Desi Teen Wins Apple’s Challenge in US

Not every day does a teenager gets to meet a CEO of a top tech giant. But Indian-origin American teenager Aditya Mangalampalli is among the winners of the Swift Student Challenge. It happens to be a major aspect of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference that celebrates and cultivates young coders and app developers building tools for tech, culture, and industry.

However, his fan boy moment came when he got to meet Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, and spend time with him along with fellow winners. Aditya’s app, PassGen, was created to solve the peril of easily compromised passwords. The app expectedly generates passwords, but it includes a tool that calculates the estimated time to brute force guess any selected password and details its entropy.

Aditya developed the app after a friend’s bank account password was compromised. In fact, Apple’s announcement of Passkeys, a new password system that utilizes touch and face ID, was the trigger for Aditya to develop his idea into an app.

The teenager happens to be a 12th-grade student of Mission San Jose High School, and he has been accepted to the University of California, Berkeley for 2022 intake in computer science and business streams.

He was among 350 students who submitted their work from 40 countries for the annual Apple contest for students. Of all, six students were chosen to meet Tim Cook, and Aditya was one of them.