- Over $45,000 in cash and other prizes were awarded to tvOS developers from around the world in the world’s biggest Apple TV development contest and hackathon
- Grand prize contest winner Takashi Iyoda, who flew in from Japan, took home $25,000 for his title Dungeon Tiles
- Hackathon winners Runtastica and Tune Pop each won $5000
- Over $6,000 in prizes from Twitter, AppsFlyer, Riffsy, GitLab, and Kochava were also awarded
SAN FRANCISCO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 18, 2016 — AppLovin, a mobile marketing platform that provides marketing automation and analytics for brands that want to reach new consumers on mobile, today announced the winners of the Apple TV App Challenge. The Challenge is a months-long Apple TV development contest culminating in a 24-hour tvOS hackathon, the goal of which is to challenge tvOS developers to build the future of television.
Dungeon Tiles, the game that matches 2048 mechanics with RPG sensibilities, won the $25,000 grand prize, followed by Symmetrica and Avian: Twitter Map, which were awarded second and third place respectively. Dungeon Tiles is an immersive game created by Japanese independent developer Takashi Iyoda. Mr. Iyoda traveled from Japan to present his app.
“I think everybody can have games they can use easily,” said Iyoda, adding that he enjoyed the challenge of creating a game on the relative big screen, where he could add more features because of more screen space.
Port winner Dustin Adair said that for him, the process of transforming an iOS game into a tvOS game was a thrill in itself. “But the conversion was painless,” he said. “I’m glad I did it.”
The Hackathon portion of the Challenge was dominated by utility and social apps. The two winners of the Hackathon were Runtastica and Tune Pop. Runtastica is an app that offers an immersive (stationary) running or jogging experience, detecting how fast the user is running in place and notifying friends of milestones reached. Tune Pop is a social music player that features local commenting and user-collaborated playlists.
“Great software comes when great engineering and UX work well together and you iterate together,” said Daniel Schwartz of Runtastica, adding that he is inspired to build more for Apple TV having participated in the event. His teammate Carter Sande, a 16-year-old junior at Livermore Valley Charter Prep, noted that it was surprisingly easy to build an app that worked well with the Apple TV remote.
“It was a great experience,” said Ki Han of Tune Pop, who together with his teammate and colleague Chase Acton participated in a hackathon for the first time. “We had the idea beforehand and the tvOS Hackathon motivated us to get it done.”
One app, a riff on Cards Against Humanity called Gifs Against Humanity, won the AppsFlyer, Kochava and Riffsy prizes. Mybnb, an app for AirBnB hosts that acts as a local guide and virtual concierge, won the Gitlab prize. And ShowShop — a team of two, one of whom traveled from Illinois for the Hackathon — won Twitter’s award for Digits implementation.
“We were absolutely blown away by the level of apps we saw,” said John Krystynak, chief technology officer at AppLovin. “If apps truly are the future of TV, these developers will make sure that the future is very bright indeed.”
About AppLovin
AppLovin's marketing platform provides marketing automation and analytics for brands that want to reach new consumers on mobile and Apple TV apps. The platform enables brands to use real-time data signals to make effective marketing decisions across more than one billion mobile consumers worldwide. AppLovin has about 100 employees and is headquartered in Palo Alto with offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo, and Berlin.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160418006184/en/
Contact:
Moxie Communications Group on behalf of AppLovin
Maggie Squires,
901-230-6514
Email Contact
