Android developer challenge ($10 million in awards)

http://code.google.com/android/adc.html

by mcxx • 19 years ago

43 25 19 years ago

code.google.com

As far as I can tell, there are no strings attached with this offer. They simply give you the cash with nothing expected in return. And 50 teams selected for the $25k prize are good ods, not to mention great publicity. Start coding!

laxk3• 19 years ago

Do you have any idea about an application for the androind platform?

mnemonicsloth2• 19 years ago

Title got my hopes up.

Robotics > Embedded development

mrtron• 19 years ago

Nice...extra incentive to code for their platform.

Plenty of time to finish too!

shayan4• 19 years ago

Seeding the Google Phone With Apps NY Times http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/seeding-the-google-...

by Dave Winer http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/11/12/android.html

Google Android: we want developers but... by Robert Scoble http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/12/google-android-we-want-deve...

michaelneale4• 19 years ago

How do people actually read scoble?

shayan4• 19 years ago

what do you mean how? whats wrong with it?

karthikv2• 19 years ago

The only thing that sucks (for me) is the app has to be developed using Java. The SDK does not support native application development yet.

mnemonicsloth2• 19 years ago

Do you mean written in Java, or targeted to the JVM?

Apologies if this is a dumb question -- I haven't read this yet.

amalcon• 19 years ago

Yeah, that is a very important distinction.

michaelneale4• 19 years ago

There are people trying (I am one of them). It runs off bytecode (which is converts to another format) - so it looks possible. Will find out shortly. I am interested in jruby, jython and scala.

andyn• 19 years ago

You write it in Java and then it's compiled to their own proprietary virtual machine - Davlik. Rather than Jython, I'd hope for a tool that would turn python straight onto Davlik bytecode.

Hopefully there should be either documentation/source for the VM at some point or an enterprising person is reverse engineering it as we speak.

jsjenkins1682• 19 years ago

Just curious, why is that a problem? The whole idea behind Android is that handset manufacturers can be free to vary their underlying linux implementations as long as they can adapt their drivers to the Android libraries. Then the programmer can code to this common interface without worrying about differences between handsets. If you were coding directly to the handsets native functionality then you break the cross platform universality. Then its just a repeat of JavaME all over again where you end up with separate builds for different devices.

From what I've read so far, there technically shouldn't be a reason why Ruby (via JRuby) and Python (via Jython) couldnt eventually be used to code Android apps. The SDK compiles Java code to native java byte code, which is in turn compiled to "Dalvik" byte code to be used by the Android VM. How the java byte code is generated (javac, jruby, jython, etc) should not matter, assuming it is using only the supported libraries.

wmf• 19 years ago

Many of the Android libraries are written in C, so if they had a stable API/ABI then portable native apps could be written. It would be merely expensive.

pistoriusp• 19 years ago

I don't mind the Java that much, but I would have preferred Python. The one thing that really bothered me was all the XML intertwined and spangled all over...

utnick• 19 years ago

I don't really see anything revolutionary that Android has over J2ME. Is there something I am missing?

Probably most apps are going to be simple android interfaces to existing web services.

But that being said you can be sure I am going to learn the api and submit an app for a shot at 25K.

davidw2• 19 years ago

Well, the hope is that Google will get things right that Sun didn't. Developing for J2ME isn't much fun, and, like a lot of Java ick, is full of things like "JSR 69", which of course makes you go look up wtf that JSR is if you haven't memorized it.

samwise• 19 years ago

I think most of you lack the vision to see how power a tool this really is. yes, there are a thousand ways this could fail. However if it does pan out like google plans, it will change the way we think about cell phones/mobile devices. The mobile device market is a huge untapped market that has yet to realize the true power of privately developed apps. If carriers adopt fully adopt android, the possibilities are endless.

corentin• 19 years ago

Ever heard of Windows Mobile? Symbian? etc. etc.

davidw2• 19 years ago

Those are proof of the "untapped potential" thing, because how many people really install apps on them?

Android developer challenge ($10 million in awards)

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