SPEAK UP: How Would You Change the ADC Format?
Written by AndroidGuys • May 14th, 2008 • Category: Recent News, Speak Up!It’s time to sound off on the way the Android Developers Challenge went down.
- What did you think of the way things were handled?
- After reading the judging process, is there something you’d do different?
- Who would you put in charge?
- How would score programs?
- Would you eliminate or disqualify entries based on anything?
The best feedback will win some AndroidGuys merchandise from our forthcoming shop.
Let’s hear it! Voice your opinion in the comments below.
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Given the early stage in the platform and being one of the first challenges of this type ever, I think the challenge went the best it possibly could. Even though GeoSyncUp did not get the $25k, we still believe we have benefited from this challenge. With that said, one of the changes I would make for the next ADC would be to lengthen the time judges have to look over each application. Not so much to allow judges more time on each application, but to reduce the number of judges and have only Google review the applications.
Why? Incentive and control. I feel that Google has more of an incentive to have innovative and high quality applications for the Android platform. I feel this way only because Google has more on the line when it comes to the success of Android than any other OHA member. Also, with only Google judges, the process can be controlled much closer. It seemed that Google (rightfully so) did not want to overstep their role in the judging by micromanaging the non-Google employee judges. With only Google judges, they could ensure that all judges are actually running each submitted application.
Also, sending our ideas to one company is a leap of faith and trust. Sending our ideas to such a wide variety of people and companies is an even bigger leap of faith.
But either way, I cannot wait for the next ADC.
-Michael Sheeley
GeoSyncUp
ShookLabs.com
Here’s my serious, non-troll answer - Would have been nice to have a physical device, no matter how crude, to use in the development! SRSLY! Look at the X prizes ( space, auto, etc. ) they aren’t “theoretical”, they involve the reality of hardware. And DARPAs autonomous vehicle challenge, they use REAL WORKING CARS AND TRUCKS as the basis for development and the competition.
Sorry, that needed to be said. End of rant.
I disagree with Michael Sheeley somewhat. I think this first round should have had somewhat more technical judges given the incomplete state of the SDK, but the next round should definitely be judged by consumers or OHA member since they will be the ones using the apps ultimately.
The only things I would really change are: fewer judges (more consistency), longer judging period.
And most importantly make the goal to give all developers feedback ie. have judges make comments about the apps. Yes, have winners but make the contest helpful to all developers not just the winners. Give everyone feedback.
My Android Developer Challenge Critique can be found here:
http://blog.zedray.com/2008/05/16/android-developer-challenge-critique/
Regards
Mark
It’s good to see that they try to reveal the judgement process as done here:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2008/05/challenge-in-more-than-one-way.html
But I wonder why this hasn’t happened beforehand, meaning before the challenge deadline, preferably at the start of ADC1. In addition there were *lots* of questions in the official forum about the judgement process, what kind of professionals the judges would be, what exactly they would be provided with for judging, if they would read the documentations or watch demo videos etc. etc.
But very few threads received an answer at all and if so, replys have been pretty vague.
Also, I think that 3 weeks for judging 1,800 apps is not exactly what you would call relaxed and judges may have made their decisions under time pressure.
I understand a lot of people feel they benefited by the contest even though they didn’t win; they feel they learned something, so it was all worth it. I hear this a lot on the lists. Unfortunately, this misses the bigger and longer-term picture both for the platform and the developer.
The ADC was the first test to see what kind of applications the industry is looking to deploy on Android. From the top 50, we see predominantly LBS, social networking applications. Google pitched Android as an open platform; it promoted the idea that platform would be used for humanitarian applications. However, there was only one open-source program in the top 50 (not very open) and there were no humanitarian applications. In the list of losers, rank a number of open-source projects, projects to help the blind, to help the deaf, to help school children in developing countries, applications to assist in the case of natural disaster.
None of these made it into the top 50. They were the wrong market. They didn’t leverage assets that could be used for mobile advertising. They weren’t what the current industry - by this I mean the old industry - is looking for. The ADC attracted do-gooders and people who were interested in an open-platform and then the ADC turned around, kicking us in the teeth, lying to us.
Google’s argument is that they are rewarding developers with the ADC. On the surface, this seems to be true; but what they are really doing is throwing money to raise the first level of software vendors for the Android platform. This will reward some early developers, but after the contest, what does that mean? What does it mean to the developer entering Android space in one year? Or two years? Or to all the developers who learned something from the ADC and are now on the outside, looking in?
In the top 50, we don’t see open-source, we don’t see development tools (another broken promise); we see nothing that will foster an open, healthy development community. Instead, the top 50, with one exception, are closed-source, proprietary applications. This is a sample of what the industry intends to support. It just becomes the next generation of software vendors getting inside the ecosystem and delivering products, without a care about the general developer community.
So, no, I don’t think that the ADC fulfilled what it promised.
None of winning applications seem to be Web browser based. To me it is a total shocker - we are in the middle of Web 2.0, Google is a Web company and iPhone showed us almost a year ago that Webkit-based browser rocks on Mobiles. Thus my request would be to open ADC II for Web Developers. To that end we submitted to ADC-I an open source Browser Bhoost - Webview shell with JavaScript API for Android Platform (see http://bhoost.com and http://code.google.com/p/bhoost). No win
We have also submitted the first WebDev framework for Android with proven 100x speedup for complex Web apps (see http://Lablz.com). No win either
So, we would like to see more Google love for Web Apps, Developement tools and Open Source for ADC II. If Web developers are enabled to compete in ADC II - the number of submissions will go up 10-100 times. This is good for Android and Google - so Google could add more reward money and split them into categories - Web Apps, Dev tools, Open Source.