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Reflecting on my experience with Apples Swift Student Challenge

Apples Swift Student Challenge usually opens submissions for student developers every year in February. This always is a great chance to create an app project, learn and grow, meet new people, and potentially attend Apples Developers Conference WWDC in Cupertino!

I've been participating from 2021 to 2024, and this year is the first time I'm not eligible anymore. Looking back at my journey over the past four years, I can say that giving it a shot — despite not being sure if my skills were good enough in the beginning — was one of the best decisions I've made! Through the challenge, I met so many inspiring people, became a part of the Apple Developer Community, grew my skills, added four app projects to my portfolio and attended Apples World Wide Developers Conference twice. It still feels unreal to me that all of my submitted projects were selected as winning ones. The absolute highlight, though, was the opportunity to present my app project to Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2023. This program really helped me believe in the power of what I can do and pursue a career in the app economy. The Swift Student Challenge has the potential to be life-changing, so I can only recommend to participate!

Last year, I built and submitted a music instrument for the challenge, but anyone participating is completely free to build an app on a topic of their choice. For inspiration, lots of past winners shared their projects here: wwdcscholars.com. And here is a walkthrough of my project from 2024.

The best tip I can share is to build an app project on a topic that you are really passionate about. Your enthusiasm and dedication will shine through! Maybe you can come up with an app idea when you combine other interests — in my case, it was a passion for music and skeuomorphic app design last year :)

Learn more about the challenge. In case you're still hesitant to give it a try, one thing I learned was to do things before you feel you're ready! You'll learn along the way and that's how you grow. So kickstart your growth now and build something wonderful for the Swift Student Challenge. Give it a try — wishing you best of luck for your submission!

To get started and learn about coding with Swift, you can check out the updated Swift Tutorials.

01. February 2025