The Android Devices Blog

Google has announced the final results of the Android Developer Challenge. 10 finalists were awarded US$ 275000 each, 10 more received US$ 100000. A gallery with screenshots and short descriptions of all the 50 finalists is available on the Android website.

The winning applications are a pretty balanced mix of productivity and entertainment applications. cab4me for example, one of the US$ 275000 winners, developed an application that will get a taxi to wherever you are at the press of a button. You don’t even need to know your address. Two applications, CompareEverywhere and GoCart use the phone’s builtin camera to scan barcodes and get additional pricing and/or review information online, a nice way of combining shopping at a store with the convenience of being able to compare prices and read reviews.

Have a look at the entire application gallery here. Many of the apps, if they don’t show up preinstalled on the first Android phones, will be available through the Android Market mobile store, which was also announced yesterday.

Alright, I’m still not quite up to the task of reporting things as they happen. Why is there always important news as soon as I go away for a few days…?

Anyway, the big news last week was of course the release of a new Android SDK version. It’s not quite a 1.0 release yet, but 0.9 should come close enough. Techcrunch has a few screenshots and details about what’s included and what isn’t. The new SDK is of course what the finalists of the Android Developer Challenge have been working with for months now. All other developers (the ones that didn’t abandon the platform for greener pastures) were stuck with an old preview that was last updated in February, so they should be quite relieved that finally they are getting something more current to work with.

HTC has gotten FTC approval for the Dream handset, which means that the rumors about T-Mobile launching that device pretty soon might actually be true. Of course the approval is for the hardware, it doesn’t mean that the software is finished. But it’s a step in the right direction. The rumor-mill continues to buzz (or whatever else a rumor-mill does) with variations of the actual release date and so far the only thing that seems to be set in stone is that it’s going to be a Q4 release, probably in October or possibly November.

The Android team have created a security FAQ and issued a challenge to security researchers to help harden the platform. That sounds like a good move, considering that various vulnerabilities were discovered in earlier versions of the SDK. And the very nature of these more and more powerful and connected devices demands greater attention to security details.

The register has an article on unhappy Android developers threatening to abandon development for the Android platform if Google doesn’t at least explain why there have been no updates of the Android SDK since February. They are especially upset because they know there is a newer version of the SDK, but Google isn’t sharing it with everyone. So far only the finalists of the “Android Developer Competition” have had access to it so far and they had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

It’s a rather weird situation – on the one hand, there’s a good number of developers who are really enthusiastic about developing for what The Register calls “the most closed open platform to not yet exist”, but they can only test their applications in an emulator and what they have worked on so far may need major modifications once a new version of the SDK is released. Google needs to get their act together quickly – this is mainly a communications issue. Google needs these developers, so the least they can do is to keep them happy by communicating clearly why newer SDK versions are not available, give them a timeline they can work with, let them know at least what changes they can expect from newer SDK versions.

If this situation isn’t resolved quickly, the Android platform may lose a number of key application developers before it even launches. The iPhone may be a lot more restrictive and closed – but it’s available now, sales are looking good and Apple is a lot more helpful than Google is proving to be at the moment.