In an effort to continue fostering the Android development community, Google has announced the second round of its Android Developer Challenge – a competition that rewards some of the platform’s best applications with large cash grants.
Google will begin accepting submissions from developers in August. In an interesting twist, Google is going to let anyone with an Android handset participate in the process, allowing them to vote using a special application available on the Android Marketplace. The voting application will randomly download applications from the pool of competitors, and users will be asked to rate them. These votes will determine the top 20 apps in 10 different categories (for a total of 200 apps), which will then move on to the next round. Users will be able to vote in the second round as well, but votes from Google judges will make up 55% of the final score.
So what are the developers competing for? Here’s how Google is breaking down the awards this time around:
Prizes will be distributed as follows; all prizes are in USD:
For each of the 10 categories:
1st prize: $100,000
2nd prize: $50,000
3rd prize: $25,000
Overall (across all categories)
1st prize: $150,000 (meaning the overall winner will receive $250,000)
2nd prize: $50,000 (meaning the 2nd prize winner will receive up to $150,000)
3rd prize: $25,000 (meaning the 3rd prize winner will receive up to $125,000)
In addition, attendees of selected developer events will be provided with devices intended for use in developing submissions for ADC 2.
All together, it sounds like Google is setting aside around $2 million for the winners. For more details, check out the official guidelines here.
Google’s last challenge kicked off in November 2007, with the final winners announced the following August.