Apple highlights four Swift Student Challenge apps ahead of WWDC 2026

Source: 9to5Mac

WWDC 2026 is just around the corner, and Apple has highlighted four Swift Student Challenge app winners. This year, Apple points out the AI tools Swift Student Challenge winners are using to help bring their ideas to life.

Apple welcomes 50 Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners to its developer conference

Each year, Apple invites 50 of the Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners to attend WWDC. Susan Prescott, Apple’s VP of Worldwide Developer Relations, says the combination of Swift and AI tools are on display with this year’s winning submissions.

“The breadth of creativity we see in the Swift Student Challenge never ceases to amaze us,” says Susan Prescott.
“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. We’re incredibly proud to support their journey and can’t wait to see what they create next.”

The four apps or app playgrounds Apple is showcasing include:

• Steady Hands – created by Gayatri Goundadkar
• Pitch Coach – created by Anton Baranov
• Asuo – created by Karen‑Happuch Peprah Henneh
• LeViola – created by Yoonjae Joung

Read the Apple newsroom announcement

AI tools are part of each developer story this year

Steady Hands

Goundadkar created Steady Hands as “an app playground that uses Apple Pencil stabilization to support individuals with tremors in creating art” with the help of Claude:

• Inspired by Apple’s accessibility features such as Touch Accommodations.
• Used Anthropic’s Claude to unpack SwiftUI concepts and understand how PencilKit handles stroke data.
• Built a tool that analyzes raw motion data from iPad and Apple Pencil, applying signal‑processing techniques to identify tremor frequency and intensity.

Pitch Coach

Baranov developed Pitch Coach, which he calls “an Apple Intelligence‑powered wingman for Shark Tank pitches,” using a mix of Apple’s Foundation Models and Claude Agent in Xcode:

• Generates personalized, context‑aware feedback and summaries after each session, flagging filler words like “like” or “um.”
• Utilized Claude Agent in Xcode 26 to translate the app into 20 languages.
• The app is available on the App Store: Pitch Coach.

Asuo

Henneh’s Asuo is an app playground that “provides safe real‑time routing to individuals in flood zones.” She relied on Claude for coding assistance:

• Designed the interface in Figma, then used Claude to help design the rain simulator and implement the A* pathfinding algorithm.
• As a designer, she leveraged AI agents to handle technical parts, reducing development time from months to a few days.

LeViola

Joung created LeViola, an app playground designed to make learning and playing the viola more accessible, using a combination of Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Google Gemini:

• Started with a camera overlay to guide bow pose; used Claude, Codex, and Gemini to learn Swift.
• Experimented with Create ML to train a custom model, then integrated it via Core ML.
• Previously built an AI companion device for the elderly and a classroom timer in Seoul, South Korea.

You can learn more about each app playground from Apple’s showcase here.

Apple’s WWDC 2026 developer conference kicks off on Monday, June 8, with announcements for iOS 27, macOS 27, and more.