The App Store and controversy go hand in hand. There have been several apps which have been rejected from the App Store for the most weirdest reason and several weird one’s which have been approved, and have left people scratching their heads as to how they got in.

It looks like Apple is upping the App Store ante a bit and going all after their main challenger, Google, by asking a developer to remove the word “Android” from the app description.

The app in question is Flash in Genius, who were a finalist in the Google Android Developer’s Challenge and had mentioned about it in their app description as seen in the screenshot above. However, the folks at Apple were less than happy about this and sent a email to them which you can read below.

Dear Flash of Genius, LLC,

Thank you for submitting Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab 2.2 to the App Store.  During our review of your application, we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections.

Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhoneApp Store.  While your application has not been rejected, it would be appropriate  to remove “Finalist in Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge!”  from the Application Description [Emphasis added].

Please log into iTunes Connect to make appropriate changes to the Application Description now to avoid an interruption in the availability of Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab 2.2 on the iPhoneApp Store.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program

According to the email, Apple has threatened the developer to remove the Android mention or face the removal of the app from theApp store. Agreed that Apple makes good business for developers, but this incident definitely says much about them and how they treat competition.

This makes me wonder if Apple allows their own employees to use a Nokia or Android based phone in their work environment? Or will they send employees a sack notice because they use one?

[via Techie Buzz]

In another effort to help it combat Apple’s wildly popular App Store, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) showed off the winners of its second Android Developer Challenge.

The contest includes a variety of judges from places like Google, T-Mobile, MTV, and Twitter, and it names the best Android mobile applications across various categories like education, entertainment, games, media, and productivity. The overall winner received $250,000, while the winner in each category received up to $100,000.

The overall winner was an app called “SweetDreams,” which will send late-night phone calls directly to voice mail depending on what the user specifies. An app called “What the Doodle!?” nabbed second place by offering Android users a real-time online multiplayer drawing game. The “WaveSecure” app took third place and it enables users to back up data, wipe data remotely, or lock down a phone remotely if it’s lost or stolen.

The cash prizes will likely be well-received as there are growing reports that many developers are having trouble making significant profits with Android apps. A recent survey by Skyhook found 57% of developers were unhappy with their Android app profits.

Some developers have complained that with the growing number of Android devices with different screen sizes and input methods, it is becoming difficult to optimize programs. Additionally, developers have complained about Android users’ relatively low download rates, as well as the requirement to use Google Checkout for buying programs.

By comparison, Apple’s app platform is relatively more streamlined because there are only three iPhones in the lineup, and many users already have credit cards tied into the iTunes ecosystem. But the App Store is not without its faults either, as Apple acts as a strict gatekeeper and some developers say its approval process can be arbitrary or unfair.

By Marin Perez

[via InformationWeek]

Overall Winners

	SweetDreams SweetDreams is a revolutionary tool that will finally allow you to go to sleep without worrying about changing your phone settings in order to avoid unwelcome late night calls. You can even use those inactivity periods to save battery power as well, and of course forget about enabling WiFi, Bluetooth or ringtones volume …
	What the Doodle!? ‘WTD!?’ is a real-time online multiplayer game where one player tries to draw out a given phrase and others try to guess it. Features FFA and Team games, Global Highscores, Personal Face Doodles, integrated Voice Recognition and more! Real-time drawing!? Built for performance, you’ll really see the magic at first doodle!
	WaveSecure WaveSecure is a complete mobile security solution that protects your device, data and privacy. 1. Track your phone’s location and who is using it 2. Lock down your phone remotely, making it worthless to the thief 3. Backup all your data 4. Wipe out your data remotely 5. Restore your data May the phone be with you!

Education/Reference Winners

	Plink Art Plink Art is an app for identifying, discovering and sharing art. Take a photo of a painting, and the Plink Art servers will try to identify it. You can also browse our database of artwork by keyword or timeline and share your discoveries with friends.
	Word Puzzle The Word Puzzle is designed to provide a fun way to learn basic English words for preschool children. Kids can study spelling and pronunciation with flash card and check achievement with word puzzle. Interesting visual and sound interaction with awarding system helps kids to keep learning. Let kids play with your Android.
	Celeste An educational augmented reality app that displays the Sun, Moon, planets and their paths through the sky onto your camera view. You can navigate through the sky selecting celestial bodies to display interesting information about our solar system. See the exact spot on your horizon where the sun will rise and set.

