SINGAPORE, Nov. 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) officially announced the Asia Pacific winners of the AppsUP 2021, HUAWEI HMS App Innovation Contest. AppsUP is the global mobile app development contest held annually by Huawei, aiming to inspire and attract talented developers across the world to create innovative apps by leveraging HMS Core open capabilities.

In APAC’s edition, the contest acknowledged 20 outstanding apps across the region with cash prize rewards amounting to US$200,000 across 10 different categories. In addition to the existing award categories – "Best App", "Best Game", "Best Social Impact Award", "Honourable Award" and "Most Popular App Award" from last year, AppsUP 2021 saw the introduction of five new award categories to extend support to more developer groups within the community such as students and women. These new categories are – "AppGallery Rising Star App", "Best Fintech Innovation Award", "Best HMS Core Innovation Award", "Excellent Student Award" and "Tech Women’s Award".

The winning apps of AppsUP 2021 APAC are:

Innovations in Health and Wellness
One third of the 20 winning apps this year belong to the field of health and wellness, offering solutions to address physical, mental, and social health.

For example, Singapore’s "Plano" is a science-based parental control and eye health app for parents and children. The app integrates with HMS’ Machine Learning Kit (ML Kit) to enable real-time camera preview to detect child’s posture and face-to-screen distance when in active mode. The app was also the only one bagging two awards this year, for the "Best Social Impact Award" and the "Most Popular App Award".

Clinching the newly added Tech’s Women’s Award, the "Bloodbank" app connects blood banks, donors and recipients on one common platform. Developed by three student developers from Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) Malaysia, the team’s female member played a crucial role in the development of the "Blood Request" function, which allows blood recipients to register their requests in detail, indicate hospital location, blood type and unit required easily through the app.

Best HMS Core Innovation Award winner – "Land of Calm" enhances the user’s mental health status by providing sound-guided meditations, breathing exercises, stories and soothing music. The sound-guided and storytelling features are made possible through the utilization of Audio Kit and ML Kit’s text-to-speech capabilities.

Game Apps Ranked High
According to App Annie, Games are the most downloaded app category globally in 2020, accounting for over 40% percent of all downloads. Echoing the global trend, it was no surprise to see Game apps making the finals. Five of the AppsUP2021 winners were games, ranging from role-playing to puzzle games.

Both winning apps for the "Best Game Award" hail from Vietnam. "Color Ball Adventure" is an adventure game where players control a coloured ball to overcome obstacles. While "Stick Clash" is a stickman puzzle strategy game where players control an army of stick figures to pass through over 350 levels.

One of the AppGallery Rising Star Award winners, "CandyBots Alphabet ABC Tracing" gamifies the child learning process. The app enables toddlers to practise letters tracing, use flashcards to spell new words, and even watch cartoons to expand their vocabulary.

Encouraging App Creativities across All Levels of Developers
Since its global launch in 2018 April, HUAWEI’s app store, AppGallery, has grown to become the top three largest app market with over 560 million of monthly active users worldwide. By the end of September 2021, the number of developers in Huawei’s ecosystem has also reached 5.1 million.

This ecosystem growth also reflects an opportunity for app developers, as can be seen through the results of AppsUP 2021. In APAC, this year’s contest saw close to 50% more team registrations and almost twice the number of app submissions compared to the previous year

"AppsUP 2021 complements other resources and programmes available to developers in the region to fuel innovation through the HMS ecosystem. The newly added award categories garnered tremendous interests from a wider group of developers. Particularly the AppGallery Rising Star Award, Excellent Student Award and Tech Women’s Award, which provide a platform for budding, female and student developers to realise their app creativity and get rewarded through this initiative," said Shane Shan, Director of Huawei Asia Pacific Consumer Cloud Service.

"HMS would like to extend our warmest congratulations to the winners of this year’s AppsUP 2021 APAC contest. We hope all developers can continue to innovate in the HMS fully open ecosystem; together, we can build a fully-connected, intelligent world," added Shan.

All the winning apps are now available on HUAWEI AppGallery for users to download and use. For full winner list, please visit: https://bit.ly/appsupapac-top20winners.