GSMA Smarter App Challenge

Consumer demand for innovative smartphone applications has grown dramatically over the past few years; there are now more than 1 million apps available worldwide with more than 19,000 new apps  being added each week according to mobile analytics firm Distimo. 

The high demand for mobile applications has resulted in a greatly increased signaling load on mobile networks, compared with a relatively low amount of data traffic. A driver behind this increased load is the proliferation of “network-unfriendly” applications which are not optimised for mobile networks.   As a result, the GSMA is looking for the world’s “smartest” mobile apps as a way to showcase great design and show how the best apps protect users’ battery life, use the radio network in the most efficient way, are always connected and provides an amazing user experience.

For the past 3 months the GSMA has been running the “Smarter App Challenge”, a competition where app developers were asked to showcase their apps using a short video to explain how their apps are network friendly.

“Following a 3 month submission period where 39,000 unique visitors from six continents visited the www.mobileappchallenge.com/smarterapp web site, over 1,000 visitors downloaded the brief and app efficiency developer guidelines and a total of 97 entries were submitted!

We’re delighted to announce the winner of the 2012 Smarter App Challenge is Jun-ho Choi of aFactory, from Seoul, South Korea for his app “Flowit Restaurant”.  After three rounds of judging, where the 97 moderated entries were ultimately reduced to a shortlist of three finalists who were all invited to Shanghai to attend the final competition at Mobile Asia Expo 2012.  Jun-ho won $10,000 for his “Smarter App”. 

The runner-up winners were Kyung Hum Kang from South Korea with his Metro Wizard app and Marco Valent of the Netherlands for his New Dance Tracks entry,  Each of the runner-sups were presented with $2,000.

To view the all of the Smarter App Challenge entries, go to http://www.youtube.com/user/AppChallenge and click on the “Smarter App Challenge” playlist.