{ADC 2 is here to rock the world of Android Developers again!}

ADC 2 has been announced at the Google site. When Android was announced on 5 November, 2007, Google also announced a $10 million Android Developer Challenge, split into two separate $5 million events. ADC 1 with a $5 million prize money attracted 1700 entries and 50 winners. ADC 2 has a prize kitty of $1,925,000 split amongst 30 winners . Can we expect an ADC 3 for the remaining $3,075,000 ?.

Compared to investments of Apple, which has a $100 million fund to seed iPhone applications, and RIM, which has $150 million fund to seed Blackberry applications, the Google investment is a far cry away.

Judging for ADC 2 is different from ADC 1 in that there will be 30 winners against the 50 last year, and 45% of weightage for an application is decided by the community vote and 55% by the judges.
It is mandatory to submit applications that run on Android 1.5 and be in English, and those that are unpublished and non-upgraded.

ADC2 will have two rounds of judging, the first round results in 200 apps total(in 10 categories), that will proceed to the second round. Out of which 30 entries will be winners with 3 entries within the 30 picking up the prizes in the overall winners category.

The contest is expected to start in August 09 and winning entries declared by November 09. We could see a drop in the Android market uploads, as the opportunity cost of waiting is pretty high. We could also see a host of entries in the Lite version (Full-featured with expiry time), so popular applications could potentially rake in money in both places (ADC 2 and The Android Market).

One bone of contention is the ‘Supposed ban on Open Source apps ‘ My comments here.