Entertainment Winners

	A World of Photo Loosely inspired by the traditional “Spin the bottle”, A World of Photo is a casual, geographic worldwide multiplayer online game with a social touch. Players spin their phones and will receive a photo from whomever in the world they pointed to. For best play experience, let the app run in the background.
	SongDNA Need any information on a song? Practicing for a big karaoke gig? Music quiz coming up tomorrow? The SongDNA widget allows you to quickly look up your favorite song’s detailed information. It includes the lyrics, artist’s bio, homepage, highest chart rank and video. Handy when you’re training for your next karaoke gig!!
	Solo Solo is a great, easy to play and feature rich pocket guitar for your phone. A must for all guitar enthusiasts! Features include -Huge chord library with 380+ chords & diagrams -Load/save chord layouts -Play along with music on your phone -Overlay music & lyrics from the internet -Various strum modes, including shake strum

Games: Arcade/Action Winners

	Speed Forge 3D Speed Forge: Heavy duty hover vehicles, normally used for mining are now seen in illegal races organized in abondoned factories and dark Marsian alleys. The rock crushing explosives once used in these machines now serve a different purpose…
	Graviturn Tilt your phone to move the red circles out of the screen while keeping the green circles. Infinite levels from very easy to nearly impossible. Compare your performance with other players after each level (online highscore and statistics).
	Moto X Mayhem Jump, lean, and race through seven levels of amazing motorbike action in the best side scrolling bike game! Lean forward and back on your motorbike as you climb hills and fly through the air using accelerometer technology. Witness realistic physics as your shocks recoil when you land jumps! Or just flick your rider around!!

Games: Casual/Puzzle Winners

	What the Doodle!? ‘WTD!?’ is a real-time online multiplayer game where one player tries to draw out a given phrase and others try to guess it. Features FFA and Team games, Global Highscores, Personal Face Doodles, integrated Voice Recognition and more! Real-time drawing!? Built for performance, you’ll really see the magic at first doodle!
	Totemo Unloose the spirit. Break the spell. Uncover the mystery hidden between the realms in a unique puzzle game. Storm your brain and relax your mind solving over 60 mind-soothing logic tasks. Play the survival mode for extra challenge and write your name into the on-line leaderboards. http://hexage.net
	Mazeness The goal of the game is rather simple – you need to bring all the balls ( up to 4 per level!) to their goals at the same time, with help of barriers, teleports and holders. It seems simple at first, but it’s not that easy. The difficulty is growing steadily from level to level.

Lifestyle Winners

	SweetDreams SweetDreams is a revolutionary tool that will finally allow you to go to sleep without worrying about changing your phone settings in order to avoid unwelcome late night calls. You can even use those inactivity periods to save battery power as well, and of course forget about enabling WiFi, Bluetooth or ringtones volume …
	SpecTrek Improve your fitness with this revolutionary augmented reality ghost hunting game. Walk or run around using GPS and your phone’s camera to find and catch virtual ghosts. You will experience a new adventure each SpecTrekking session. The game offers statistics, awards, titles, records, and most of all a whole lot of fun!
	FoxyRing FoxyRing makes your phone smarter by analyzing the ambient noise and adjust the ringer volume. Also: – Sleeping hours to silent your phone during the night. – Geolocated ringer profiles, change ringtone or make your phone vibrate only at work! – Widget to silent your phone for a timed period. – Great interface

Media Winners

	Buzz Deck BuzzDeck is the quick and easy way to get all the web content you care about most. Flick through your daily hit of favourite news topics. And get Twitter & Facebook updates alongside. BuzzDeck learns what you like and recommends cool new stuff. Simple, elegant & fast. NB: No landscape mode yet. http://mippin.com/buzzdeck
	SPB TV SPB TV is a highly usable IP-TV solution, optimized to run on mobile devices. SPB TV provides users with lots of channels in multiple languages with easy-to-use features and settings. No subscription fee! Requires a reliable 3G or WiFi network connection for proper streaming. Full-featured 60-days trial.
	FxCamera FxCamera enables you to take a picture with various effects. – ToyCam (Toy Camera Emulator) – Polandroid – Fisheye – Warhol (Andy Warhol-izer) – Normal *this app requires SD card*

