We are very pleased to announce the winners of the Tizen App Challenge [2], a contest that awarded over $4M in prizes to app developers. 54 prizes were awarded to top ranked Tizen apps across 9 categories. In addition, the top rated HTML5 apps received $50,000 each.

We were very impressed with the breadth, quality, and quantity of the submissions. In fact, it took a great deal of effort to narrow down the winners, particularly in the games categories.

In the process, we also learned some interesting things about the Tizen developer community. In a survey of developers involved in the Tizen App Challenge, over 90% said that the Tizen development tools [3] met or exceeded their expectations. Roughly half of the submissions were HTML5 and the other half were native. A third of the community considers themselves pure native developers, a third are pure HTML5, and the remainder are a hybrid of the two. As expected, the vast majority of Tizen developers also develop for other platforms.

Which brings us to another point. Many of the apps that were submitted also appear on other platforms. This was expected and encouraged. It's become increasingly common for app developers to use middleware like Marmalade, Sencha, Unity, Cocos2d-x, and others [4] to develop apps, and with Tizen as one of the export targets it makes sense to get them into the store. In addition, we saw a large number of HTML5 apps that were already written for other platforms ported to Tizen specifically for the challenge. In one notable case, one of the grand prize winners took three days to adapt an existing (and quite extensive) HTML5 app for Tizen.

Perhaps most impressive was the fact that in order to be eligible, these apps couldn't have received direct funding from Samsung or Intel to create a Tizen version. Most apps came from independent developers and development shops with less than 15 people.

Once again, thanks to everyone who submitted. It was fantastic to see so much variety from so many talented developers.

Keep on hacking!