MHacks V

Under the Hood

For those of you that came out to MHacks V this year, you probably noticed that we were all about our mobile apps. From the day MHacks IV ended to the Fuck It Ship It before MHacks V where we shipped, our mobile teams had been working non-stop to re-imagine and develop the official Android and iOS MHacks apps to provide hackers with the best hackathon experience. Users queried a ton of events, announcements, maps, and were sent countless push notifications.

Here’s MHacks V in numbers.

This year we had 900 hackers download our apps.
516 were Android users.
384 were iOS users.
Over the course of the 36 hour hackathon…
we had a total of 54,867 API requests, with a peak of 26,507 on Saturday.
we sent a total of 74,874 push notifications, with a peak of 37,459 on Sunday.
we had a total of 41,018 file requests, with a peak of 19,125 on Saturday.

Numbers are cool, but let’s see what that looks like.

All graphs start on the Thursday (1/15) before MHacks and end on the Tuesday (1/20) after. Registration opened on Friday (1/16) at around 6:00 PM EST. Hacking began midnight Saturday (1/17) and ended noon Sunday (1/18).

API requests for MHacks V.

Push notifications for MHacks V.

Now let’s put everything together.

Push notifications v. API requests v. File requests for MHacks V.

All three shot up and peaked on Saturday. Since the apps utilized Parse’s local datastore, API requests and file requests declined throughout the last day as all the info and files were stored/cached on the device. Push notifications, however, continued to rise as we directed people through the two expos and closing ceremony.

Weapon of Choice

iOS vs. Android users at MHacks V.

Here’s a breakdown of our 900 installs. In percents that’s
57.33% Android
42.67% iOS

CNET’s article in September ’14 pegged the US cell phone market share numbers at
51.5% Android
42.4% iOS

Push notifications for iOS v. Android at MHacks V.

If we break down the push notifications we sent per device we see that on Saturday (1/17) Android devices received more than 2x the push notifications that iOS devices did. Sorry Windows Phone…

Are Hackathons Global?

You tell me. This heat map shows the default time zones of the users that downloaded our apps. Keep in mind that this data was pulled from users’ time zones so of the 39 hackers shown to be from Los Angeles, some were probably from the Bay Area or other parts of the state. Although there was a large concentration in the mid-west, we reached hackers from Sao Paulo all the way to Shanghai. Are hackathons global? MHacks is.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
See you at MHacks 6.
- Omkar