If you could use an extra $50,000 and you’re a BlackBerry developer, you might want to take advantage of Telegram Messenger‘s offer.
As noted on their Twitter account and company blog, Telegram is looking for a BlackBerry developer or developers to bring their cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app to the BlackBerry 10 platform. The company wants to put focus on security and speed.
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.
Your task is to port Telegram for BB 10 using the open source Java code of the Android app
Rather than just compile and use Android code, Telegram wants developers to keep three things in mind:
- 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 and developers will have the opportunity to do so until December 13th. Winners will be announced on December 25th on the company’s blog.
Intrigued? Check out the contest rules here.