Hey all it is me again! Nothing to update you all on right now but wanted to leave a personal message before the winners are announced. This past week all I can think of is WOW, over 3k submissions?! Like seriously! That is so crazy and I have said it before but I am truly blown away by the quality. I really hope a majority of these apps go on to become household staples. There were so many in my opinion that have the potential to be peoples go-to everyday apps. It’s been awesome watching video after video after video after video… of your incredible creations:) I think collectively there were over 400 hours of videos watched.
Choosing the winners was tough. Not only because of the sheer number but also because there were so many amazing apps. For judges I truly felt bad because of how good the apps were. If you were ranked a top app then you were reviewed and scored by expert teams and lots of people at Google. Each app was probably seen by 2-3 people And yeah, the videos were a HUGE factor a bigger factor than I had envisioned when launching the competition (who knew?! ). Big shout-out to one of my favorite peers for helping me try to explain it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niepTetuUo
Also because I feel like you cannot capture all of the submissions glory with just a select group of winners I will be sharing (in a blog) my favorite apps in the coming weeks. I will also release an honorable mention (will have maybe the top 10-25 highest graded) on ai.google.dev/competition both will be done after some PTO lol. Can’t wait to celebrate all the winners with you this week though! If there are harsh comments or critics about the competition my schedule just opened up so happy to talk through those as well. I genuinely mean that as I want to learn what I could have done better for next time!
This whole competition has been a wild ride! From my coworkers DeLorean idea last year one fall afternoon to getting Christopher Lloyd on board… it’s been pure madness (in the best way possible). Learned a ton, and yeah, maybe made a few mistakes along the way. But hey, that’s how we grow, right? As I mentioned above I appreciate and accept all criticism on how this could have been better so that way next time it’s that much better. I know more proactivity in these forum spaces was desired and if I do this again I will make sure to have more resources allocated. As well as timing on the initial winner announcement… believe me I did not delay on purpose. There were just so many submissions to get through. What started as a side project turned into my full time job so thank you all for being patient and working with me.
The Biggest takeaway of them all though? You all are AMAZING. Just flat out thank you all for caring and competing. A huge thank you to the people that helped answer questions when they came up I see you and appreciate that. Seriously, some of the apps you all built in just 3 months… mind-blowing! If I could have given everyone a prize, I would have. Well maybe not everyone but A LOT of people. Next time I will make sure there are more awards.
Thanks for sticking with me, for your passion, and for sharing your incredible talent with the world. This definitely isn’t my last rodeo… next time, I’ll be even more prepared and have an even bigger prize!
p.s. this isn’t my last message but I wanted to share what has been on my mind this week.
Thanks to the team, we finally made it to the end of this journey. I learned a lot during the process of making the submission, from technical perspectives to other related skills like video editing and condensing a lot of information into 3 minutes to highlight essential features. Congratulations to all the finalists!
Congrats to all winners. Winning is just one part. However, the rules were clear and you break your own rules by just selecting apps from demo videos. If there were too many submissions, many apps were just a repetition that could be rejected right away. i.e. Fitness, Diet planning. Filtration was very easy. Somebody shared with me a list of all the apps submitted. I checked more than half of the apps within a day. That is a useless excuse. If you just need to select apps from demo videos then how you can give points based on execution? Many good developers and great ideas created simple videos. My app was also simple and I was not expecting to be a winner but at least I was expecting that it would be tested and judged fairly.
By who? From the message it looks like somebody or few people filter out the “top apps” and THEN judges took a look using a scoring system. If this is correct the results will be very biased.
I do not know whether this was judge traffic but I noticed on Google / Firebase Analytics three users with random @example.com email ids accessing my app Peti-peti.com around 8th Nov from New York, Dublin, Hoofddorp, Bosrdman, Lulea… I also noticed a slight spike in access to my YouTube video around that time (but could not identify the locations).
But it looks like Peti-Peti.com didn’t get very far as I have not received any email ! There are so many more deserving apps so if these were Google experts taking a closer look that’s good enough for me!!
