‘They will be proud iOS representatives’: Noida students impress top Apple executive Greg Joswiak with their apps

As Joswiak steps into the spanking new iOS Development centre, there is palpable excitement among the students who seem eager to showcase their work. The layout of the facility is different from regular classrooms and is more like a corporate office. This, Galgotia explains to Joswiak, makes it easier for faculty to interact with any student on the floor.

The iOS Student Developer programme, an industry and academia-partnered initiative to grow quality iOS talent in India, was piloted at the SRM Institute of Technology in Chennai last year and has expanded to Galgotias University and Chitkara University in Chandigarh in the second year.

After Vashishta Agarwala of SRM takes the Apple team through a very hands-on demo of Circles, a mobile application he created to help groups plan travel and meet-ups, teams of Galgotias University students show Joswiak and others their apps which are in different stages of development. They range from Sakhi, an app to help women track their periods and get assistance with related issues, to VibroPlay, a music learning app for those with hearing challenges.

The new iOS Development center has a pride of place at the heart of Galgotias University, overlooking an arterial path where students from over 30 countries walk through daily.. (Photo credit: Apple)

“It’s unbelievably impressive…,” Joswiak tells indianexpress.com soon after. “These kids were so well spoken, they have thought out what they could do and they were taking advantage of all modern technologies… and to explain it with such competence,” he adds, underlining the fact that most of these demos were based on just a few days of development.

“iOS is one of the largest platforms… it’s really what has driven the app economy around the world. There is a need to fulfil development requirements within companies and within the user base within India,” Joswiak explains why Apple has given so much importance to the Student Developer programme. “What I saw here with these kids, they are gonna to be proud representatives of iOS development.”

During his India visit last year to mark 25 years of Apple in the country, CEO Tim Cook had underlined how the 1 million jobs iOS supports here was a “testament to the tremendous growth of developers in India”.

On the importance of Swift, especially among student developers, Joswiak highlights it is a modern programming language as compared to Objective C and others which “just didn’t allow developers to move as quickly as they need to”. “Swift allows them to move fast, to have interactivity while they are developing and be more creative without fear of mistakes. It has a more forgiving syntax if they make some mistakes,” he says.

Students who are part of the programme get access to Mac and each team gets access to iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watch for development and testing, while they leverage learning resources from Apple and industry best practices from Infosys.

The learning is not limited to the students. Dhruv Galgotia, CEO, Galgotias University, says working with Apple has been an “inspirational and enriching experience” for the faculty and his leadership team as well. “The quest for astute perfection, eye for micro detail, and the intelligence behind the design has truly been an enlightening experience and we at Galgotias aspire to emulate the same culture within our organisation,” he says.

As Joswiak steps into the spanking new iOS Development centre, there is palpable excitement among the students who seem eager to showcase their work. (Photo credit: Apple)

Industry feedback, Joswiak says, is a huge part of how the programme has evolved over the years. “It is important because they are involved in what we are creating. They are providing internships and roles for these students,” he says, adding: “And obviously as a platform provider we have our perspective in it as well.”

Meanwhile, Dhruv Galgotia is sure the learnings from the iOS development centre “will have a far-reaching impact well beyond the boundaries of the centre specifically in the teaching-learning pedagogy of the entire university”. He says the centre’s approach resonates with the teaching culture at Galgotias which is now focussing on active learning. “The students experiencing this centre have developed a global outlook towards problem statements and are ready to take on the challenging world outside the haven of the campus.”

Asked what he thinks will be the success metric for a programme like this, Joswiak acknowledges that is hard to quantify. “For us at Apple, it’s never been about the most of it, it’s about the best of it,” he adds.

Joswiak says what he saw at the centre, especially the Circles app, had nothing student-like about it. “So several students can come out of this and create high-quality projects that we somehow had a hand in. Both for the development centres as well as iOS as a platform, that is a success.”