Productivity/Tools Winners

	WaveSecure WaveSecure is a complete mobile security solution that protects your device, data and privacy. 1. Track your phone’s location and who is using it 2. Lock down your phone remotely, making it worthless to the thief 3. Backup all your data 4. Wipe out your data remotely 5. Restore your data May the phone be with you!
	Hoccer Hoccer is your application for ad-hoc data exchange. Use gestures to “throw” your data through the air and let the recipients “catch” it. There is no need for prior exchange of contact details.
	Tasker Tasker let’s you link any Task (action set) to the Contexts (application, time, day, location, event, widget press) where it should run. Send an SMS at 3:15 Monday, make per-app settings or locks, map camera button to a menu, launch music app on headphone insert, timelapse photos, encrypt on-the-fly, the list is endless!

Social Networking Winners

	Ce:real – Everyday trends Ce:real, What’s happening in this world? Are you curious about real world? How about North Pole or an edge of Africa? Also, it can be your neighborhood. It is offering to you hot photo stories with Twitter trends keyword which has speed of lights. Enjoy millions of happenings in real world and you participate in it as well.
	SocialMuse Check out what users on the other side of the world are listening to! Find people with similar musical taste, or just explore the world through music. Browse other users’ music libraries, listen to previews of their songs, and buy them if you like them. Check out their profiles on MySpace, Facebook and Last.fm.
	SpotMessage SpotMessage is a communication tool using GPS. Send a message designating a spot with Google Maps then the message will be notified when the recipient arrives at the spot. SpotMsg finds various uses; as an alarm reminding you of a task at a certain spot or for sending your friend a surprise message on his or her arrival.

Travel Winners

	Trip Journal Trip Journal is the ultimate trip tracking and sharing solution currently available on Android powered Smartphones. Impress your friends by sending them real time updates from the places you are visiting. GPS route tracking, record waypoints, photos & notes, trip statistics, KMZ & Picasa exports, incorporated Google Maps.
	iNap: Arrival Alert Ever wanted to get some sleep during a train ride, or a quick powernap on the bus to work? You either hoped to wake just in time not to miss your station, or set an alarm to wake you far too early… Using your phone’s GPS it will determine where you are, and wake you when you are close to your destination!
	Car Locator Save your location whenever you park, and Car Locator will navigate you back to your car should you ever have trouble finding it. – Points in direction of your car using GPS and compass – Radar view, map view, and split view – Parking timer alarm GPS and compass must be enabled. This free version expires after 25 runs.

Misc Winners

	Rhythm Guitar Plays like a real 6-string, 5-fret guitar. Strum and pick chords, make new chords, string them together to create songs, transpose songs to fit your vocal range. Great for songwriting, chord reference, learning radio hits, or even plugging into speakers and pedals.
	Andrometer Andrometer allows you to measure the approximate distance from you to an object that you can see. Uses GPS, accelerometer and geomagnetic sensor. Tips: – Keep as steady as possible – The further you walk, the more accurate the measurement – Must be outdoors with clear view of sky – Works best under 1 km
	Calton Hill GPSCaddy GPSCaddy allows golfers to quickly and easily map any golf course either out on the course using GPS or in the comfort of home using satellite imagery. Then, when they are playing the course, it uses GPS to tell them exactly how far they are from the significant features of the hole they are playing (green, bunkers, etc).

Over the next several weeks, Android 1.6 will be rolling out to customers via an over-the-air update. In addition to a number of user-facing features such as a new Android Market and a faster camera application, the Donut branch has a few goodies for developers as well. This article explores how to get 1.6 right now, and the developer-facing features inside.

Can’t wait for the regular update? The 1.6 SDK is available for download now. It contains an emulator for a virtual Android device so you can develop and test your programs on your desktop machine. Windows, Linux, and MacOS are supported.

Want to see it running on a real phone? If you have an ADP1 or Google Ion phone, download the latest version from the HTC support site. Be sure to follow the link specifically for your hardware: Android Dev Phone 1, and Google I/O Device (Ion). I tried the directions for the Ion and they worked like a charm.

