Google Giving ADC Winners Ranking Indicators
Written by AndroidGuys • May 16th, 2008 • Category: Developer Challenge News, Developer News, Recent NewsWe just received an email from Jeffrey Sharkey, the developer behind Scan. He forwarded us a copy of an email he received from the Android Developer Challenge Team. The jist of the letter is that developers are being made aware of what went into the ranking of their applications.
- Effective Use
- Polish
- Indispensability
- Originality
These are the four factors that were used to determine how well the application fared. We like the mix of categories. Originality might be harder to achieve in the second Android Developers Challenge after seeing what’s already been put together. Now that we know polish is rather important, future developers would be wise to put the finishing touches on the back end stuff so they can make it look more appealing before it goes before the judges.
Below is the percentile ranking for your application in these four categories and the overall score. The first set of scores is for the percentile ranking for specific categories; for example, it shows how your application ranked among all the other apps in “Effective use”, “Polish”, “Indispensability”, and “Originality”. The final score shows your application’s overall ranking among all of the submissions.
It should come as no surprise that Scan was in the Top 25% of each category as well as overall. It’s one of the more heavily favored applications if you look at some of the other tech sites.
Thanks to Jeffrey for sending along this information! Stop over and take a look at the Developer Spotlight Series we did with Jeffrey back in April and learn more about him and Scan!
Anyone else wanna share scores? Leave ‘em in the comments below!
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I’ve set up a thread in the forums to track scores
http://groups.google.com/group/android-challenge/browse_thread/thread/bd86761bb254702
It’s a bit beyond me how ADC judges can rank an application manager, one of the most critical parts of a mobile device, with indispensability at 50-75%. Google’s Application Repository certainly couldn’t function without one. Were these judges from the mobile industry? Anyway, here are the scores:
SAM - SlideME Applications Manager
Effective use: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted applications
Polish: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted applications
Indispensability: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted
applications
Originality: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted applications
Overall: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted applications
Shane Isbell, you have to remember all of the judged were heavily bias.
If you got a Sprint or T-mobile judge they might have a competing app and thought theirs was better or didn’t see a use for SlideME if they have other plans.
I know it sucks but its part of being a part of such an new (pre alpha) platform.
Well, if the judges are heavily biased, that’s a problem with the ADC contest. And if judges downgraded apps for which their companies have a competing product, then the judges should have recused themselves, as that would be a conflict of interest. In fact, not only would that suck, but that would make the entire contest a sham.
I’m not saying that is what happened, however. All I’m saying is that some of these judges are incompetent if they can’t recognize that an application manager is indespensible.
Shane,
Our idea, Trackdroid (http://www.trackdroid.com) - is very similar to SlideMe, we did a little better in the contest
Effective use: In the 25th to 50th percentile of all submitted applications
Polish: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Indispensability: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Originality: In the 50th to 75th percentile of all submitted applications
Overall: In the 25th to 50th percentile of all submitted applications
I wont speculate why the scores of our apps are different, it could be just personal view of some judges, or that something prevented them from evaluating SlideMe properly.
YA said that they had several application managers scoring in the top 25% for indespensability. Now I find out that trackdroid got the same score. We had good documentation and stripped out all the network connections so that it wouldn’t go down by slow networks, downed servers, etc. We had four people testing it constantly. I don’t buy that the application crashed on 4 judges laptops.
Is it SlideME’s focus on the small developer? In our application, we gave as much focus on the developer profiles as to the catalog info. We’ve been pretty active on the lists saying that we as developers need to form a community or we are going to get buried by the big players. Maybe the judges didn’t like our message or any application that promoted the developer or the concept of a strong developer community that could deliver their own content directly to the end-user, without going through a number of middle-men.
You can see our unpolished app here: http://slideme.org/sam