Page Contents: Rules | Judging Criteria | Audience Choice

$15,000 in Prizes!

Rules

  • Teams may consist of up to four (4) undergraduate or graduate degree-seeking students of Brigham Young University (including BYU-Idaho and BYU-Hawaii) who are part-time or full-time students and enrolled during a semester or term of the current academic year. You can involve non-students (or students from other institutions), but only BYU students may compete and/or present in the competition.
  • Student participants may not compete on more than one (1) team.
  • The members of the competing team (i.e. BYU students) must control the majority of the intellectual property rights of the app submitted to the competition. If there are disputes surrounding IP rights of an app, you are required to inform us prior to submission. Failure to do so will result in disqualification.
  • The members of the competing team (i.e. BYU students) must account for the majority of the work and resources put into the creation and marketing of the app. You may use third-party frameworks if you have acquired appropriate licenses to use them.
  • Only new, unique apps that have not already been uploaded online previous to the start of the school year (Sep. 3, 2019) will be considered for the competition.
  • Teams may submit only one (1) app for the competition, but they may have multiple versions for various platforms. The following platforms are accepted for this competition:
  • iOS
  • Android
  • Web app
  • Virtual assistants (e.g. Amazon Alexa), smart watches, wearable devices, and similar platforms
  • Apps submitted to the competition should acknowledge the Rollins Center somewhere in the app (the credits or info screen would be an ideal place to include such an acknowledgement). Using the Rollins Center name or logo outside the app (e.g., in marketing materials) during the competition is prohibited. Winners of any prizes in the app competition should modify the next version of their app to include a statement of how their app did in the competition. We're not going to be rigid about this point, but we would appreciate appropriate acknowledgement, such as "Award winning app from the App Competition sponsored by BYU's Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. We are grateful for the center's encouragement and support."
  • Teams that want to be judged on app analytics must implement an analytics solution such as Google Analytics or Firebase and provide the Rollins Center access to their analytics data. You will self-report downloads and daily unique visitors during the judging period, but we will carefully audit the top-placing apps by logging on to their accounts ourselves. Teams agree to keep their analytics data private and confidential at least until after the competition final event when winners are announced.
  • All code used to develop official competition entries must be submitted for review. Judges will evalutate your code as part of the judging process. Teams retain all rights to their app and code. The Rollins Center will treat source code like course work handed in as part of taking a class at the university. It will remain private, but faculty (and judges acting on behalf of the faculty) may examine it.
  • Any team found using plagiarized or unauthorized material will be disqualified at BYU's discretion. For example, do not download non-public domain images and include them in your app. Using an open source library is not plagiarism if you follow the terms of the library's license agreement, which usually involves giving credit to the open source author or project. Follow any applicable licensing terms carefully. If you use someone's code, give credit via a comment in the source code and an appropriate acknowledgement in your info/credits screen.
  • The Rollins Center reserves the right to disqualify or otherwise modify the ranking of a team's performance if they feel it is in the best interest of the competition.
  • The Rollins Center reserves the right to change and/or otherwise alter these rules at any time and for any reason.

Judging Criteria

$14,500 of the competiton prize money will be allocated to finalist teams based on the judges' evaluation of app quality in three dimensions: construction/utility, design, and analytics.

  • App Construction and Utility: based on quality of the implementation, quality of the business opportunity, and usefulness of the app.
  • Design: based on the user experience and user interface design.
  • Analytics: based on the number of downloads and daily unique users during the analytics judging period. We will award one $2,500 cash prize to one team that reaches at least 50,000 downloads during the analytics judging period. We will also consider cumulative analytics from the beginning of the competition school year as a secondary dimension of analytics judging.

Audience Choice Award

Audience members will vote for their favorite app at the final event. We want to see a large and raucous crowd at the finals to lead the cheer for the top apps. Be sure to invite all your friends and family to support you if your team is chosen to present. $500 of the competition prize money will be awarded to the audience choice winner.