On November 8, Beijing time, the 11th Mobile App Innovation Competition finished final judging and held its awards ceremony at Zhejiang University’s Zijingang Campus, according to an SSPAI report published on November 10, 2026 by waychane.
The contest is organized by the National Association of Computer Education in Colleges and Universities and jointly run by Zhejiang University and Apple. It began in 2016 with 161 universities. SSPAI reports that it has since reached more than 1,000 colleges and universities across China and drawn nearly 50,000 participants in total.
Last year, the Enlightenment (启迪) track opened to vocational-college students for the first time. SSPAI says that made the contest the only event under China’s collegiate computer competitions to cover the full academic path. This year, the number of participating vocational colleges increased nearly fourfold from last year, and registrations from those colleges increased eightfold. The middle-school group was no longer limited to exhibiting work; students could enter a formal competitive track for the first time.
Across this year’s tracks, nearly 12,000 people registered, the first time entries passed 10,000. Participants ranged from middle-school, vocational-college, and university students to young developers within five years of graduation and supply-chain employees. Of all contestants, 40% were not computer majors, and nearly half had no previous programming experience.
Among teams that reached the finals, 98% made substantial use of large language models and 85% used AI to assist the full development process. The number of visionOS entries doubled from last year. Of the works that advanced to the final round, five are on the App Store and 16 are in TestFlight.
The top prize, the Most Innovative Award, went to HoloGrip, an iPad app for 3D virtual experiments. It was built independently by Wan Chunyu, a student in Automation Technology and Applications at Nanjing Vocational University of Industry Technology.
Wan traced the idea to middle school, where cost and safety concerns meant students did not carry out physics and chemistry experiments themselves. He wanted students without lab access to observe and operate experiments rather than only memorize textbook conclusions.
HoloGrip uses the iPad’s front camera to recognize hand movements. Pinching, rotating, or moving the fingers controls lab equipment and 3D models, including demonstrations such as ignition by air compression and acid-base reactions. Solid-geometry problems can also be turned into 3D models that can be rotated and taken apart.
Wan said development began in April 2026 and the app was substantially rewritten three times within six months. AI assisted early planning and asset generation, but he did the main work himself, from product design and development through the live demonstration. HoloGrip is not on the App Store. He said he plans to keep the project open source under AGPL-3.0, add more experiments, and explore hardware connections that link virtual experiments with real operation.
The Social Responsibility Award in the same group went to 萨尔塔音 (Saertayin), an app for learning and preserving the Dongxiang language. It was developed by Deng Bowen, Ma Xuehua, and Gao Jiaduo, students in IoT Engineering Technology at Lanzhou Petrochemical Vocational and Technical University.
Dongxiang, used by the Dongxiang people, belongs to the Mongolic language family and is spoken mainly in Gansu. With no widely used writing system of its own, it has largely been passed on by speech. The team found that fewer people their age around them could speak it, and built the app to record the language and give young Dongxiang people and other learners a place to study and communicate.
Saertayin is built with SwiftUI and uses ARKit and AVFoundation for AR display and on-device audio comparison. On iPhone or iPad, users can learn Dongxiang and check pronunciation by reading aloud. The students began using Swift in 2025 and, during the contest, handled the topic, research, prototype, testing, App Store release, and pitch. SSPAI reports that the experience led them to see code as a way to record and carry on culture, not only to implement features.
Saertayin is already on the App Store. The team plans to add language material and interaction methods, improve the read-along assessment, and reduce the app’s size while improving performance.
This year’s event also presented results from 20 teams in the first Apple App Incubator. Over about six months they received coaching in technical development, product design, marketing, and business operations. Unlike the contest, incubator teams must keep testing user demand, market performance, and the business model after launch, under broader and stricter review criteria.
At the finals and awards ceremony, Ge Yue, Apple vice president and managing director of Greater China, congratulated the developers. SSPAI reports remarks in which she said good ideas need lasting life and that the contest is only a starting point. She said Apple announced the App Incubator at the previous year’s finals, that some selected founders had themselves been contestants, and that the first cohort had graduated the day before with excellent apps, quite a few of which had reached a wider stage. She said she hoped contestants would one day bring work into the incubator and move from student developers to founders. She also said innovation sits at the meeting point of technology and the humanities, and encouraged them to keep that enthusiasm and make products that change daily life.
SSPAI writes that, over 11 years, the contest has given more students from different backgrounds a chance to turn ideas into apps and has helped some become developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and educators who later contribute back to the event. The article says the larger scale and higher standard also, to some extent, reflect Chinese developers’ work in the global app ecosystem, and hopes more ideas will be noticed and built in next year’s contest.
Original article: SSPAI