🏆Sticker App Contest: Results

After hundreds of hours of testing, we are ready to announce the results of the Sticker App Contest.

Although we’ve discovered a dozen nice apps among the 79 submissions, none of those can be considered a perfect Sticker App before addressing the issues we've mentioned in our reviews for each app.

Evaluation criteria
In our evaluation, a solid sticker app is an app that allows:
• Exporting whole packs, not just individual stickers.
• Has zero major crashes.
• Supports local caching.
• Provides an option to keep several sets and edit stickers or reassign emoji after publishing.
• Offers more than a basic editor for imported images.

Contest highlights
Humble Antelope came close to achieving all of the above with their TStick app on both Android and iOS.

Fluffy Giraffe on Android and Jolly Croc on iOS went for a creative approach and submitted advanced editors for animated stickers. (Unfortunately, both these apps require significant polishing before they are ready for large-scale use).

We'd also like to commend contestants who focused on user experience – adding intro screens, onboarding messages and useful tooltips, like Huge Shark and others.

Some of the other ideas we liked: Fairy Zebra's meme face swap tool and Subtle Phoenix's tool to export drawings as animated stickers (unfortunately, this app doesn't support sticker sets and only allows exporting a single sticker).

Rewards
We’re rewarding all contest entries that allowed users to create some stickers and export them to Telegram. We hope that these contestants will be able to use the prize money to further improve their apps. In total, 57 of 79 submissions have qualified for prizes. Certain submissions received penalties due to issues, like prominent crashes.

🥇1st PLACE – $2,000
3 submissions (3 Android + 1 iOS app)

🥈2nd PLACE – $1,500
11 submissions (5 Android + 6 iOS apps)

🥉3rd PLACE – $750
25 submissions (12 Android + 14 iOS apps)

🎖4th PLACE – $500
18 submissions (14 Android + 8 iOS apps)

You can find the final results and prize breakdowns, together with detailed comments and penalties from our judges on the Contest Platform.

What's next?
Participants of this contest retain all rights to the apps they created, and are welcome to launch them as independent startups — as well as potentially monetize them. However, we recommend fixing the issues identified by our judges first. 😉

Anyone can use our platform for third-party apps to help users create stickers for Telegram (check out the documentation here).

We're planning to announce other similar contests in the future. Stay tuned!

All reaction videos submitted for the GIF Contest, Round 2 are now available on contest.com:
https://contest.com/gif2021-r2

We invite all participants to add a comment to their submissions with any details about their work they’d like to share with our judges.

Everyone is also welcome to leave their feedback on the submissions – our judges may take it into account when assigning awards (ratings on the platform will not affect the results).

Stay tuned for more news about the evaluation of the GIF contest.

GIF Contest, Round 2: Evaluation

Telegram judges have completed the initial evaluation phase for Round 2 of the GIF Contest. While they continue evaluating reaction videos, we invite everyone to help them.

Community Evaluation
Phase 1: Image Quality

@ContestRatingBot will let you rate the image quality of the first 920 reaction videos. If you successfully complete this task before 23:59 Dubai time on December 20, we may invite you to process more reaction videos for monetary compensation.

We collected some examples of good and bad quality reaction videos in this channel. Please study them and the judging criteria carefully before you begin sorting.

What happens then?

Success in this task will depend on how close your ratings are to the verdicts carried out by Telegram Judges. Those with the best results will be invited to participate in a paid task to process more reaction videos.

Once Phase 1 is over, submissions with acceptable image quality will be evaluated in Phase 2: Relevance to determine whether they are expressive enough and relevant for their chosen emoji.

Good luck!

Thanks to everyone who used @ContestRatingBot to rate the quality of reaction videos.

We will reach out to those who achieved the best scores. Expect to hear from us before 23:59 Dubai time on Friday, December 24.

Everyone is welcome to keep using the bot while we finish evaluating the results. The final results of round 2 should become available in January.

GIF Contest, Round 2: Community Evaluation

As our judges continue evaluating submissions, we have selected some of you to join our effort based on how well you did in our previous task.

Those who were selected have received a notification from @ContestRatingBot.

A most deserved thank you goes out to everyone who completed the task!

If you completed the task but were not selected, don’t worry: we still could use your help.

Starting on December 27th, the bot will let everyone rate an additional 1000 gifs, and will continue adding more gifs at regular intervals as we process everything. Those who successfully rate gifs according to our guidelines might still be chosen as paid helpers.

Expect to see updated guidelines in the bot, along with new examples.

🏆Android Design Competition 2021: Results

We are happy that 47 designers from all over the world chose to participate in the
Android Design Competition.

Unfortunately, none of the design concepts met the ideal submission criteria required for🥇1st Place.

Each of the🥈2nd Place entries would require a substantial amount of work and considerable polishing to make the submission suitable for use in future Android Developer contests.

