Winners of the 2026 Swift Student Challenge have been announced.
Apple has chosen 350 winning Swift Student Challenge winners from around the globe while detailing four distinguished winners and their apps.
Apple announced that the annual Swift Student Challenge saw people from 37 different countries and regions chosen as winners. Of those 350, 50 have been invited to attend the company’s WWDC event in June, 2026.
But while there are dozens of winners this year, Apple took time to call out four in particular. The four young app developers used their apps to help with real-world problems, from creating artwork with tremors to escaping a flood zone. Apple also noted the use of AI during development.
“The breadth of creativity we see in the Swift Student Challenge never ceases to amaze us,” Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, said in Apple’s press release. “This year’s winners found remarkable ways to harness the power of Apple platforms, Swift, and AI tools to build app playgrounds that are as technically impressive as they are meaningful.”
Steady Hands — Gayatri Goundadkar
Created by 20-year-old Gayatri Goundadkar, Steady Hands was built to help her grandmother create artwork using an iPad despite suffering from hand tremors.
Using Apple’s accessory features, such as Touch Accommodations, Goundadkar learned SwiftUI concepts and then leveraged Anthropic’s Claude AI to figure out a solution.
The result is an app that uses Apple’s PencilKit and Accelerate frameworks to monitor an Apple Pencil’s movement and then identify tremors. Those tremors can then be accommodated for.
Pitch Coach — Anton Baranov
At the age of 22, Anton Baranov is a computer science student at the University of Applied Sciences Mittelhessen in Germany. He developed Pitch Coach after hearing his linguistics and literature professor mother explain how students sometimes struggle under pressure in her class.
Four of 2026’s Swift Student Challenge winners
Pitch Coach is designed to help users overcome presentation anxiety. The app uses Apple’s Foundation Models framework to generate feedback and help users avoid filler words such as “like” or “um.” Now, Pitch Coach helps everything from students doing class presentations to stand-up comedians.
Asuo — Karen-Happuch Peprah Henneh
Having only learned Swift earlier this year, Henneh created Asuo to help people in flood-prone communities find safety when they need it. The app provides real-time routing in flood zones, and includes support for VoiceOver to help visually impaired users.
At its core, Asuo calculates rain intensity and then uses a pathfinding algorithm informed by historic flood data. Henneh used Figma to create the app’s interface before turning to Claude for help in building the rain simulator.
LeViola — Yoonjae Joung
Yoonjae Joung came up with the idea for his app after finding that he missed playing an instrument that he’d had to leave at home. He found that he didn’t have room for his viola when packing for an exchange program at New York University.
He was inspired to create LeViola, an app designed to make it easier to learn and play the viola even if you don’t have one.
Joung used Apple’s on-device machine learning frameworks to analyze the movement of his left hand to determine which notes are pressed. Tracking the angle of the right arm means the app can differentiate between strings.
It’s still early days for LeViola, but Joung says that he can also make similar apps for other instruments, too.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
