Huawei has revealed the winners of the Huawei HMS App Innovation Contest 2021. (Apps UP), from the Middle East and Africa region, the winners include UniAPS, Blind Assistant, and Handyman Calculator.
The Best App Award in the region went to WashyWash, Handyman Calculator, and Coresthetics. The Best Game Award went to Real Car Race Game 3D: Fun New Car Games 2020, LittleAstro, and Scary Teacher 3D, while the Best Social Impact App Award went to Blind Assistant, Limit, and Emergency Buddy. Each of the three categories’ winners will get $15,000 in prize money.
“The Apps UP contest is a great initiative from Huawei, and I hope that we continue to encourage app developers to make apps that are beneficial to society. One advice that I have for developers would be to think more about your onboarding experience, and let users test it out to see what the app does and understand the problems they may face,” said Ahmad Abugosh, an Apps UP MEA judge and Director of Marketing & Learning Programs, AstroLabs Middle East & Africa.
More than 4,000 teams from more than 200 nations competed in the 2021 edition. A jury of prominent industry professionals thoroughly examined all applications based on their originality, social impact, business value, and User Experience (UX). The public voting stage of the competition ended on October 10; public votes accounted for 10% of the final results.
The winners of the eight categories were:
Adam Xiao, Managing Director, HMS and Consumer Cloud Service for HUAWEI Consumer Business Group MEA, said, “Creating functional, smooth, and intelligent applications is not an easy task, and through Huawei HMS App Innovation Contest (Apps UP), we aim to reward the developer industry for their outstanding contribution. This year’s competition was extraordinary due to the quality of apps submitted, and the new categories added garnered tremendous interest, particularly the Women’s Tech Award that saw over 600 submissions globally. We want to congratulate all the winners for their impressive submissions that aim to benefit our societies in different areas.”
The Huawei HMS App Innovation Contest (Apps UP) 2021 kicked up in June and ran for more than 100 days. China, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America were among the regions that submitted entries. The entire prize pool for the competition was US$1 million, with each participating region receiving US$200,000 in cash rewards.
The results were announced at Huawei’s annual developer conference, HDC, which featured presentations on HarmonyOS, smart homes, smart offices, HMS Core, and other topics related to Huawei’s ambitions to create a new ecosystem of boundless possibilities. The number of developers in Huawei’s ecosystem will have surpassed 5.1 million by the end of September 2021, and the number of apps integrated with HMS Core will have surpassed 173,000.
