How I twice participated in contests for mobile developers with cash prizes

Competition contest strife. It is one thing when a successful framework in the local market opens an API and wants a competition to tell the whole world about this event. And it is quite another when a corporation tries to raise its ecosystem of applications from its knees or launches a new device. There are other budgets with a difference not even at times, but by orders of magnitude, other competition models and, it seems, other chances.

Samsung Smart Apps Challenge 2012

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The first time everything happened by chance. I read a note about the Samsung competition that just started. Then they promoted the first Galaxy Note, plus, as I understand it, they decided to “tap into” with Google Play. For 80 winners in three nominations a prize pool of $ 4,080,000 was announced. In two of the three nominations, the winners were determined by the number of downloads, and in another - by the jury team.

I had a ready application and it was possible to take part simply from wheels. On the one hand, it was rather stupid for such claims, because it was assembled from two ready-made examples found on the web. On the other hand, it's cool, because there was a non-trivial mathematics based on the algorithm developed by the university for the recovery of grid functions along level lines. I collected the math in C ++, introduced it into the examples, and it turned out the PaintUp application, the essence of which is a finger drawing tool with automatic coloring in gradients. Any Kalyaka-Malyaka child algorithmic coloring turns into a canvas by Van Gogh.

In my non-game category, the winner was determined by downloads. During the competition, and it lasted 4-5 months, the application was installed 15-20 thousand times a month. This is a lot, but without a public rating - it is not known whether it is enough. Somewhere within a month and a half before the end, the organizers began to publish top nominations and when I first published I was on the 11th place, which corresponded to the 2nd prize. After this began the most interesting. I could no longer disengage from participation and daily dudonil on this high-list, waiting for his next update. The F5 key suffered no less than W in the days of Fifa99.

As expected, with each apom of the rating the application gradually lost ground. The stock was still - for the third prize it was necessary not to fall out over the top thirty. But the dynamics are not pleased. And just a couple of weeks before the end of the test time (after which another month of time was planned for the results and the announcement of the winners), something happened that was worse than what could be just a departure from the 30-s - Samsung decided to extend the competition for another month. It was necessary to do something, and I thought hard.

Obviously, not only experienced me. But if I was thinking about where to get more downloads, then some thought who would be knocked out of the 30s. I received a letter from one of the participants, who drew attention to our other competitor with several applications in the 30-ke, the essence of which was as follows. The application "Cow" - when you start the chuck a cow. The app "Steamboat" - buzzed. In principle, figs would be with him. But this guy wrote that, until recently, all these applications (and there were 30 such applications submitted by the author) didn’t allow the user to start any further until he installed 2-3 others. In his words now, however, the situation is no longer reproduced. I downloaded a couple apk of these applications, disassembled them and really - I found in the code the output of the banner and the restriction - no later than the specified date. And if you translate the date of the phone back - the situation was reproduced. I unsubscribed to him that, they say, yes, fu-fu-fu, you need to punish. He said that he had written off with 2 more participants and offered to write a collective fu-fu-fu samsung. Having collected all the evidence in a clump into one impressive slander, we sent it to the organizers.

To enhance the effect - they say, it’s not just privately developed buzzers, but the public is indignant - I wrote to some manager in the Moscow office and he also promised to check.

Behind all these troubles it was time to announce the winners. My application took the 18th place, but there was no bad uncle with all its applications among the winners.

After that, the most crucial part of the competition began. On the one hand, the struggle is over and here they are the laurels. On the other - some trifle, formality - and you can be left without a prize. Competition rules are written in the blood of participants.

It usually happens to me. And this case is no exception. As a result, for a limited time, I had to change the name of a participant in the competition, re-send DHL documents to Korea, and in the classic style “years mi spik frome may hart” to communicate with the Korean phone manager.

In the end, somewhere in January 2013, I received a registered glass ... cup, and in February - 9 months after the beginning of the epic - I received my prize money.

Samsung Gear App Challenge 2014

In 2013, Samsung held 2 more competitions - one for the Galaxy S4, the second for the next generation of Note. I did not participate in them. But already at the beginning of this year I went to the next call.

This competition Samsung podgadali under the promotion of smart watches - Gear 2 and Gear S. It is logical that for successful sales they needed to fill the market with useful applications for devices of this type. They did not offer nominations, they chose a more mass model, and in order to avoid fraud, they decided to determine the winner by the opinion of the jury.

This time I only had a layout, not published anywhere. An application for monitoring the battery charge of other devices (their devices, wife’s phone, child’s tablet) ChargeDevice . Porting the application to the clock and seeing the same information “on hand” is quite in the spirit and model of the application and the ideology of the device.

The logic of the competition, which was held in two rounds, made it possible to count on the result with the normal idea of ​​the application. In the first round, everyone participates, according to its results, the top 200 are selected. They receive a prize, the right to participate in the second round and 1.5 months for the finalization of applications. According to the results of the second round 40 winners are determined.

With the development, it seemed, there would be no difficulties: the clock on OS Tizen, where applications are widgets with an interface on html + css and logic on js.
But it was not without problems. The guys in Samsung either hurried with the competition, or did not have time with the SDK. As a result, the SDK was released raw (with version number 1.0.0.b2), with incomplete documentation and non-working declared features. In addition, each “call” to publish an application in the market is 7-8 days of advance, which may result in failure. And with tight deadlines for submission to the competition - you can simply not make it. I had everything in two submissions, but, judging by the reports in the internal competition forum, a lot of people were eliminated from this.

At the time of the end of the application acceptance period (which, by the way, was also postponed - it looks like Samsung’s normal practice) –it turned out to be just under 1000. There was a lot of slag: a dozen “I am in trouble” buttons, various “accounts” like how much I am today drank water and ate pies, clones 2048 and generally many ports of different logical games.

After the next deadline 200 winners were announced, my application was among them.

It was clear that in the second round it would be hard to enter 40 out of 200. First, there were, if not interesting, then objectively high-quality applications. Secondly, the rules did not prohibit the participation of developers of the Samsung itself, as it was before. And they have problems differently with the SDK, and undocumented functions are available, and tester teams. Nevertheless, I didn’t lose anything anyway, I just had to figure out how to improve my application and spend some time. In my application, I added the prediction of the device operation time based on the available statistics and slightly changed the design.

I must say that the application was quite popular in the market. It floated free in the 50-60s places for hours and received several dozen installations per day. But due to the peculiarities of the device interaction architecture, I immediately planned to remove it from Samsung after the competition, and instead publish it as paid only for mobiles in Google Play. In principle, Samsung after the competition removed it themselves, seeing a potential hole in the js-code for the clock. I guess they found it even during the competition, but decided to avoid another slander :)

There was no delay in announcing the winners of the second round, I was not among the winners. Some attentive losers immediately made a fuss in the contest forum, as the names of several participants were easily googled as employees of the Samsung, and in the first 10k it seems like 7 applications from people from Poland, where there is some large Samsung office. But they were quickly settled, pointing out the absence of restrictions on the participants.

At the end of this sheet, I want to draw some conclusions.

• Follow the contests and participate in them. This is not only a new experience, but also an opportunity to earn money, sometimes even quite good ones.
• If there is a formal sign on which you can cut off - the consequences do not depend on you, do not allow this.
• Samsung is a good company and makes quality devices. In a word - well done! :-D