Four-person Aussie app team beats billion-dollar competition to take out Google design award

A FOUR-PERSON Australian app company, based in Adelaide, claimed one of just six Google design awards — and you won’t believe who they beat.

Adelaide developers Shifty Jelly claim a Google Award for the Pocket Casts app at Google I/O. The company was one of only six to receive awards at the event. They are Russell Ivanovic, Chris Martin and Philip Simpson.

INTERNET giant Google recognised just six companies for app design at its annual San Francisco developers conference and one Australian company defied the odds to make the cut: a four-person team from Adelaide.

Three of Shifty Jelly’s members were on hand to collect the award at the Moscone Centre, alongside esteemed fellow recipients from billion-dollar social network Tumblr and respected newspaper The New York Times.

Shifty Jelly developer Russell Ivanovic said Google started with a shortlist of 100 developers for the awards, “pared it down to 18 and then a top six”.

Internet giant Google gave out six awards at its annual developer conference, including one to Adelaide-based company Shifty Jelly for its Pocket Casts app.

Just two of the Adelaide developers planned to attend the event, he said, but a contact at the search giant “told us that you probably want to turn up”.

Still, server architect Philip Simpson said they did not suspect they’d actually win one of the six awards.

“For just a tiny little company in Adelaide, we feel like ‘What are we doing here?,” he laughed.

Google senior user interface designer Rich Fuller said the awards recognised apps that made the most of its fresh design guidelines released at the Google I/O event last year.

“We’re highlighting 18 great Material Design apps through a collection on Google Play, just like with the Beautiful Design collection in years past,” he said.

“Of those 18 apps, we’re recognising six with a special award, which we handed out during Google I/O.”

Some of the apps nominated for the awards, but missing out, included Evernote, Buzzfeed, Lyft and Runtastic Running.

Google handed out six top design awards at its annual developers' conference in San Francisco for use of its Material Design guidelines.

Shifty Jelly received its award for the “seamless browsing” in its Pocket Casts app that delivers access to podcasts and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times in Google’s Play Store.

Mr Ivanovic said, although small, the team had taken Google’s design guidelines seriously, employing new designer Chris Martin’s skills to redesign the app piece by piece.

More than a day was spent upgrading the animation that sees its play icon turn into a pause icon, for example.

“When Material Design came out, a lot of (redesigned) apps came out a week or two later,” he said. “We spent six months on it.

“We went through a lot of iterations. We’d take them home every day. It just takes time. I think a lot of people thought it was a lot easier to do. At one point we had people sending us mock-ups, saying ‘just put this over here ...’.”

Despite the win, the Shifty Jelly team said they planned to further refine the podcast app’s design, and focus on the iOS version of the app as Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference begins next week.

Originally published as Four-person Aussie app team beats billion-dollar competition to take out Google design award