Even though no submission could be awarded🥇1st Place, we decided to increase the prize fund by another $18,000 to properly reward all the efforts that went into this content.

Congratulations to the winners!

2nd PLACE – $2,500
🥈Grim Shark
🥈Clever Cow
🥈Happy Squid
🥈Mighty Unicorn
🥈Tactful Turkey
🥈Keen Pony
🥈Busy Phoenix
🥈Eager Jackal

3rd PLACE – $2,000
🥉Crazy Peacock
🥉Tall Mantis
🥉Kind Parrot
🥉Dreamy Leopard
🥉Mad Spider
🥉Cute Lemur

4th PLACE – $1,000
🎖Huge Puffin
🎖Groovy Ladybird
🎖Swift Shark
🎖Little Otter
🎖Groovy Fox
🎖Fit Wolf
🎖Stone Ant
🎖Holy Eagle
🎖Night Gnat
🎖Groovy Mink
🎖Savvy Swan
🎖Stone Swallow
🎖Hardy Bull
🎖Sunny Swan
🎖Sexy Leopard
🎖Tanned Cat

All the above winners also get the opportunity to prove their skill in the second stage of the design contest, which ends on January 22, 2022.

We invite all 30 winners of the design contest to take part in the second stage of the competition – to design the main screens of a native Telegram app for Windows 11.

Prize fund: 40,000 USD
Deadline: January 22, 2022 @ 23:00 Dubai Time
Who can take part: All 30 winners of the first stage
Announcement of results: January 30, 2022
Goal: Design main screens for the Windows 11 native Telegram app in accordance with the newest guidelines of Windows 11 and using the latest approaches of that platform (e.g. blurred backgrounds). The mockups and functionality shown should also be consistent with the Telegram apps on other platforms.

The screens that are necessary to design:

- Chat list with all types of chats shown (channels, groups, secret chats, bots)
- Chats with all types of messages shown (voice and video messages, videos, photos, polls, documents)
- The UI to send files/media and add captions to them.
- The UI to record voice and video messages.
- Voice/Video chats and 1-to-1 calls
- Main settings and Chat settings

To check out what a native Windows Telegram app looks like, you can try Unigram @unigramappx. It is possible that the best design solutions will be implemented into Unigram. To check the functionality of Telegram desktop apps, please refer to https://desktop.telegram.org

Participants in Round 2 of the Design Competition can now submit their designs to @ContestBot as a ZIP archive (choose Designers Contest).

Please start uploading your file in advance so that there is enough time to complete the process. You can resubmit your file at any time before the deadline.

Design Competition, Round 2: Submissions

We received 23 submissions for the Second Round of the Design Competition.

Everyone is welcome to check out the designs on contest.com while our judges evaluate the results:
https://contest.com/win11-design

We ask each participant to add a comment to their submission with a brief explanation of the structure of their archive, how it is intended to be viewed, as well as of anything else that might need an explanation. Good luck!

🏆 Design Competition, Round 2: Results

We are pleased to recognize the progress many designers achieved in the Second Round.

This round required designers to take on a different platform, and they delivered – bringing modern and fresh concepts to transform @unigram for Windows 11.

In total, 22 out of 23 participants have earned a prize. Unfortunately, we could not award Groovy Mink's entry due to it having an insufficient number of screens. Thanks to everyone for participating in the contest – and congratulations to the winners!

1st PLACE – $3,500
🥇Sunny Swan
🥇Mighty Unicorn
🥇Happy Squid

2nd PLACE – $2,000
🥈Groovy Ladybird
🥈Cute Lemur
🥈Busy Phoenix
🥈Clever Cow
🥈Groovy Fox
🥈Hardy Bull
🥈Mad Spider

3rd PLACE – $1,500
🥉Swift Shark
🥉Crazy Peacock
🥉Keen Pony
🥉Grim Shark
🥉Dreamy Leopard
🥉Sexy Leopard
🥉Tactful Turkey
🥉Night Gnat

4th PLACE – $1,000
🎖Holy Eagle
🎖Fit Wolf
🎖Stone Swallow
🎖Tanned Cat

GIF Contest, Round 2: Community Evaluation

Phase 1: Image Quality

Our quality evaluation has ended! 🎉
We would like to thank everyone who contributed — together we were able to gather millions of ratings across 33,792 reaction videos in just a few weeks.

We've identified more than 8,000 high-quality reaction videos that will now be further evaluated in Phase 2.

Phase 2: Relevance

@ContestRatingBot will let you rate the relevance of the first 920 reaction videos. If you successfully complete this task before 23:59 Dubai time on February 21, we may invite you to process more reaction videos for monetary compensation.

We collected some examples in this channel. Please study them and the judging criteria carefully before you begin sorting.

What happens then?

Success in this task will depend on how close your ratings are to the verdicts carried out by Telegram Judges. Those with the best results will be invited to participate in a paid task to process more reaction videos.

