Google Blogoscoped

Friday, April 18, 2008

Google Android Challenge Deadline Reached
By Yannick Stucki

Last fall Google created quite some buzz with the announcement of the mobile device platform Android and the $10m Android Developer Challenge. The deadline has been reached and the official Android Developers Blog announced that they’ve received 1,788 entries for the competition. A significant part of the buzz was caused by the huge prize money and that certainly showed Google’s decidedness to enter the mobile market.

Naturally, the question whether throwing $10 million was worth it comes up. Of course, to answer this question we’d have to check out all the apps in order to judge their quality, but since there was a lot of money to win we can expect that there will be at least a few hundred very good/useful/cool apps.

Even if we can’t judge the applications yet, we can still do the math: Google paid an average $5,600 per app. This might sound like a lot of money, but think about how much more it would have cost to hire people and fully pay them to create all those apps. $5,600 is not really much for an app: after all, adapting to Android, implementing and debugging takes quite some time. Furthermore, you couldn’t just hire a team for $10m and tell them: “code 1000 apps for Android!” Not just because of the workload, but creative and different ideas are also crucial; not that a hired team wouldn’t be creative, but but the large number of third party developers can do even more diverse and creative stuff.

At last, besides creating a lot of buzz and apps, the developer challenge also brought hundreds of outside developers to the Android platform to form a community, even before the first phones have arrived. So I’d certainly answer the above question – whether it was worth the money – with a yes.

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!