Apple highlights four Swift Student Challenge apps ahead of WWDC 2026

WWDC 2026 is just around the corner, and Apple has highlighted four Swift Student Challenge app winners. This year, Apple points out 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, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.

“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

AI tools are part of each developer story this year

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 in part by Apple’s accessibility features such as Touch Accommodations, she got started by learning SwiftUI concepts, using Anthropic’s Claude to help unpack lessons on topics like how PencilKit handles stroke data. And to characterize a user’s tremor, she built a tool that analyzes raw motion data from iPad and Apple Pencil. It captures hand movements and applies signal processing techniques to identify the frequency and intensity of a user’s tremor.

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

To guide users through overcoming presentation anxiety, Baranov leveraged Apple’s Foundation Models framework to generate personalized, context-aware feedback and summaries after each session, alerting the user to filler words such as “like” or “um.” He also used Claude Agent in Xcode 26 to translate the app into 20 languages, and consulted with friends and colleagues to help identify filler words in other languages.

Asuo is an app playground that “provides safe real-time routing to individuals in flood zones.” Henneh also points to Claude for coding assistance:

After designing Asuo’s interface in Figma, Henneh turned to Claude for help in designing the rain simulator on her app’s launch screen, along with implementing the A* pathfinding algorithm. “Because I’m a designer, I don’t really dive into the very technical parts,” she shares. “I rely on AI agents for assistance with those. Something that would have taken me months to do was able to be done in three or four days.”

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

Though Joung has been coding for a long time — as a teenager in Seoul, South Korea, he made a timer to control electronics in the classroom, and he recently developed an AI companion device for the elderly living alone — he’s new to Swift. “When I came up with the idea of using my hands to play the instrument, and using the camera overlay to help users navigate their own bow pose, I didn’t know where to start,” he says. To familiarize himself with the coding language, Joung used Claude as well as OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Gemini. He then experimented with Create ML to train his own model before integrating it into his app using Core ML.

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

Apple’s WWDC 2026 developer conference kicks off on Monday, June 8. The company is set to unveil iOS 27, macOS 27, and more.