Australian app developer Shifty Jelly was one of six companies honoured in Google’s Material Design Awards last week for its Pocket Casts podcasting app.
The award was announced last week at the Material Now session of the Google I/O developer conference, with Pocket Casts taking out the ‘Seamless Browsing’ category. Other award winners included Tumblr and the New York Times.
The six award winners also beat out a number of big-name apps including Tumblr, Evernote, Indiegogo, Lyft and Buzzfeed.
The awards honour well-designed Android apps that apply Google’s Material Design guidelines, with the nominees honoured in a best-in-class Android design section of the Google Play app store.
The Material Design guidelines were introduced by the tech giant at the Google I/O conference in 2014, as part of Android 5.0 Lollipop. Aside from Android, the guidelines are also used to inform Google’s design for apps, the Chrome web browser and online services.
Other key announcements from Google I/O included a new IoT platform called Brillo, a virtual reality platform called Jump, a photo sharing service called Google Photos, its Android Pay mobile payments service, and the latest version of the Android operating system, known as Android M.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