Good luck!

🏆 Telegram X Android Competition: Round 1

Prize fund for Round 1: $25,000.
Deadline: 23:59 on July 2nd (Dubai time).
Who can participate: Everyone.
Results announcement: July 12th, 2022.

The Task is to implement message reactions identical to the demo materials of TGX Reactions.zip attached below, including all the animations, layouts, and other visual effects:

• You should use the Telegram X source code available on GitHub.
• You must avoid using an existing codebase of the same functionality from other Telegram clients.
• Final result must be submitted as a ready-to-merge pull request to the repository on the deadline date.

Your pull request should support:
1. Sending a reaction to each message type in private chats, groups, and channels. When holding down an emoji in the reactions panel, the app is expected to display a full-screen animation effect once the reaction is sent.
2. Allowing a user to set their preferred Quick Reaction in Settings.
3. Accessing the list of reacted users in groups in the following ways:
• Press and hold the specific reaction button for a quick view.
• Open the 'Reacted' list to show a multi-tab interface, with individual sections for each reaction emoji. Users should be able to switch tabs via a swipe gesture.
4. Turning message reactions on or off in group and channel management – including the ability for admins to disable and enable individual reaction emoji from the list.
5. Display an unseen reaction badge both in the chat list and inside the conversation.

Evaluation Criteria:
1. The overall code quality will be a top priority, aside from animation smoothness and overall stability. Make sure to get familiar with the project structure and guide for contributors before getting started. Reaction code should keep in mind possible future use on other screens outside of the task (i.e. placing reactions through shared media).
2. The implemented features should not impact existing functions, like causing the app to crash when interacting with other features.
3. Ensure the app is free of major glitches, interface jumps, and severe layout issues.
4. Your app should run smoothly on a wide range of devices. In the evaluation stage, we will test with several devices, including Samsung Galaxy (A51, S10, S21 Ultra), Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro, and more.
5. Implementing a clearly better sticker render (i.e. less disk space usage, better FPS, less CPU usage) will be considered a major advantage, but only after completing all other parts of the task.
6. Attempts to impersonate someone else's work (i.e. submitting a copy of someone else's pull request) will lead to permanent disqualification from Telegram X contests and any potential reward systems in the future.

Submissions:
Contestants will be able to submit their entries to @ContestBot at the end of this round. We will further clarify the submission instructions closer to the deadline.

P.S. For the next stage, we expect to only invite contestants who achieve🥉3rd place or higher in this round.

Contestants are now welcome to send their submissions for the Telegram X Contest to @ContestBot.

Choose “Telegram X Android Competition”, answer the bot’s questions, then send it a link to your ready-to-merge pull request for this repository on GitHub.

Note: The name of your PR must contain #154.

Telegram X Android Competition: Submissions

We received 11 submissions for the Telegram X Contest.

Everyone is welcome to check out the apps on contest.com (at their own risk) while our judges evaluate the results:
https://contest.com/android-x-r1/

🏆 GIF Contest, Round 2 Results

Announcing the results of Round 2 of the GIF Contest.

Our Judges and paid helpers made over 500,000 unique judgments and ratings to select 285 winning entries containing thousands of GIFs. To account for the great number of high-quality submissions we received, we will be distributing an additional $10,000 on top of our initial budget – for a total of $60,000.

To see some high-quality, smooth and expressive GIFs created by the contest winners, simply open the GIF search section in your Telegram app. (Android: Emoji Icon > GIF, iOS: sticker panel > GIF. You can insert an emoji in the search field.)

Results
Each submission was individually rated 1-3 by several Telegram judges, who also considered ratings submitted by paid helpers.
The rating mainly reflects image quality, the overall usability of the submissions and their relevance for the chosen emoji.

In addition, our judges considered creativity, uniqueness and style consistency. Bonus points were granted to submissions that achieved excellent quality while maintaining a small size.

Here are some notable mentions!

🎞 Iconic Movies
• Young Quokka
• Swift Eagle

🎬 Modern Movies
• Merry Lynx
• Mad Skunk
• Kind Beaver

🛸 3D Cartoons
• Fit Skunk
• Nice Ram
• Calm Dolphin

🎨 2D Cartoons
• Noble Duck
• Small Bass
• Sturdy Shark

🏅View All 285 Winners

PS. You can have more fun checking out the winners by simply playing around with the GIF search. Which one is your favorite?

We will reach out to each of the winners and paid helpers to coordinate the payment of prizes.

🏆 Telegram X Android Competition, Round 1 Results

After many hours of testing, we are happy to announce the results of the Telegram X Android Contest. Several Telegram Contest veterans were spotted in the list of participants – 9 out of 11 contestants have previously taken part in Telegram contests for developers. We are also pleased to have several of them earn top places in this round.

