AndroidDeveloperChallenge
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Android Developer Challenge 2 winners announced, makes for a convenient shopping list
Google just wrapped up the second coming of its festive Android Developer Challenge, an invitation to all comers to submit awesome apps in exchange for cash prizes (a whopping $100,000 for winners in each category, plus $150,000 for the overall champion). What made ADC 2 an especially exciting event was the fact that Google turned voting over to the public with a special ADC app giving users access to nominees' binaries, so the winners that you see here weren't selected by a hand-picked group of VIPs alone -- votes from around the world got factored into the results. It's a great opportunity for users to find out about some of the best apps available to the Android community right now, and there are some doozies in here -- we're particularly amped about SweetDreams and Andrometer, but judging from the icons alone, we're in for a wild ride across the board.
Android Developer Challenge winners announced
Google has wrapped up judging on its very first Android Developer Challenge, and some twenty dev shops (or in some cases, individual developers) are finding themselves considerably richer as a result. Of the fifty apps to make it through to the final round, ten have been awarded $275,000 each and another ten have made off with a cool hundred grand -- good coin for some really good ideas. As you might expect of anything being backed by Google and the Android platform, a good number of the finalists made location-based services an integral theme; take grand prize winner Locale, for example, which automatically switches device settings based on your current location (if that's not a "why didn't we think of that?" kind of product, we don't know what is). The more we scan it, the more we realize that the list of winners reads like a who's-who catalog of apps we know we want installed on our Dreams out of the gate -- and more importantly, it looks like Google has a great way here to encourage best-of-breed Android development over the long run.
Google lays out Android roadmap, devs scheduled to get more love
Google feels really badly about that several month-long stretch where it kept any and all updates to its Android SDK out of the public limelight, developers, honest, but it wants to make it up to you. It seems that yesterday's 0.9 release, which represented the first official SDK available with a platform even remotely resembling what Google intends to release on retail devices this fall, was just the first in a string of goings-on leading up to the grand 1.0 launch in the coming months according to a new roadmap published on the Android site. To start, there'll be "additional Android 1.0 (pre) SDK releases made available, as necessary" in September, followed by the first 1.0-compatible release in the Q3 to Q4 timeframe (that's any time between now and the end of December, for you calendar-disadvantaged folk). Finally, the Android source will leak out in the fourth quarter along with the first "Android 1.0 devices" -- pay special attention to the plural "devices" there -- and an announcement about Android Developer Challenge II. It gives us a warm fuzzy to see that Google's interested in keeping its devs engaged with these contests on an ongoing basis, because let's be honest: "prize money" has a much nicer ring to it than "VC money" ever will.[Via Talk Android]
Google unveils Android Developer Challenge finalists
The fruits of 50 individuals' and companies' labors have now paid off to the tune of $25,000, all thanks to a nice little gift from the good folks at the Android Developer Challenge. Google actually unveiled the top 50 applications to be submitted to the contest a few days ago; we've been scouring the list since, and we've definitely noticed a trend -- location-based services. LBS was actually one of Google's "suggested areas of focus" going into the Challenge, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to see a wealth of apps take advantage of Android's rich, pervasive support for them. There's some seriously exciting innovation in the group -- not easy to do, considering the maturity of smartphones as a development platform in general -- and we've got to say, this all bodes really well for Android. Four of the 50 winners have chosen to remain anonymous (ooh, we wonder what sorts of crazy things they're cooking up!), but the remainder have been collected into a convenient slide deck that can be grabbed off the ADC's site. We recommend it; it's a solid, inspiring read, unless you work for an Android competitor, in which case we recommend you kick your third-party developers in their collective behind.
