Early this morning, 200 Android developers woke up to one hell of an e-mail: they’d made it into the final round of the second Android Developer Challenge, and were thus one giant step closer to as much as $250,000.
Android Developer Challenge 2 officially began way back in May, though the actual voting didn’t begin until some time in September. The votes were split amongst Android users and Googlers (with the latter getting a 55% say), with all voting taking place in a special, custom-made application. To be eligible, applications had to be completely fresh to the Android Market (read: no updates allowed) as of August 1st, couldn’t have been a part of the first Challenge, and had to play friendly with Android v1.5.
In the end of round 1, 20 applications across 10 categories would go onto a second round of voting – and that’s where we stand today. Google’s big ol’ list of finalists has just gone live, and round 2 has begun. The top 3 winners from each category will take home $100,000, $50,000, or $25,000 respectively, with 3 overall winners walking away with $150,000, $50,000, or $25,000 in tow.
You can see the full list of finalists here, and (though we can’t seem to find it right now) play with and vote for them by downloading the “Android Developer Challenge 2” application from the Market. Oh, and just in case you’ve ever wanted to roleplay as an ADC2 finalist (and really, who wouldn’t?), we’ve obtained a copy of the aforementioned notification e-mail:
From: ADC 2 Support
Date:
Subject: ADC 2 Round 1 Results for ‘App Name’
To:Congratulations! Your application ‘App Name’ was selected by Android users as one of the top 20 in the ‘ ‘ category! We’re excited that you chose to participate in the ADC 2 and wish you luck in the final round as your application is evaluated by users and a panel of judges.
For full information on the challenge, please see our official site: http://code.google.com/android/adc/
Thanks,
ADC 2 Support
Update: We can’t get the voting application to work on our Droid (presumably because it’s running Android 2.0 and these apps are only tested against 1.5, so unforeseen 2.0 issues might skew votes), but we’re told that scanning this QR code with the Android Barcode Scanner app should take you right to the download:
