Telegram Contests

2021-12-30 17:43:19 We invite all 30 winners of the design contest to take part in the second stage of the competition – to design the main screens of a native Telegram app for Windows 11.

Prize fund: 40,000 USD
Deadline: January 22, 2022 @ 23:00 Dubai Time
Who can take part: All 30 winners of the first stage
Announcement of results: January 30, 2022
Goal: Design main screens for the Windows 11 native Telegram app in accordance with the newest guidelines of Windows 11 and using the latest approaches of that platform (e.g. blurred backgrounds). The mockups and functionality shown should also be consistent with the Telegram apps on other platforms.

The screens that are necessary to design:

- Chat list with all types of chats shown (channels, groups, secret chats, bots)
- Chats with all types of messages shown (voice and video messages, videos, photos, polls, documents)
- The UI to send files/media and add captions to them.
- The UI to record voice and video messages.
- Voice/Video chats and 1-to-1 calls
- Main settings and Chat settings

To check out what a native Windows Telegram app looks like, you can try Unigram @unigramappx. It is possible that the best design solutions will be implemented into Unigram. To check the functionality of Telegram desktop apps, please refer to https://desktop.telegram.org Open / Comment

2021-12-30 17:43:18 Android Design Competition 2021: Results

We are happy that 47 designers from all over the world chose to participate in the
Android Design Competition.

Unfortunately, none of the design concepts met the ideal submission criteria required for 1st Place.

Each of the 2nd Place entries would require a substantial amount of work and considerable polishing to make the submission suitable for use in future Android Developer contests.

Even though no submission could be awarded 1st Place, we decided to increase the prize fund by another $18,000 to properly reward all the efforts that went into this content.

Congratulations to the winners!

2nd PLACE – $2,500
Grim Shark
Clever Cow
Happy Squid
Mighty Unicorn
Tactful Turkey
Keen Pony
Busy Phoenix
Eager Jackal

3rd PLACE – $2,000
Crazy Peacock
Tall Mantis
Kind Parrot
Dreamy Leopard
Mad Spider
Cute Lemur

4th PLACE – $1,000
Huge Puffin
Groovy Ladybird
Swift Shark
Little Otter
Groovy Fox
Fit Wolf
Stone Ant
Holy Eagle
Night Gnat
Groovy Mink
Savvy Swan
Stone Swallow
Hardy Bull
Sunny Swan
Sexy Leopard
Tanned Cat

All the above winners also get the opportunity to prove their skill in the second stage of the design contest, which ends on January 22, 2022. Open / Comment

2021-12-26 10:00:54 GIF Contest, Round 2: Community Evaluation

As our judges continue evaluating submissions, we have selected some of you to join our effort based on how well you did in our previous task.

Those who were selected have received a notification from @ContestRatingBot.

A most deserved thank you goes out to everyone who completed the task!

If you completed the task but were not selected, don’t worry: we still could use your help.

Starting on December 27th, the bot will let everyone rate an additional 1000 gifs, and will continue adding more gifs at regular intervals as we process everything. Those who successfully rate gifs according to our guidelines might still be chosen as paid helpers.

Expect to see updated guidelines in the bot, along with new examples. Open / Comment

2021-12-20 23:17:16 GIF Contest, Round 2: Evaluation Telegram judges have completed the initial evaluation phase for Round 2 of the GIF Contest. While they continue evaluating reaction videos, we invite everyone to help them. Community Evaluation Phase 1: Image Quality @ContestRatingBot… Open / Comment

2021-12-17 16:48:46 GIF Contest, Round 2: Evaluation

Telegram judges have completed the initial evaluation phase for Round 2 of the GIF Contest. While they continue evaluating reaction videos, we invite everyone to help them.

Community Evaluation
Phase 1: Image Quality

@ContestRatingBot will let you rate the image quality of the first 920 reaction videos. If you successfully complete this task before 23:59 Dubai time on December 20, we may invite you to process more reaction videos for monetary compensation.

We collected some examples of good and bad quality reaction videos in this channel. Please study them and the judging criteria carefully before you begin sorting.

What happens then?

Success in this task will depend on how close your ratings are to the verdicts carried out by Telegram Judges. Those with the best results will be invited to participate in a paid task to process more reaction videos.

Once Phase 1 is over, submissions with acceptable image quality will be evaluated in Phase 2: Relevance to determine whether they are expressive enough and relevant for their chosen emoji.

Good luck! Open / Comment

2021-11-18 18:17:40 All reaction videos submitted for the GIF Contest, Round 2 are now available on contest.com:
https://contest.com/gif2021-r2

We invite all participants to add a comment to their submissions with any details about their work they’d like to share with our judges.

Everyone is also welcome to leave their feedback on the submissions – our judges may take it into account when assigning awards (ratings on the platform will not affect the results).

Stay tuned for more news about the evaluation of the GIF contest. Open / Comment

2021-11-12 00:10:30 Sticker App Contest: Results

After hundreds of hours of testing, we are ready to announce the results of the Sticker App Contest.

Although we’ve discovered a dozen nice apps among the 79 submissions, none of those can be considered a perfect Sticker App before addressing the issues we've mentioned in our reviews for each app.

Evaluation criteria
In our evaluation, a solid sticker app is an app that allows:
• Exporting whole packs, not just individual stickers.
• Has zero major crashes.
• Supports local caching.
• Provides an option to keep several sets and edit stickers or reassign emoji after publishing.
• Offers more than a basic editor for imported images.

Contest highlights
Humble Antelope came close to achieving all of the above with their TStick app on both Android and iOS.

Fluffy Giraffe on Android and Jolly Croc on iOS went for a creative approach and submitted advanced editors for animated stickers. (Unfortunately, both these apps require significant polishing before they are ready for large-scale use).

We'd also like to commend contestants who focused on user experience – adding intro screens, onboarding messages and useful tooltips, like Huge Shark and others.

Some of the other ideas we liked: Fairy Zebra's meme face swap tool and Subtle Phoenix's tool to export drawings as animated stickers (unfortunately, this app doesn't support sticker sets and only allows exporting a single sticker).

Rewards
We’re rewarding all contest entries that allowed users to create some stickers and export them to Telegram. We hope that these contestants will be able to use the prize money to further improve their apps. In total, 57 of 79 submissions have qualified for prizes. Certain submissions received penalties due to issues, like prominent crashes.

1st PLACE – $2,000
3 submissions (3 Android + 1 iOS app)

2nd PLACE – $1,500
11 submissions (5 Android + 6 iOS apps)

3rd PLACE – $750
25 submissions (12 Android + 14 iOS apps)

4th PLACE – $500
18 submissions (14 Android + 8 iOS apps)

You can find the final results and prize breakdowns, together with detailed comments and penalties from our judges on the Contest Platform.

What's next?
Participants of this contest retain all rights to the apps they created, and are welcome to launch them as independent startups — as well as potentially monetize them. However, we recommend fixing the issues identified by our judges first.

Anyone can use our platform for third-party apps to help users create stickers for Telegram (check out the documentation here).

We're planning to announce other similar contests in the future. Stay tuned! Open / Comment

2021-11-10 00:05:29 GIF Contest, Round 2: Submissions

We received 33,792 reaction videos from 460 participants in the Second Round of the GIF Contest.

Everybody is welcome to view the submissions using GIF search in any Telegram app:
- Open the GIF panel (a tab in the sticker panel)
- Type #reactiongif in the search box
- You can refine the search by adding one emoji after the hashtag.

Have fun while our judges evaluate the results! Open / Comment

2021-11-08 18:13:20 Given that some participants in the Second Round of the GIF Contest encountered issues with uploading their reaction videos and some uploaded them too early to be accepted, we've decided to extend submissions by one more day.

The new deadline is November 9, 23:59 (Dubai time).

If you are having any issues, please see this message for details. Open / Comment

2021-11-08 17:01:45 GIF Contest, Round 2: Submission FAQ

Submissions for Round 2 of the GIF Сontest are open until November 8 November 9, 23:59 (Dubai time).

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Warning: If you have uploaded any gifs before the announcement on Nov 7, they are not participating in the contest (unless the bot says they are).
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Instructions:
https://contest.com/docs/gif-contest-submission

If you have any questions, please check the FAQ.

A few extra tips, in case you're having any issues:

1. Prepare your videos for publication in an external video editor (it is not recommended to use the built-in Telegram media editor for this purpose).
- Aspect ratio: between 1:1 and 4:3
- No audio track! (especially important for uploading via desktop apps)
- Suggested width: 380, 640 or 848
- Suggested height: a multiple of 16 (but remember to use the correct aspect ratio!)

(Other widths/heights may also work – but if you run into problems, try the suggested ones.)

2. Once you've prepared your videos for publication, use an official app to send them to your channel.
- Send as a video (not file).
- If you use a mobile app, set the maximum quality.
- If you use iOS, disable audio before sending (tap on the speaker icon) – even if you removed the soundtrack when preparing the video for publication.
- If you use Android, don't disable audio – instead remove the soundtrack when preparing video for publication.

3. If @ContestBot tells you your videos were not accepted, you can tap the "Show videos with issues" button to get details on each problematic video.

4. If the bot tells you you haven't submitted any videos, see number 1 in this message .

5. Note on audio tracks:

If @ContestBot doesn’t recognize the videos, make sure that you have disabled the soundtrack completely before uploading. Your video file must have no audio channels for desktop apps to recognize them properly.

There are many ways of disabling the audio track in a video. If you’re having difficulties, we suggest googling for a solution that works best for you.

6. Note on size:

If you uploaded your videos more than a few hours ago and @ContestBot says their size is too large, try re-uploading them again.

If you tried again and it's still not working, try saving them with the standard H.264 preset: preset=medium, crf=23 — and re-upload again.

This should also help if your video gets stuck at 100% during uploading to public channels with the correct caption. Open / Comment