Android Developer Challenge: helpful innovation, powered by On-Device Machine Learning + you!

Posted by The Android team

Developers like you have always played an important role in shaping the direction of Android, fueling the wave of Android innovation. It’s the reason that when we first launched the SDK for Android 10+ years ago, we simultaneously announced the Android Developer Challenge: a way to help reward model apps and show us what user problems you wanted to solve. As Android continues to push the boundaries into emerging areas like ML, 5G, foldables and more, we need your help to bring to life the consumer experiences that will define these new frontiers.

So we’re bringing back the Android Developer Challenge and asking you to help us unlock new experiences on Android, and help inspire other developers around these emerging technologies.

As we kick off this challenge, the first area we’ll be focusing on is On-Device Machine Learning. At Google, we’re big believers in how this new technology can open up a world of helpful innovation so you can get things done in ways you never thought possible. Take Live Captions: for the almost 500 million people who are deaf and hard of hearing, Live Captions bring content to life and is exactly the type of machine learning-powered innovation we expect to see more of someday, and with your help we can turn someday into today!

Bringing your idea to life in front of billions of eyes

Got an idea? Whether it’s still a concept or ready for users, tell us how you could use Google’s help, and how it supports the mission of using machine learning to help people get something done. Join the #AndroidDeveloperChallenge topic on GitHub, and share your idea as a repository under this topic. Don’t forget to come back here and officially submit your concept.

We’ll pick 10 concepts and provide expertise and guidance to those developers to help in their plans to bring their ideas to fruition. And once the app is ready, we’ll help showcase it in front of the billions of users on Google Play, through a collection and more. Here’s what those 10 developers will get:

Expertise and development support bootcamp: We’ll work with you to provide expertise and guidance to help in your plans to bring your app from concept to reality, including:

• An all-expenses paid, working session with a panel of experts at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA
• Google engineer mentorship at the bootcamp, providing guidance and technical expertise on how to help your plans to bring your app to fruition

Exposure and street cred! Once your idea is ready for prime-time, we’ll help you get users, and celebrate you to the broader Android community, including:

• A collection on Google Play where we’ll feature your app (apps must be ready for Google Play on May 1, and must meet Google’s minimum quality requirements)
• Tickets to Google I/O 2020
• And we’ll celebrate these experiences to the broader Android developer community on developers.android.com. We might even showcase you at Google I/O, in places like the sandbox, sessions, perhaps even a keynote!

Helpful innovation is an important investment area for us on the Android team, and On-Device Machine Learning has played a critical role in powering new features in the last several releases of Android. We’re just beginning to scratch the surface, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!