Now that Telegram X became open source, the contestants faced the challenge of implementing message reactions from scratch, unable to re-use the existing codebase of other Telegram apps. This was indeed a challenge even for Eager Cat, Dreamy Crab, and Subtle Piranha. These developers won the first and second prizes in a similar Telegram for Android contest back in December.

The judges' rankings for this contest were unanimous, and here are the winners:

II PLACE – $6,000
🥈Eager Cat – has solid overall app quality and beautiful animations, but the entry suffers from several nasty crashes that slightly frustrate user experience. There are also notable discrepancies between this submission and the provided design mockups.
🥈Dreamy Crab – has the highest attention to detail of all entries, the developer even focused on some features that were out of scope for this round, like including support for Premium reactions. However, the submission also has occasional visual issues.

III PLACE – $3,500
🥉Subtle Piranha – this entry could have earned a higher place if it had implemented the required animations and visual effects, but overall a decent solid app that is stable enough to use.

IV PLACE – $1,500
🎖Mad Seal
🎖Busy Raccoon
🎖Huge Chicken

The remaining $5,000 will be distributed between the two 2nd Place entries once we are able to judge their updated submissions (promoting them to 1st Place). We will get in touch with them separately.

More detailed comments from our judges are available for each submission on contest.com. Congratulations to the winners!

P.S. The second stage of the Telegram Android X Competition is starting next week. Stay tuned!

We are pleased to announce that Dreamy Crab’s submission has been awarded an additional $4,000 – thanks to the enormous amount of polishing added since the contest ended.

The initial task has been fully completed and the majority of reported bugs have been eliminated. The implementation didn't significantly change any basic components of the app and followed the app’s code style, which is a welcome benefit.

We also awarded Eager Cat's entry an extra $1,000 for the efforts they made. Their reaction animations play at a smooth 60 FPS, but some basic issues and certain missing animations have prevented the entry from merging with Telegram X.

Dreamy Crab’s reaction implementation is now available to test on the Telegram X Beta.

Stay tuned for the second stage of the competition, which will be announced with the next Telegram X stable release.

A new contest for iOS developers with $50,000 in prizes will be announced this week. The winner of this contest may also be able to join the Telegram team.

Telegram X Android Competition: Round 2

Prize fund for Round 2: $20,000.
Deadline: 23:59 on October 30th (Dubai time).
Who can participate: Everyone! Even if you didn't participate in Round 1.
Results announcement: November 9th, 2022.

While the upcoming contest for iOS devs is on its way, Telegram X for Android is ready to announce the next stage of its competition, introducing a new reward structure. The Contest Task is to implement 3 separate features in Java, identical to the demo materials of TGX 2022 Contest 2.zip attached below – including all the animations, layouts, and other visual effects. This time, each task offers its own prize. There will be a single winner announced for each category listed. We strongly recommend focusing on 1 task to make sure it is done right:

$9,000 – Channel Comments + Message Threads
$7,000 – The ‘Send As’ feature
$4,000 – Improved Search

As a reminder, the following conditions are mandatory:
• You should use the Telegram X source code available on GitHub.
• You must not use any existing codebase of the same functionality from other Telegram clients.
• Entries must be submitted as ready-to-merge pull requests to the repository by the deadline date.

Details:
The complete feature list and logic description can be accessed here – https://contest.com/docs/TgX-Oct22-Round2.

Evaluation Criteria:
1. The overall code quality will be a top priority, as well as animation smoothness and overall stability. Make sure to get familiar with the project structure and guide for contributors before getting started.
2. Your implementation should not impact existing functions, like causing the app to crash when interacting with other features.
3. Ensure the app is free of major glitches, interface jumps, and severe layout issues.
4. Your app should run smoothly on a wide range of devices. In the evaluation stage, we will test with several devices, including Samsung Galaxy (A51, S10, S21 Ultra), Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro, and more.
5. Attempts to impersonate someone else's work (like submitting a copy of someone else's pull request) will lead to permanent disqualification from Telegram X contests and any potential rewards in the future.

Prize Distribution:
• We strongly recommend picking a single task. If you submit entries for two features, each will be evaluated separately. Remember, there will only be a single prize winner per task.
• After the deadline date, all the apps from the submitted PRs will be built and posted on @tgx_prs.
• Over the following 10 days, the judges will evaluate them. During this period, you may focus on fixing your bugs – whether self-discovered or reported in @tgx_dev.
• We will select the winners for each category on November 9th with an immediate 70% payout of the announced prize. (For example, the entry for best channel comments and threads would be awarded $6,300.)
• The winning apps then go to the public beta for 2 weeks. The contestants will fix any bugs discovered by the community, further polishing the apps. Then the remaining 30% will be paid.

Submissions:
Contestants will be able to submit their entries to @ContestBot at the end of this round. We will further clarify the submission instructions closer to the deadline.