2009 Mobile App Development Contests

The next 20 years of software development is all about Fat Client / Fat Cloud Mobile Apps.

For the software developers, I’m restating the obvious. Let’s face it, the days of thin client / fat server are over. We quickly moved to a new world of ubiquitous mobile computing everywhere (e.g., in the car, on the train, at a baseball game, in a plane). I have software running in my watch, my sneakers, my bicycle, toaster, refrigerator and bathroom scale. The devices communicate peer to peer or device to cloud.

Thanks to the iPhone and iPod Touch, the buzz for the foreseeable future is the new small screen computing devices. I started working on some mobile apps recently and was surprised to see the level of developer interest.

I’m a big fan of Google’s Android largely for the development community and the great development tools. Google and Microsoft understand that the success of the platform depends on a healthy and vibrant development community. In an effort to measure the current ‘success’ of a platform’s development community, I compared the annual developer contests of the 6 major mobile phone vendors.

If you rank the 6 vendors by cash prize award, Android, Win Mobile and Blackberry come out on top. The following table has the details.

2009 Mobile App Developer Contests

#	Mobile Phone	Contest	Submission Date	Award Date	1st Prize	2nd Prize	3rd Prize
1	Android	Android Developer Challenge	8/31/2009	Nov 2009	$150,000	$50,000	$25,000
2	Win Mobile	Windows Mobile Developer Contest	9/30/2009	Oct 2009	$100,000	$50,000	$20,000
3	Blackberry	Blackberry Developer Challenge	9/25/2009	Nov 10, 2009	$100,000	$20,000	$5,000 to 16 finalists
4	iPhone	Apple Design Awards	5/4/2009	Jun 12, 2009	$10,000 in hardware and other perks	–	–
5	Palm Pre	preDevCamp Developer Challenge	8/9/2009	Aug 2009	Devices and $200 Gift Card	–	–
6	Nokia	Nokia Developer Programs	–	–	–	–	–