My name is Rutvij, Senior PMM at Bubble, and I’m thrilled to announce an exciting opportunity for our community: The Bubble Summer Mobile App Challenge — happening from June 17 to August 18!
This new challenge invites all Bubblers to leverage our new native mobile builder and win up to $5,000 while doing it.
Here’s how to join:
Build a mobile app and share your progress: As you (or a team of up to three) create your mobile app, tag us to share your progress on social throughout the summer.
Publish: Once you’re ready to deploy, fill out this form to get one month free. Then deploy your app to the App Store or Google Play Store by August 18. Don’t wait — only the first 1,000 submissions will be considered!
Share: Once your app is live in the app store, share a video demo of your app on LinkedIn and X with the hashtag #BubbleMobileChallenge.
Stay tuned: Winners will be announced at the end of August!
Our judging panel, including Karthik “KP” Puvadda (Founder Relations at Paddle), Wayne Hu (Partner at SignalFire), and Lisa Michelle (Founder of Durag Fest), will evaluate entries based on your app’s:
UI/visual quality
Complexity and scale potential
Ability to solve clear user needs
The winners in each category will get:
$5,000 cash prize for the top new iOS app
$5,000 cash prize for the top new Android app
$5,000 cash prize for the top companion app to an existing web app
Please note: Beta and TestFlight submissions, or any app started before June 17, 2025, are not eligible. If a team of builders wins, the prize will be equally distributed among members.
Questions? Drop them in the comments!
Best of luck — we can’t wait to see what you build!
Can you please include users who have been building the past few months. I feel this is pretty unfair excluding the developers who have worked so hard over the past few months on their apps before public release. We’ve put a considerable amount of effort into refining your product for you and sharing to the community the skills/features we’ve learnt. I feel this should be rewarded as much as a new-comer would be rewarded who’s incentive to create an app is for prize money. We created an app with no incentive :(. Maybe could make a 4th category?
Totally agree with Patrick! I was eager to jump in as soon as the Beta was announced - a week ago! I was so excited after seeing the announcement as I had a project in mind. I jumped in and started building, knowing this comp was on its way as well and the money would really help me get my MVP launched.
Then you announce it is only valid on projects on or after 17th?
You must surely have cut out a lot of builders who were eager to jump in as soon as you released the tool!
Seems very unfair… now I’m disqualified already… thanks a lot. Punished for being eager to get started.
but I would guess the purpose of the contest is to show how quickly a great-looking Mobile App can be built using Bubble…which is why there is a 2 month window.
I think it’s pretty common for competitions to expect users to work within the hackathon’s timeframe.
Do you feel like working on a new mobile app for this challenge specifically is too much work/time? The rules are pretty open-ended and you have 2 months to come up with an idea (or multiple!) and work on them.
Missing pretty much what I said in my comment? I started working about a week ago when they announced they were launching… now I miss out on a competition and potential prize money because they restricted the date to yesterday… why not say when they released the tool the comp would only start a week after… I would have waited. I have an idea, I started it already… but now I miss out for simply being eager to get started.
I’m trying to develop a proper MVP for a real business… this comp could have helped with startup costs… i’m not just doing another for this… got enough to do
totally valid, that’s why I was asking what your blocker is.
The team is aware of your questions (thanks for submitting a ticket btw!) so hopefully we’ll hear more info soon
It would be unfair to give people who have had early access to the beta an advantage to a paid contest, it seems like a pretty straight forward decision on bubble’s end.
Im on the same page as @stuart9 and im guessing quite a few others are too. Other then new MVP builders, the competition is clearly positioned towards agencies & nomad developers that build multiple apps and have spare time to create side-project apps. But that’s not really what Bubble was built for, it was built for REAL start-ups and business that are trying to go scale and bring Bubble with them. I get that it makes it less competitive for new comers to native, which is very plausible explanation from Bubbles side, as they’re obviously eager to start growing and marketing this environment they’ve spent millions of $ on. BUT… from the standpoint of builders pre-dating the 17th, its a bit of a F*** you; unless your an agency and likely to work on alot of apps.
In general the people who’ve been hussling in the Beta haven’t been given any recognition accept some very kind “Thankyou’s” from the team. Letting them join this competition is more fair than excluding them. Simple to me.
As I’ve mentioned, if Bubble is concerned that it might become unfairly competitive for new builders, then there should at least be an Open category with no date restriction. I don’t really see that as a downside. New builders could actually benefit by learning from the submissions of Beta builders who’ve spent months mastering the platform and discovering all the tips and tricks. Plus, the whole point of this “competition” is presumably to push the boundaries of what Bubble Native can do and see what wild, creative ideas we can bring to life.
I’d agree with that, except I didn’t have beta access. I just started a couple of days ago! I watched the webinar announcing the tooling was now live, thought it looked amazing and actually had an idea i’d been toying with, and jumped in… so I could miss out on 1 or 2 days… why not just extend the start date to when they released the tool?
I’d love to continue developing for mobile but there’s a really nasty bug in the new editor that is blocking development. I cannot publish an app that gets completely bricked (until a user refreshes the page) anytime an API call returns an error.
my two cents