On November 8, Beijing time, the 11th Mobile Application Innovation Contest finished final judging and held its awards ceremony at Zhejiang University’s Zijingang Campus.
The contest is hosted by the National Association of Computer Education in Colleges and Universities (全国高等学校计算机教育研究会) and jointly organized by Zhejiang University and Apple. It began in 2016 with 161 universities. It has since reached more than 1,000 universities in China and drawn nearly 50,000 participants in total, according to a November 10, 2026 report by waychane on SSPAI (少数派).
Last year the Inspiration (启迪) track opened to higher-vocational students for the first time. The report describes the contest as the only event under the China Collegiate Computer Contest (中国高校计算机大赛) to cover the full educational path. This year, the number of participating vocational colleges grew by nearly four times from last year, and registrations from those colleges rose eightfold. The middle-school group was no longer limited to showing work; those students could enter a formal competitive track for the first time.
This year’s entrants included middle-school students, vocational and university students, developers within five years of graduation, and supply-chain employees. Nearly 12,000 people registered across the tracks, the first time the total passed 10,000. Forty percent of participants were not computer majors, and nearly half had no previous programming experience.
Among teams that reached this year’s finals, 98 percent deeply used large language models and 85 percent used AI to assist the full development process. visionOS entries doubled from last year. Of the works that ultimately advanced, five are on the App Store and another 16 are in TestFlight.
HoloGrip
The top award, Most Innovative, went to HoloGrip, a 3D virtual-experiment app for iPad. It was built independently by Wan Chunyu (万春宇), a student in Automation Technology and Applications at Nanjing Vocational University of Industry Technology (南京工业职业技术大学).
Wan said the idea came from middle school, where cost and safety concerns meant the school did not have students carry out hands-on physics and chemistry experiments. He wanted students without those conditions to observe and operate experiments, not only memorize textbook conclusions.
HoloGrip uses the iPad’s front camera to recognize hand movement. Pinching, rotating, or moving the fingers operates lab equipment and 3D models, including processes such as ignition by compressing air and acid-base reactions. Solid-geometry problems can also become 3D models that can be rotated and taken apart.
Wan said development started in April this year and the app went through three major rewrites within six months. AI assisted early planning and the generation of materials, but he did the main work himself, from product design and development through the on-site demonstration.
HoloGrip is not yet on the App Store. Wan said he plans to keep the project open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, continue adding experiments, and try connecting hardware so virtual experiments can be combined with real operation.
萨尔塔音
The Social Responsibility Award in the same group went to 萨尔塔音, an app for learning and passing on the Dongxiang language. It was built by Deng Bowen (邓博文), Ma Xuehua (马雪花), and Gao Jiaduo (高佳朵), students in IoT Engineering Technology at Lanzhou Petrochemical University of Vocational Technology (兰州石化职业技术大学).
Dongxiang, used by the Dongxiang people, belongs to the Mongolic language family and is spoken mainly in Gansu. With no commonly used writing system of its own, it has mainly been passed on by speech. The team found that fewer people their age could speak it, and built the app to record and preserve the language and to give young Dongxiang people and language learners a way to study and communicate.
The app is developed with SwiftUI. ARKit and AVFoundation provide AR presentation and on-device audio comparison. On iPhone or iPad, users can learn Dongxiang and check their pronunciation by repeating after the app.
The students began learning Swift in 2025. During the contest they completed topic selection, research, a prototype, testing, an App Store release, and the pitch. The report says the contest showed them that code can also carry the work of recording and transmitting culture, not only implement features.
萨尔塔音 is already on the App Store. The team plans to add more language material and ways to interact, improve the read-along assessment, and reduce the app’s size and improve how it runs.
First Apple App Incubator
Besides the usual track demonstrations and judging, the event presented work from 20 teams in the first Apple App Incubator. Over nearly half a year they received coaching in technical development, product design, marketing, and business operations. Unlike the contest, those teams must keep testing user demand, market performance, and a business model after a product launches. The report says the judging dimensions are more complex and the requirements stricter.
At the finals and awards, Ge Yue (葛越), Apple vice president and managing director for Greater China, congratulated the developers. In remarks reported from the event, she said good ideas should keep their vitality and that the contest is only a starting point. She said the Apple App Incubator was announced at the previous year’s finals, that some of the selected founders had been contestants like the students in the room, and that the first cohort had graduated the day before. Those teams, she said, had made several strong apps, and quite a few had already reached a global stage. She said she hoped participants would one day bring their work into the incubator and move from student developers to founders.
She also said innovation needs to stand where technology and the humanities meet, that she saw that possibility in the participants, and that she hoped they would keep their enthusiasm and make products that truly change daily life.
The article says that over 11 years the contest has given students from different backgrounds a chance to turn ideas into apps, and that some have gone on to become developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and educators who later contribute back to the event. It treats the larger scale and higher level of entries as, in part, a reflection of Chinese developers’ performance and contribution in the global app ecosystem, and hopes more ideas will be seen and built in next year’s contest.
Original article: 报名人数创下新高，第十一届「移动应用创新赛」圆满落幕