot of code.

Yesterday, Amazon announced an open source version of the Alexa Car Core (AAC) SDK, or AutoSDK, to help automakers connect Alexa voice controls to cars and their infotainment systems, as well as to replace on-screen controls needed for navigation, media and other functions.

Speaking at IFA, Rausch also talked about Alexa’s impact on compatible device sales. According to figures cited by Rausch, businesses have seen a 43 percent increase in business in the nine months following the launch of Alexa-enabled products. Rausch again cited data from Amazon, When a company combines Alexa features with its products (meaning you can ask Alexa to control the device), businesses see an almost immediate 53% increase in business.

GoogleAssistant and Siri are deeply connected to Android and iOS respectively, and smartphones are definitely Alexa’s weak spot. Amazon has had great success with Echo, selling more than 20 million Echo smart speakers in the U.S. and accounting for 70 percent of the market share as of January 2018, but it has been a bit slow on the mobile end. Amazon doesn’t make its own phones, nor does it have a mobile operating system, so it’s hard to compete with Google and Apple on the mobile end.

Earlier this year, amazon struck a deal with a number of PC manufacturers to embed Alexa in WindowsPC, directly into Microsoft territory. The PC makers, which include HP, Lenovo, Asustek and Acer, said at CES this year that users will be able to interact with Alexa on their PCS in much the same way they do with the Amazon Echo — allowing them to control lights and complete simplified commands.

But WindowsPC already has Microsoft’s own Cortana, and amazon’s Alexa has a lot of hurdles to overcome in order to survive and take the initiative on both mobile and PC.