Maybe they selected videos based on the People’s Choice award or YouTube views. Many big companies also submitted their apps for the competition. They asked their employee or remote developer to submit it so that it looks like a recent startup. However, they have been working on it for more than a year or 2. They have all the resources to get views and push their apps for people’s choice awards, creating beautiful and appealing demo videos. If you are an independent developer, it is very difficult to manage all. If you have a good team then you can distribute work and create a good demo video. My focus was on execution. I wanted to create a good demo video but I did not have time left.
I hope we make this an annual thing. There’s Ludum Dare for games and something like PennApps/MHacks for hackathons, but not many are that prominent and consistent. It’ll probably be good to have something that’s like the Olympics of hackathons and hey, it’s probably good marketing to do it consistently. If that happens, it would also be cool to have like another award a year later to honor the best production app that participated in the competition.
Honestly, I think it’s unfair that the winners won because of a nice video, while for my project, I spent three months developing the app and only 6 hours making the video. If I had known that, I would have spent three months on the video and 6 hours on the app instead. I was the sole developer for this complete app, which had over 30,000 lines of code in total. I’m sure the best apps have the worst videos. And nowhere in the rules did it state that someone would be selected based on the best video.
If it was already proven that the audience award didn’t send data anywhere and you could vote multiple times, what makes you think that all the winning apps were selected based on the idea and not just a nice video?
It is not about winning. There is very little chance of winning because there are only 10 prizes. The issue is about grading and testing. @Jesus_Castillo said, he spent a lot of time programming, and if his app is not tested then the question is why it is not tested? I do not know if this is the right word or not but I think they go for glamour not quality. I also think big companies were involved because of the huge prize money. Maybe they also included this factor. I have years of working experience with startups and startups that look very appealing actually fail in the future. Sometimes they succeed in getting huge funds just because of their marketing strategy. Startups that nobody think about become successful.
@Lloyd_Hightower so, as you mentioned, the winners will be announced this week, either today or in the next two days. Please, don’t make the mistake of choosing winning apps that don’t truly deserve it, or apps that have no real impact, can’t be genuinely useful, or can’t change the world as highlighted in the featured video in your post. Apps chosen by Some Google gemini competitions, like the ones I recently saw in a post here (response to your previous post about the updates on technology awards), which transform dog gestures into code or brain activity into music in another hackathon… (everyone in the professional field mocks them, just look at the comments everywhere…), are simply nonsensical and pointless [the idea about theses apps is like when you have nothing to add, you invent nonsensical things that are not useful , no sense, to make them seem innovative…] . I also think it makes no sense to announce the winners this week and then wait until after your PTO to see the honorable mentions. Why not do it all at once? It should be done in a single announcement? If it’s not possible to announce the honorable mentions this week, then postpone the entire announcement until after your PTO. It’s simple (Because there’s no reason to separate the two announcements since you already have the top-graded apps, right? Or is there a “compelling” reason for that?: It’s simple, there’s no reason.
I’ve been working on my idea since the competition started and have added too many AI features to give users the best experience and make it easy to use. The project is complex, and it might be something my country needs.
I’m working hard to complete it soon and will share it once it’s launched.
I think apps with the best videos win because that’s the easiest way for Google to showcase how good Gemini is to the world.
This whole competition is basically a way to get the public to make promo videos for Gemini, and all it cost Google was $1m and a car, as opposed to spending $millions on a marketing company to make something fluffy at best.
Like seriously! That is so crazy and I have said it before but I am truly blown away by the quality. I really hope a majority of these apps go on to become household staples. There were so many in my opinion that have the potential to be peoples go-to everyday apps. It’s been awesome watching video after video after video after video… of your incredible creations:) I think collectively there were over 400 hours of videos watched.
). Big shout-out to one of my favorite peers for helping me try to explain it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niepTetuUo
If there are harsh comments or critics about the competition my schedule just opened up so happy to talk through those as well. I genuinely mean that as I want to learn what I could have done better for next time!
