PAYPAL X; WHERE COUNTING IS NOT A REQUIREMENT AND COMPLIANCE WITH REQUIREMENTS IS OPTIONAL.
If you ran a competition and stated that; How many entries would you expect to find in the next round? Well, if you’re PayPal, that’ll be 11. And as for “gross abuses”, well, apparently “incentivized voting” (i.e. offering rewards for votes) isn’t a gross abuse (or certainly doesn’t appear to be enough of a gross abuse to warrant doing anything about), which I’m sure is something that any entrant into a voting process would be interested to hear.
AOSP - IN NEED OF LOVE AT BOTH ENDS
After spending some time trying to build a firmware I’ve seen some things which have opened my eyes as to why the Android Open Source Project may not be seeing the kind of community contributions that would be expected of such a high profile project. Other people have shown an interest in knowing my thoughts so I’m going to throw out my top 3 for discussion which will hopefully help to improve things;
BUILDING FIRMWARE... NOT FOR THE INFIRM...
A project I’m working on requires the use of a custom firmware image, so I’ve been exposed to the joy that is trying to build and use the open source version of Android, and to be honest it’s left me a little battered. If you’re on an ADP1, and you’re just looking to build a 1.6 firmware, you’re in for a smooth ride. JBQ and his helpers did a fantastic job and created some easy to follow instructions which you can use to build a firmware image from the donut-plus-aosp branch of the central android repository.
AND GUESS WHAT.... YES, WE DIDN'T MAKE THE CUT.
After all of the problems with seen with the PayPal X Developer Challenge we’re hardly surprised that PortaPayments didn’t make it through to the next round. We have, however, asked for details of the per-entry voting count so that we can see if there were any anomalies in the voting patterns (e.g. 1 or 2 entries with > 50% of the votes), and hopefully I will be able to post these details along with details of any of the final 10 which we identified as not complying with the rules in the near future.
AND ON THE LAST DAY...
I thought that on the final day of voting it would be worth recapping the “experience” which has been our listing as a PayPal X Developers Challenge finalist. For us there are statistics which, to us, indicate that something has not been quite right with the way the contest has been run. These are; PortaPayments was featured in the PayPal FOWA Presentation. PortaPayments wasrecommended in one of the largest on-line Android blogs (Android Guys), and that article was re-tweeted and re-used on other sites.
AND THE PAYPAL X DEVELOPERS CHALLENGE GETS A LITTLE MURKIER..
[Update: Within 12 hours of making this post PayPal made the voting stats public again, briefly, and then they dissapeared once more] Some of you may wonder why I’ve stopped updating a previous post with the current percentage of votes PortaPayments has in the PayPal X Developers challenge. There’s a simple reason; PayPal have taken away the ability to see how many votes have been cast. Whether this has something to do with a sudden leap of 1,000 cast votes over 24 hours a couple of days ago, or being able to see that even though they sent out an email stating they were aware of “Incentivized voting” they hadn’t actually penalised anyone for it, or it could be related to me pointing out that, at one point, the system was showing more votes than users (despite each user only suppose to be able to cast 1 vote), or possibly even if it’s because they don’t like the fact people are making stats about voting available, is completely unknown.
650+ DOWNLOADS, 300+ ACTIVE INSTALLS, AND 8 VOTES OF SUPPORT. TIME TO SUSPEND DEVELOPMENT?
[This body of this post was updated on the at 08:45 GMT - 28th Feb 10 with the latest statistics] When we entered the PayPal X Developers Challenge we hoped for a good result (who doesn’t when they enter a competition?). After the problems we saw with the way it’s being run we decided to use the number of votes we received to determine what to do with the project in the future.
A PAYPAL DEVELOPER CHALLENGE EXPERIENCE
Update : I’ve put a list of 17 apps out of the current 54 which we believe don’t comply with the rules. You can find the list here. Towards the middle of December 2009 I came across details of the PayPal X Developer Challenge, which is a contest to write apps using PayPals adaptive APIs. There were two prizes, one of $50,000 cash $50,000 in PayPal fees, the other $25,000 cash $25,000 in fees.
WHY "NEW CUSTOMER ONLY" DEALS ARE BAD FOR REGULAR PAYMENT BUSINESSES.
I thought the effect of “New customer only” deals on long term business were well understood, but, in the last month, I’ve seen some examples which show that some companies still haven’t grasped their long term effects. Its' true that “new customer only” deals get people through the door (which every business needs), but for businesses that survive on regular payments (e.g. subscriptions or credit repayments), or want customers to continue to use them, it also has a crippling side effect.
EXPERIENCES OF IN-APP MOBILE ADVERTISING
With my companies Funky Expenses Android applicaion we have two versions; An ad-supported version and a pay-for ad-free version so that users can choose how they help to fund development (yes, we do get requests for a free ad-free version, but unfortunately that won’t keep the company afloat). The ad-free version is available from Google Market (which currently has the largest user base by a long way) and AndAppStore, and the pay for version is only available in Google Market.