Community Style Check

Style Check was Echo Look's flagship feature: photograph two outfits, and a combination of machine learning and human fashion specialists would tell you which one worked better. Community Style Check extended it to the crowd — submit the same head-to-head poll from the Echo Look app to the Amazon Spark community inside the Amazon Shopping app, and watch live vote results come back as the community weighed in.

I was the lead developer. It was the first feature to prove cross-app content rendering between Echo Look and Amazon Shopping, and the first cross-app feature the two ever shipped.

The problem

Two separate iOS apps, from two separate teams, needed to hand a rich object back and forth: a poll with two photos and its metadata, out of Echo Look and into a social feed; then a running vote tally back into Echo Look.

There is no clean channel for that. What we built instead:

1. Onboard Echo Look into the Shopping app's iTunes App Group, so both apps could reach a shared container and cache the poll images to disk rather than shipping them through a network round trip.
2. Encode the poll metadata into deep link query parameters and hand off from Echo Look into the Shopping app.
3. Integrate with the posting flow owned by the two partner teams that ran the social feed.
4. Render Echo Look polls natively inside that feed so they looked like a first-class citizen rather than a foreign object.
5. Deep link back into Echo Look from the Shopping app so voting results returned to the originating device.

Building the piece nobody had capacity for

The team that owned the social feed had no engineer available to build custom poll rendering for Echo Look content. Rather than let that become the thing that killed the launch, I picked up the work and built the poll rendering inside their codebase, while simultaneously setting up the App Group and the deep-link-based posting module on the Echo Look side.

Designing the deep link schema meant agreeing on a contract with a team that would be parsing what we generated — coordination across three teams for a handoff that had to be exactly right in both directions.

Why it mattered

Community Style Check took a deep-linking proof of concept and productionized it into a stable feature on both sides. It established the pattern that made the larger Echo Look Style Feed integration possible, and it demonstrated that a camera device and a shopping app could share a live social experience.

It shipped on the React Native platform work described in React Native Multi-Root Architecture, and it sat alongside the device's other capabilities on Echo Look.