As promised last week, Google today released the software development kit for its Android operating system for mobile phones. In an effort to give developers a little extra incentive to create applications on top of Android, it is also announcing a $10 million challenge. The best 50 apps will get initial grants of $25,000 each, followed by ten $100,000 and ten $275,000 grants.
That comes to $5 million. The second $5 million will be reserved for another challenge after handsets have been built. Google is obviously serious about jump-starting Android and the Open Handset Alliance as viable mobile operating system. You don’t see Google giving away $10 million to developers creating OpenSocial apps. Which project do you think is a higher priority?
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Android of course!
Just saw this on read/write web.
Nice. This is exciting stuff.
I don’t think these contests work really well. That being said, I would love to make our search engine compatible with Android. Just not to submit the code to Google. It’s like what, do I send the 16Terabytes of indexes on 380 blu-rays?
Are they going to rebuild the distributed computing platform to make it work?
So I don’t think their contest is applicable for large scale projects.
Some lucky person is going to win a lot for a little.
FANTASTIC
I feel like just kissing the feet of these guys. At least they do something useful for the developers.
The symbian development SUCKS. now in symbian 9 if you develop something, you need to get it CERTIFIED. which means paying several THOUSANDS of euro to a company like Cap Gemini just to make a certification for you.
And after ALL THESE years, Symbian has not released a decent managed language programming interface
God Bless Google.
http://code.google.com/android.....itheclipse
There’s an eclipse plug in. I’m just going to code up an interface to our engine with it. I bet it doesn’t win a prize though. I’m having flashbacks to developing WAP with the fugly Nokia phone emulator for windowz. wow.
@Chris, we really do not care about your top secret search engine that you always touted about that seemingly exist only in vapor mode + selling your top notch 65K a year programmer.
So leave the price money to the little app developers like us, it probably too little for your beerco and cheap smart programmers.
Um, I was talking about eclipse and the plugin and the software emulator?
Thanks for the interest though.
I can’t believe they released this in Java?
And why no netbeans plugin? I prefer netbeans dammit.
They could have done the API in C and let everybody create interfaces in whatever language. I guess mobiles usually run jars though and they wanted to make sure people couldn’t run unsigned code.
Does anybody know if the jars will have to be signed?
Does anybody know if Android will have /usr/bin/php or perl or python?
It looks like developing video games for cell phones right now. That’s the closest I can describe it.
“So leave the price money to the little app developers like us”
because I’m evil, like Bill Gates. I want all your price money.
The more you know * * *
priority one: Get the phone in the hands of the geeks
Sounds like a good plan to kickstart things around Android, the more applications released for android, the more appealing the handsets will be for us the end users.
Funny… even if Google offered 100M, it’s still free money… considering how well they are doing on the stock market
Jon
I just heard MSN is preparing dirty to get its hands on the opportunity the global mobile market holds.. and here goes google launching ‘android’