Apple has opened up the Swift Student Challenge, its annual coding competition for students. Entries are no longer limited to app playgrounds, and for 2027 students can submit full Xcode apps for any Apple platform. Submissions open February 8 and close February 28, 2027.
The change is significant. Since the competition replaced Apple’s WWDC scholarship programme in 2020, it has mostly meant building a small, self-contained app playground: a useful format for showing off an idea, but a narrow one. Now, Xcode apps and Swift Playground projects for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Vision Pro are all eligible. Command-line tools and Swift packages are still excluded, so the focus remains on apps with an interface people can explore.
The technical limits have loosened considerably too. The maximum ZIP file size rises from 25MB to 500MB, which gives students room for richer graphics, audio and 3D assets, especially for anyone targeting Vision Pro. The core rules haven’t changed: judges must be able to explore each project in about three minutes, everything has to run offline with all resources included, content must be in English, and apps must be built with Xcode 27 or Swift Playground 4.7 or later.
The competition remains open to as many students as possible. Entrants need only a free Apple developer account, not the paid membership, though they must meet Apple’s age and education requirements and cannot be working full time as developers. Projects have to be individual work, though credited open-source code and public-domain images and sounds are allowed if students explain how they used them.
Every winner receives a year of Apple Developer Program membership and a gift. A smaller group of Distinguished Winners is invited to Apple’s Cupertino campus. Students can win up to three times but can be named a Distinguished Winner only once.
Apple is also running free online preparation sessions. The first, on December 10, covers agentic coding in Xcode. Sessions on preparing for the challenge and building an app’s story follow in January and early February.
Leading with agentic coding raises a question for a competition built on individual work. Apple is clearly encouraging students to use AI coding tools in Xcode, but the published rules don’t explain how much AI-generated code is acceptable in an entry or how judges will assess it. As AI tools increasingly write code for developers, Apple will likely need to clarify where judging lines fall, perhaps before submissions open in February.