Huawei has announced the top 20 finalists for the Huawei HMS App Innovation Contest, Apps UP, for developers around APAC, with shortlisted apps now open for public voting.
The Apps UP contest is now open to developers in Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, Latin America and China.
From 21 October to 5 November, the public can view and cast a vote for their favourite apps at the contest website. The judges’ scores weigh 80% of the final result, while the public votes accounts for the remaining 20%.
Each region will hold a separate final in October. The judging panel will rank the 20 shortlisted works according to a comprehensive scoring formula, in which the judging panel and public rating scores are added.
The 20 finalists span across multiple service categories, including mobile games, social, lifestyle, education and more to address different users’ needs. The list of shortlisted apps include:
- Bungkusit Rider
- Cake Recipes
- Camy
- Cookbook Recipes
- Cut Slice Perfect: Good cut
- DinoMao – Real Claw Machine Game
- Epic Cards Battle: Dragons Rising
- Fave – Deal, Pay, eCard
- GStep Step Counter, Pedometer & Running Tracker
- Investa Vtrade
- Kumu
- Learn Crafts and DIY Arts
- Malaysia Calendar
- Money Manager 365
- Nestia
- Niyay Dek-D
- SPICK & SPAN
- SplitNow
- Stick Battle Fight: Super Heroes Warriors
- Torrac: Not Getting Along
Prizes and wider benefits
- USD$1 million in total funded by the Shining-Star Program, in cash prizes in the following categories: Best App, Best Game, Best Social Impact App, Most Popular App, Honourable Mention
- Opportunity to compete on a global stage and showcase technical ability using leading HMS Core
- Discussion with industry experts and Apps UP’s expert judging panel
- Global media promotion opportunities
- Free access to Huawei Developer events, courses and certifications
HMS Core 5.0
Huawei launched Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) Core 5.0 for global developers last month, introducing services in seven main areas including App Services, Graphics, Media, AI, Smart Device, Security, and System for developers to make the most of Huawei’s “chip-device-cloud” capabilities
HMS (HUAWEI Mobile Services) is Huawei’s own service framework used to replace Google GMS services. HMS Core is a collection of Huawei cloud services and mobile service open capabilities. It is a platform that provides basic services for application development.
It aggregates Huawei terminal core-end-cloud capabilities, including a full set of open HMS Apps, HMS Core, HMS Capabilities, HMS Connect, and corresponding development and testing IDE tools.
If you’re a developer, HMS Core helps you enhance your app’s user experience by providing features such as push notifications, quick logins, in-app payments, machine learning, as well as map and game services.
As of March 2020, Huawei’s global monthly active users has reached 650 million, a year-on-year increase of 25 percent. Additionally, there are 1.4 million registered developers worldwide, a 115 percent growth over the last year. The number of apps integrated with HMS Core has also exceeded 60,000 globally, demonstrating 67 percent year-on-year growth.
HMS Core 5.0 is a successor to HMS Core 4.0 with more than 20 newly added capabilities to meet the growing needs of developers worldwide. The 4.0 version has already established diverse open capabilities ranging from AI to security, while the newly launch HMS Core 5.0 takes one step further to offer expanded capabilities such as Computer Graphics (CG) Kit, AR Engine, Accelerate Kit, Scene Kit, and more to provide a comprehensive solution for app development.
Following are the key highlights of HMS Core 5.0 services:
- Computer Graphics Kit helps accelerate the adoption of CG in apps, which will especially benefit the motion picture and gaming industries in creating richer and innovative content. With the improved Physically Based Rendering (PBR) algorithm, developers are enabled to accurately represent real-world materials in the mobile game.
- AR Engine offers a wide range of AR-related capabilities such as motion, environment, human body and face tracking, for developers to create an interactive and immersive AR experiences easily.
- Accelerate Kit provides developers with multi-core, multi-threading solutions to optimise the app performance. For apps that require heavy geometry or CG rendering such as mobile game, the Accelerate Kit eases the app development process and makes it run efficiently.
There are several upgrades that have also been made to the existing App Services. Scan Kit now incorporates deep learning-based scanning codes to improve scanning accuracy in challenging situations with faster response.
The Map Kit adds bus and subway route planning to help developers improve the app functionalities.
‘Cloud Debugging’ for app test run and debugging on Huawei devices remotely
As a lightweight Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tool plugin, HMS Core Toolkit implements app creation, encoding, conversion, debugging, testing services to help developers integrate HMS Core with lower costs and higher efficiency.
For example, the ‘Cloud Debugging’ service offers emulators to enable developers to test run and debug their apps on different Huawei devices remotely online.
This service covers wide range of Huawei’s latest device models, including the popular HUAWEI P series and Mate series. The ‘Cloud Debugging’ supports resolution change, and switch between landscape and portrait modes. Developers can also view and download logs for fault identification.
‘Cloud Debugging’ is accessible through Huawei Developer website; and the service is currently only available in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.
