Telegram wants to give away $50,000 to a BlackBerry dev to bring their app to BlackBerry 10

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Are you a BlackBerry developer who could use $50,000? If so, the folks from Telegram are looking for you. As noted on their Twitter account and company blog, they are looking for a BlackBerry developer or developers to bring their cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app with a focus on security and speed to the BlackBerry 10 platform.

A lot of Telegram users asked us to support Blackberry 10 devices. As a small team, we have to choose areas to focus on. But since Telegram API is 100% open and free, any independent developer can port Telegram for Blackberry 10 if they study our protocol and the Java code used in our Android app. To give an incentive to Telegram fans among Blackberry engineers, we are announcing a month-long coding contest starting today. Your task is to port Telegram for BB 10 using the open source Java code of the Android app. A prize fund of $50,000 will be distributed among the winners.

Objectives:

Of course, you could just compile our Android code for use on the BB platform, but there are three more things to think about:

  • Native BB design. We designed Telegram for BB 10 and provide you with screenshots and graphics, but you need to implement it.
  • Native BB notifications. We have set up an API for that, they are obviously absent in our Android-version.
  • Speed and stability. Our Android code is not optimized to run on BB 10 and there'd definitely be overhead if you don't refactor it.

There's a full set of contest rules that must be followed in order to win but Telegram has laid everything out nice and neat for anyone who may be interested in taking on the challenge. The contest is open until December 13th and on December 25th, they'll announce the winner(s) on their blog. Yes, there can be more than one winner. The prize budget will be distributed between contributors with the fastest, most stable and smooth running apps. Hit their site for the full details.

Read more on the Telegram site

Thanks, Mossa210!

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