For other kinds of phones such as the T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch3G, Taylor Wimberly and Ben Marvin have written a couple of articles that have downloading and install instructions. Be sure to read all the warnings and comments about potential problems with a manual update, especially if you are running a custom or rooted Android ROM.

Now that you have 1.6, let’s look at the developer-facing changes in the new version.

1.6 is a minor release of Android, which means that there are only a handful of changes in the Android application programming interface (API). The official API diffs page lists 538 removals, additions, and other changes to the API between 1.5 (Cupcake) and 1.6 (Donut). However this number is misleading. When a class is deprecated in one place and moved to another, every method and field in the class is counted twice. So the actual number of changes is much lower. Here are the highlights:

• Support for multiple screen sizes and densities. Applications targeting 1.6 are assumed to support different screen densities and sizes. They can still explicitly specify screen support either way with the supports-screens manifest tag.
• New permissions. 1.6 programs must explicitly request the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission to be able to modify the contents of the SD card, and they must explicitly request the READ_PHONE_STATE permission to be able to be able to retrieve phone state info. Apps targeting earlier versions will always request these permissions implicitly.
• New audio sources. In 1.6, you can record audio from the VOICE_CALL, VOICE_DOWNLINK, and VOICE_UPLINK channels (hardware permitting).
• Path-based permissions. In 1.5 you either had full access or no access to all the paths exposed by a Content Provider. In 1.6 the developer can restrict access based on particular paths.
• Gesture strokes. Android 1.6 provides some limited support for defining gestures (distinctive finger movements) in your own applications. So far, none of the standard apps have taken advantage of this.
• WiFi multicast. This will make it possible for apps running on the same WiFi network to discover and talk to each other.
• OpenGL changes. Some of the classes in javax.microedition.khronos have been deprecated and moved to android.opengl. I’m not really sure they will stay there though, so there’s no urgency to change your code. More interesting are the hints that Android will be supporting OpenGL 2.0 in a future release. You can now specify the OpenGL version number that you require in your Android manifest.
• CDMA support. Unless you’re generating GSM/CDMA tones in your program you probably don’t care about this.
• android.os.Build.VERSION_CODES. Before making a call to a new API, you can test to see which version of Android you are running on.

By far, the most important change in 1.6 is support for different screen sizes. This is the only change in 1.6 that most developers need to worry about. 1.6 is the first release that can really support screens that are larger or smaller than the standard 320×480 HVGA display that has been used so far on all Android phones. The first phone to take advantage of this will likely be the HTC Tatoo, which will have a 240×320 screen. The Motorola Sholes/Tao, due out later this year, will have a 480×800 screen, and some netbooks will use 480×854 or bigger.

When running an older application on a 1.6 phone, Android will attempt to scale the user interface to the new size. However, it doesn’t always do a great job of this. Small screens are particularly difficult to support so on those phones Google decided to limit the Market so that 1.5 apps will not even appear in the list of available applications users can download. So it’s important that all Android programs be updated sooner or later to target the new version. In a future article I’ll explore how you can have a single program that support multiple screen sizes and versions of Android.

by Ed Burnette

[via ZDNet]

The official Android Developer blog has today announced that the second Android Developer Challenge is now open for submissions.

App developers are required to submit their applications to one of ten categories which include:

• Education/Reference
• Games: Casual/Puzzle
• Games: Arcade/Action
• Social Networking
• Lifestyle
• Productivity/Tools
• Media
• Entertainment
• Travel
• Misc

For each of the ten categories, the following prizes will be awarded:

• 1st prize: $100,000
• 2nd prize: $50,000
• 3rd prize: $25,000

With overall prizes available across all categories:

• 1st prize: $150,000 (meaning the overall winner will receive $250,000)
• 2nd prize: $50,000 (meaning the 2nd prize winner will receive up to $150,000)
• 3rd prize: $25,000 (meaning the 3rd prize winner will receive up to $125,000)

Entrants are reminded that all submissions must be entered before 11:59:59pm Pacific Time in the United States on August 31, 2009.

The Developer blog also stresses the importance of using only published APIs for the submitted applications, as some judges may be testing the apps on new or untested Android handsets.

Plan on entering the challenge? Let us know in the comments!

android-developers.blogspot.com + code.google.com/android/adc/

[via Talk Android]