I recently (1month ago) found 1 of my 5 roller blinds no longer responding to the controlling routine. There are all in the same room with my echo plus from the same manufacturer. Since everything worked for a "long" time, so it took me a while to find the manual instructions how to repairing it. Now I just happen to find 2 others doing the same thing. Having this time the manual handy, it took me not much time to fix these. What is annoying is that there is no rime to the failure. Any suggestions I can find are not applicable. So is this the common finding we have to live with? I suspect something is going on with echo device loosing setup info.

I've found it common that things stop functioning sometimes after an update. The Echo system updates are sometimes the reason for the treason of your configured devices it's suppose to operate. I find this on almost all brands and types of devices. This morning I had to unpair and repair an Apple TV remote to get it to start working again after an update on the Apple TV device... half of the remote functions just quit working and no settings whatsoever would allow the remote to get back to normal. Since I have a spare remote (due to upgrading the olds one to the latest), this was possible. If I had no other remote, I would have not been able to re-install the remote even. I restarted, rebooted, reset, and reconfigured for almost an hour trying to get things to work and finally decided to go back to the old remote and see if it would work... and it did. So I repaired the new one and it works as it should now... These products nowadays are not ready for end users, and we should have a Huge "WELCOME TO BETA TESTING" warning on the packaging so we'd know what we're getting into.

Just know that anytime the auto updates occur (which I don't think the Echos have an option to not update), you may have some oddity show up on either the Echo you are using or the devices it controls... and there often is no known solution. It's up to you to find the way to make it work.

Like you, I was a fairly early Alexa adopter... I had the first gen tower and the earliest dot I had was a second gen. I just bought a new Bridge I have yet to install... I need to look up how to copy the info off the old one and see if the newest one does any better connecting with Homekit... I just got it last week, and heaven't had time to dig into it just yet. If you have any input on copying and transferring all the bridge settings that'd be nice... I have four routers to work with so connecting them at the same time is no problem... but I can't recall all the details of running either separate bridges, or copying and installing all the files onto the new one...

But I do remember there was a TON of food joint apps on the Echos early on. Now that things are more sorted out it seems like they'd be getting back on the wagon.

All I got to say is good luck with the homekit.    I know absolutely nothing about it.  I basically kept things the same since I started - nice and simple.   Only added additional smart devices.   

Aren't there several Eatery Apps available on the Echo systems? I purposefully have my voice ordering turned off, or the people in my house would likely cost me a fortune...

Not as many as there once was,   I think a lot of them had skills before alexa became a thing and they dropped their skills because nobody knew about them.     

They just opened a store in my small town a couple of days ago.    Just found out you can order using Alexa.    Too easy..   Going to get fatter.   

Hello,

We have ported the PC Switch for Alexa Android Smartphone App to Amazon's Fire TV Stick. You can find the App in the Fire TV Appstore. With the Fire TV App you can control all your computers with Alexa Voice Commands.

Sincerely,
Christoph Weller
DCM Works
https://www.dcm-works.net/