Hello everyone!

I wanted to elaborate and shed light on criteria undertaken  in deciding the winner of the Most Popular App category. It was a close contest as you can see from the stats posted on the Leaderboard.

To share some details of the judging process and parameters, the winner was selected primarily on the basis of the app usage statistics (70% weightage) and the votes received from the community (30% weightage).

Here, I would like to re-iterate our point of view on the issue of spamming, both in terms of apps usage and dislikes or negative votingon the community. Our system did receive a lot of spamming and that was appropriately filtered before deciding the winners. To counter any manipulation of the usage statistics we applied a filter to remove hit from numbers identified to be spamming txtWeb. Also, we decided to not consider the dislike votes on the app because of the reported abuse of this feature on certain apps especially during the later stages of the competition. In fact in the light of this issue, we have decided to remove the ‘Dislike’ feature completely from the community and you can see this change implemented in a few weeks.

In the end, we would like to re-affirm to all the community members that the judging process was completely transparent and impartial and we took strong actions to eliminate any manipulations that might have crept in giving a false edge to any of the apps.

Congratulations once again to our winners of our “Most Popular Award” Niranjan & Sushanth from BMSCE for their Placement app and 1^st runner up Praveen Kumar for his Cricket app.