James Parton of o2 Litmus responds to App Showdown developer concerns

This morning I published a note from mobile developer, Simon Maddox. Simon was concerned about certain terms of the o2 Litmus App Showdown.

Proving that o2 Litmus is a very responsive organisation, their top chap, James Parton, sent this answer to publish.

Over to James:

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This week, we launched the O2 Litmus App Showdown, with a prize of £10,000. Whilst we’ve had a very positive response from the community, we’ve also received some constructive feedback on how to make the competition better.

The App Showdown is a test case and if it goes well then we will be doing more of them in the future, which can only be good news for the developer community. We admit that we don’t have all the answers, and that we were bound to make mistakes first time around. That’s why we are keen to listen to the developer community to ensure that competitions such as the App Showdown are valuable to them.

In terms of the specific observations from Simon on the competition;

There was an error in the copy about the need to submit an iTunes url to enter the competition, we fixed this yesterday, fingers crossed! Re the available test slots for developers to use themselves – we were keen to ensure we could involve as many O2 customers in the judging process as possible, any guidance on the optimum number of slots reserved for the developer would be welcome. We did speak to a number of developers in preparing the competition, but I guess everyone has a different opinion at the end of the day!

As for the third problem – bias towards O2 apps – there’s no surprise there: we are after all the exclusive supplier of iPhone in the UK and the aims of the App Showdown fits in with trying to provide the best service possible to our customers. As Simon points out in the closing sentence, the key to making this successful is involving the community, e.g. real O2 customers.

As Simon’s final comments describe, there are other ways that the competition might have run. We’ve started up a forum thread on the O2 Litmus site so that these ideas and any others that people have can be discussed. We’ll then take the best ideas and roll them out, much like Litmus does with mobile apps themselves.

If you want to hear more, see the relevant forum on O2 Litmus or get in touch with me via Twitter – @jamesparton.

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Thank you for taking the time to respond James.