As promised last week, Google today released the software development kit
for its Android. operating system for mobile phones. In an effort to give developers a little extra incentive to create applications on top of Android, it is also announcing a $10 million challenge. The best 50 apps will get initial grants of $25,000 each, followed by ten $100,000 and ten $275,000 grants.
That comes to $5 million. The second $5 million will be reserved for another challenge after handsets have been built. Google is obviously serious about jump-starting Android and the Open Handset Alliance as viable mobile operating system. You don’t see Google giving away $10 million to developers creating OpenSocial apps. Which project do you think is a higher priority?
Oh what I wouldn’t do to be in that little SDK but I do no have the experience I wonder if this will start out some disputes with Apple.
It’s not anything more than a rumor right now, but reports are floating around claiming that “select developers” are already receiving prerelease versions of the upcoming iPhone SDK. The kit is said to already be producing native apps, and development is being compared to other sandboxed APIs like Google’s OpenSocial — apps have “clear limits” on what they can do, and interactions with the OS are mediated, presumably to avoid any security or performance issues. That jives with what Steve-O said about managing access, but again — this is all just a steamy cloud of vaporous nothing till that first app shows up in iTunes.
