Android Developer Challenge 1: Where are they now?
For those that don’t know, last year’s Android Developer Challenge gave away a million dollars in prize money in an attempt to shock the Android market to life prior to the release of the G1.
Clearly from the amount of apps in the market to date- the money didn’t go to waste however what happened to the apps that one the top prize of $275,000. ( compared against Atrackdog’s top 100 Monthly Android Applications)?
- Cab4me- Not in the top 100- Just released an iphone version of their app
- Compare Everywhere- position 50- Currently on version 1.3 however their website seems to be unavailable
- Ecorio-Not in top 100- Last blog post on website was from last year september 2008
- Go Cart- Position 3- Changed name to ShopSavvy and is one of my favorite programs and still very popular
- Life360-Not in top 100- difficult to find any specific mention of Android on their website
- Locale- Position 92- Great program, however was more of a complement to other apps. This app added functionality that should have been within the OS, and might have been too lofty a goal for android to stomach so soon after its birth.
- Picsay- Position 14- Great application and a lot of fun- I recommend that you try it out
- Softrace- Not in top 100- Hopefully will have a production release soon.
- Tunewiki-position 40- Lots here that has been done, and hopefully will continue to develop
- Wertago- not in top 100- Most likely was included as it was a pioneer of location based services- this crown has been usurped by others such as Googles own directory and Qype.
Interestingly, The Weather Channel which is one of the top apps only managed to get into the first round of finals before getting the boot.
From the above stats, it would appear that the ADC was not particularly successful at encouraging the creation of quality applications. Of the finalists- only 5 are still in the top 100 with only 2 being in the top 20 apps!
If one takes into account the fact that
- the phone hadn’t even been released yet,
- Very few people were able to give feedback
- The developers did not have a through understanding of what power the SDK had,
then its clear that the competition was going to be doomed to fail from the beginning.
What did succeed was that the competition provided an amazing incentive for developers to dip their finger into the newly formed android development community and provided the basis for many of the future applications that would come. One could argue that these winners above when blessed with very large sums of cash courtesy of Google, spent a great deal of it on wine and food and lost interest in the apps, however most likely these programs above lost their initial development intertia due to lack of demand and positive feedback.
The new ADC will turn out to be a completely different type of competition: with a strong community, large growing user base, experienced developers who are familiar with the SDK and phone. 4- 10 major devices with users anxious to try out these new apps and of course loads of websites who are going to be analysing the apps to see which will be innovative and popular. I am very excited to see what a difference a year can make.
Android Developers Blog: ADC 2 Updates.
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Interesting data. My conclusion would be quite different; something like:
The ADC was an amazing success! 5 of the 10 finalists are still in the top 100 apps!
The factors you say made the ADC “doomed to fail” are why I would have expected that quite possibly none of the apps would still be around a year later. I don’t know what Google thought, but I (as an outsider) thought of the ADC as a way to generate buzz and cool tech demos. If the ADC generated not only buzz and tech demos, but also 5 applications that are still being used by many people, then that seems like an amazing success to me.
Hi Carl,
I see your side of it, and perhaps its a case of being a “glass is half full” or half empty. My thoughts behind this is that the finalists were given such a great cash injection that they could potentially become full time android coders and build and develop their application into something amazing. Whether its the end user not agreeing with the ADC judges on what were the best apps or the fact that some of the apps were left to rot after the competition.; I thought we would have had a higher hit rate and much more of them in the top 20 after a year.
Perhaps Google should have timed released the money, based on continued development.
I think it would be interesting to see how the users review ithe appsin the new ADC when it starts.– and produce more top 20 apps this time next year.