Below is the email from Google detailing the score breakdown of SplashPlay’s submission for Android Phase 1. Even though we didn’t score well in the ‘Effective Use’ category, we still managed to get short-listed

Again, i feel the pain of the other 1,738 non-winners (loosers is not the right word) and hope the developers can dig deep and both support the short-listed candidates and also fellow non-winners as many seem to be very despondent with the whole judging process; bringing new technology to market isn’t the easiest task and trying to please so many people is bound to ruffle a few feathers.

Hi,

Thanks again for participating in the Android Developer Challenge. We have had a lot of constructive feedback from our developer partners who have contributed to the success of the challenge. In listening to the feedback, we heard that participants would like more visibility into the ranking of their entries. As you know, entries were judged on the following criteria: Effective Use, Polish, Indispensability, Originality. Due to the large number of high quality entries, many of the submissions received scores that are extremely close to each other. That’s why a single individual score would provide less information than the relative ranking of each submission when compared to the other submissions.

Below is the percentile ranking for your application in these four categories and the overall score. The first set of scores is for the percentile ranking for specific categories; for example, it shows how your application ranked among all the other apps in “Effective use”, “Polish”, “Indispensability”, and “Originality”. The final score shows your application’s overall ranking among all of the submissions.

SplashPlay

Effective use: In the 25th to 50th percentile of all submitted applications
Polish: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Indispensability: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Originality: In the top 25% of all submitted applications
Overall: In the top 25% of all submitted applications

Thank you,
Android Developer Challenge Team