Abubakr Elmallah

Swift Student Challenge

🏆 Issued by AppleJune 2024Awarded in my senior year of high school

The reason I was there was the Swift Student Challenge, Apple’s annual competition where students around the world build an interactive app in Swift and tell the story behind it. Each year only a few hundred students are selected out of tens of thousands of submissions. I won in 2024 for Al-Quran, my app for learning and studying the Holy Quran, which also earned a personal congratulatory letter from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations team. Being recognized among student developers from across the globe, and getting to celebrate it at Apple Park, meant the world to me.

I was selected from thousands of high school and college students worldwide while still in high school, which is the part I am proudest of: the win came in my senior year at Trabuco Hills, and the invitation meant I flew to Cupertino days after graduating, still technically a high schooler. The year before, in December 2023, I had won the Congressional App Challenge for Al-Islam, also as a senior, so both honors on my high school page were earned before I started at UCI.

Every winner is listed publicly on WWDCScholars, the community directory of Swift Student Challenge and WWDC Scholarship winners going back to 2012. The 2024 cohort is ordered alphabetically by first name, so Abubakr is the first name on the page.