Here’s who won Google’s second Android Developer Challenge

Winners of Google’s second Android Developer Challenge were declared recently. The competition not only offers grand cash prizes to the winners but also gives the participants an opportunity to enhance the development of Android.

In all, 30 prizes were handed out in total 10 categories. Out of these, the top three scorers in each category walked home with an impressive $100,000, $50,000, or $25,000 respectively.

In addition to this, the three, who were declared winners of the competition on the whole, earned themselves prizes worth $150,000, $50,000, or $25,000, respectively.

An application, Sweetdreams, which facilitates in diverting late night calls to the voicemail straight away and also, automatically turns off devices like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi at night in order to preserve battery, was the overall winner.

This was followed by the application What the Doodle!? The application is the online multiplayer adaptation of the Pictionary.

The third prize was bagged by WaveSecure, an application that helps you detect the location your phone is in at a given time. This security tool also helps in locking down and remote wiping your phone, in addition to restoring data.

Other winners
In the education and reference section, the winners were – Plink Art, an application that helps recognize and share art information, Word Puzzle, that aims at helping preschool children learn English words in an enjoyable way and Celeste, an application that helps children learn more about the celestial objects like the Sun, Moon and the solar planets by displaying them through the sky on the camera view.

The entertainment winners included A World of Photo, an application that derives its basic premise from the conventional spin the bottle game, SongDNA, which provides you with information of your favorite tracks and Solo, a pocket guitar for the phone.

The games category had two further divisions. In the arcade/action section, the winners were Speed Forge 3D, Graviturn and Moto X Mayhem. Whereas the winners of the casual/puzzle sections were What the Doodle!?, Totemo, Mazeness.

SweetDreams, SpecTrek and FoxyRing won the prizes in the lifestyle section and Buzz Deck, SPB TV and FxCamera claimed the top spots in the media category of Anderoid.

Productivity/tools winners were WaveSecure, Hoccer and Tasker. The social networking applications to win the prizes were Ce:real - Everyday trends, SocialMuse and SpotMessage.

Trip Journal, iNap: Arrival Alert and Car Locator won prizes in the travel section and Rhythm Guitar, Andrometer and Calton Hill GPSCaddy were awarded in the miscellaneous category.

The competition
Earlier in November, 200 finalists for the second Android Developer Challenge were picked.Google came up with a special Android voting application to select these finalists.

In the first spell, 20 applications were selected for each of the 10 categories in the competition, and later, users again voted for the top three in each category from amongst the 20 selected earlier. The weightage of votes from the users and Google’s official judges was kept at 40 and 60 percent, respectively.