20-year-old Pune girl gets top honours at Apple Swift Student Challenge

Gayatri Goundadkar has come up with an innovative disability-friendly application called Steady Hands, which helps senior citizens create digital art with ease.

With the advent of generative Artificial Intelligence, many companies have incorporated it to automate mundane coding jobs and this has resulted in job losses worldwide.

In uncertain times like this, many people, to reduce stress, prefer to work more independently or do freelancing. They can leverage the latest gen AI to develop their own applications that can solve real problems.

Youngsters who start early with coding will have an edge over their peers. Apple, in a bid to encourage software programming among children, hosts the Swift Student Challenge every year.

This time, Pune-based Gayatri Goundadkar has won top honours at Apple's annual event. A 20-year-old has come up with an innovative disability-friendly application called Steady Hands, which helps senior citizens create digital art with ease.

The inspiration for the app came from Goundadkar's grandmother. They both shared a great interest in Warli painting, a centuries-old art form known for its use of basic geometric shapes. However, due to age-related ailments, the grandmother's hands over the years began to tremble while drawing things.

This made Goundadkar, a third computer science student at Maharashtra Institute of Technology World Peace University, develop the Steady Hands app that uses Apple Pencil stabilisation to support individuals with tremors in creating art.

"My main audience is older adults. Especially in India, technology can feel intimidating for that generation, so I made every decision with that in mind. The interface had to feel calm, not clinical. I didn’t want anyone to open the app and feel lost or overwhelmed. I wanted them to feel like it was made for them,” said Goundadkar.

She picked up SwiftUI concepts pretty quickly. With PencilKit handling stroke data, Apple’s accessibility features such as Touch Accommodations, and Anthropic’s Claude AI, she was able to develop the 'Steady Hands' app. It is still in prototype, needs a little more fine-tuning, before making its debut on the Apple App Store.

From left to right- Yoonjae Joung, Karen-Happuch Peprah Henneh, Anton Baranov, and Gayatri Goundadkar are four of this year’s Swift Student Challenge winners.

Besides Goundadkar, Germany-based Anton Baranov (22), Karen-Happuch Peprah Henneh from Ghana and South Korean Yoonjae Joung (21) have won top honours at the Swift Student Challenge.

Anton Baranov has developed 'Pitch Coach'. It is a self-help app, which will enable people, young and old, to overcome their anxiety in situations such as doing presentation in front of a large group of people. 'Pitch Coach' made its debut on the App Store in early March, and since then, it has amassed more than 6,000 organic downloads and is growing.

Karen-Happuch Peprah Henneh from Ghana has developed Asuo (meaning 'flowing water' in her native language, Twi). The app offers real-time safe routing for individuals in flood zones.

South Korean Yoonjae Joung (21) has developed LeViola, an app playground designed to make learning and playing the viola more accessible on a smartphone. He plans to add support for more musical instruments in the future.

50 distinguished student winners, including the four students mentioned above, will be flying to Apple's Cupertino office to attend the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2026 in June.

Also, they get the chance to interact with Apple's top experts and even CEO Tim Cook at the Apple Office.

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