Google announces Android applications winners

GOOGLE HAS ANNOUNCED the winners of its second Android developer challenge.

The competition started in May of this year and closed at the end of August. According to the company it saw thousands of applications, with many being described as interesting and of high quality. Prizes were $250,000 for first place, $50,000 for second and $25,000 for third, with an extra booty for the overall winners in a number of categories. Categories included Casual, Productivity, Media and Travel.

In a blog post, Eric Chu of the Android developer group said, "We announced ADC 2 - the second Android Developer Challenge - to encourage the development of cool apps that delight mobile users. We received many interesting and high-quality applications - everything from exciting arcade games to nifty productivity utilities. We also saw apps that took advantage of openness of Android to enhance system behavior at a deep level to provide users with a greater degree of customisation and utility."

Apps were assessed by thousands of Android users, before finally being settled on by a panel of judges including representatives from Google, T-Mobile and MTV. Winners included A World of Photo, a photo app "Loosely inspired by the traditional 'Spin the bottle'", and Wavesecure, a mobile security solution. The winner of the Miscellaneous category is an application to turn your Android phone into a guitar. Jimi Hendrix must be spinning in his grave.

Best sounding one for us is Sweetdreams, "a revolutionary tool that will finally allow you to go to sleep without worrying about changing your phone settings in order to avoid unwelcome late night calls", because usually we'd just ignore them.

One award winner was the UK developer firm Mippin, whose Buzz Deck application was awarded first prize in the Media Category. Buzz Deck is a social media integration tool that compiles information from Twitter and Facebook accounts, and has already one two awards, according to the firm. µ