

Ask YC: Android Developer Challenge results are in. Did you win? What did you make? - aschobel

I didn't make it into the final 50, I guess an app that "makes your notes more useful" isn't uber sexy but I do believe it is something people want.<p>http://groups.google.com/group/android-challenge/browse_thread/thread/41c9ebfcbffc77c7<p>One of the things that is really cool is that Google is letting you Opt-In if you want to get contacted by the judges to do consulting work.<p><i>Dear participant,<p>During the past few weeks, 100+ judges around the world reviewed over 1,700 applications.  They were extremely impressed with the diversity and the large number of high quality entries submitted.  It is clear that the number of great applications far exceeds the 50 top scoring applications that will move on to the final round of the Android Developer Challenge.<p>We regret to inform you that your entry was not among the top 50 submissions.  However, we'd like to bring a couple of interesting opportunities to your attention:<p>1. Due to the high quality of the submissions many of the judges who are also members of the Open Handset Alliance have showed interest in contacting some of the participants regarding their applications to explore further opportunities.<p>2. In the near future, we'll be creating an Android Developer Challenge Gallery where you can showcase your application.  We'll be providing more details shortly on how you can participate in this gallery.<p>If you're interested in either one of these opportunities, please fill out the following form: [url deleted]</i>
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davidw
I did a Hecl port for it, and it didn't win. On the other hand, our daughter
was born the other day, and she is simply wonderful:

[http://padovachronicles.welton.it/articles/2008/05/08/helen-...](http://padovachronicles.welton.it/articles/2008/05/08/helen-
carolina-welton)

It's kind of tough to think of much else at the moment:-)

Besides the Hecl entry, I also got some client work out of it, and although
unfortunately that didn't win either, at least I made a bit of money, and
there's a chance we'll keep working on the app, which is pretty cool.

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comatose_kid
Congrats! You're in for a lot of fun, and a lot of sleep deprivation.

I noticed a comment beneath the photo that said your days of late night
hacking are gone. This is true for the first 6 months, but things do improve
on that front.

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eugenejen
I did one app to translate and say what I type in. I wanted to learned the SDK
and use the competition as a learning experience. I wish I had won it. But I
was really happy when I saw judges used it until last Wednesday.

Since I know I passed the phase 1 judgment. I am working on porting it to
iPhone and see how people want it.

\-- edit -- One lesson I learned from this is PG is right to found
Y-combinator startup by number of founders. I did not start early so I did not
team with other people in time. I guess a team definitely has better chance to
succeed. And by mathematics, if a team can has better probability to win, even
each one won much less, but the expectation value will be higher.

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waleedka
I used the challenge deadline as a motivator to get me to learn the Android
SDK quickly. Downloaded the SDK on the last day and had to submit by midnight.
I built a simple twitter clone but instead of seeing what your friends write,
you see what people within 10 miles around you write. Needless to say, I
didn't win.

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aschobel
Likewise, I used it as a deadline to get the RESTful API done. When I
AJAXified my app a few weeks later it was dead simple since I had a solid API
to write to.

The money would have been nice since I'm bootstrapped, but it would have
allowed me to put off launching even longer. So maybe it was a blessing in
disguise?

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DenisM
We didn't win. I don't think judges did a thorough job - I was monitoring logs
on my server and they never tried the advanced features in our app. Those
required the backend usage, so I would know and the phone-server connection
was the whole point why we made the application in the first place.

Anyway, we have this app on Windows Mobile too, so we will launch it soon-ish
to start getting the user feedback.

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ros_white
We didn't win too. We submitted port of <http://www.bloove.com> for Android.
In allows you to manage your mobile phone via web. If you have Nokia or Sony
Ericsson phone you can try it without Android :)

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aschobel
When you wrote your app for Nokia and SE did you write for MIDP?

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flashgordon
No we didnt win either. our project was to have a trip planner which would
scour bus and train timetables and present it on Android. This was only for
the sydney region by the way. Very primitive (duh).

<http://talkingwombat.com/>

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martythemaniak
Didn't win and I wasn't expecting to either. It would have been a neat app,
but I only submitted an early version with pretty limited functionality.

