He is only 17 but Apple has already invited the Hungarian iOS-developer two times – video

Roland Horváth from Sopron learned the basics of coding by watching videos on the Internet. However, he was bitten by the coding bug so he later learned more sophisticated languages. He created his first app when he was 13 and he was already invited as a presenter to the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) where he could personally meet Tim Cook, the CEO of the company – reported hvg.hu.

Addicted to coding since the age of 9

‘I was maybe 9. I played computer games a lot, but I was thinking about how I could realise my ideas for new games. Thus, I kept searching on the Internet with my basic-level English how I can write a game. I found GameMaker, a visual game maker program. Then I was creating simple games all day with the knowledge I acquired until then” – told Roland about the start of his career.

According to the secondary school student from Sopron, he started to make a lot of games but he finished only some of them.

“My devotion towards coding came with my first smartphone’

– added Roland.

Roland believes that everything can be learned by using the Internet.

He created his first working app when he was 13 as a school project. Show Me! is promoting sign language and he worked on it for months then. However, it was

a real breakthrough in his career

since it received many awards. For example, it was awarded at Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles in 2017. Despite his young age, Roland is very purposeful, according to him; his apps are inspired by everyday problems.

Apps inspired by everyday problems

For example, he already created a GPS-based alarm clock (Transitnap) which wakes up people a couple of minutes before they reach their destination so they would not miss their station because they sleep or talk. For this idea, he was thanked from 30 countries, but he received no money since

all of his apps are free.

Furthermore, he created an app helping people to kill time (Try Not To Smile) and a toilet-searching one, too (Toiler).  He regards the former as his best so far. The program shows random videos to the user who has to avoid laughing. Though the idea seems to be simple, the coding work behind it is very complex since the app identifies smile with the help of a facial-recognition system. If somebody cannot resist, it freezes the outburst of the laugh as a GIF which can be shared in the social media.

Here you can watch a video about how it works:

Roland said that he learned a lot while he was working on the app. Even though Facebook already created a similar one since then, Roland’s app has now 154 thousand users, 8 million views and, it appeared among the top apps in the App Store three times.

The Tim Cook story

For his Show me! app he was invited two times to the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) while Try Not To Smile provided international requests and relations for him. Though the entrance fee is more than 1,600 dollars on WWDC

Apple paid the whole sum for him

because it regarded his idea so important.

According to him, the week of the WWDC has been his best so far. ‘We visited the Steve Jobs Theater in the Apple Park where iPhone X was introduced last year. Here we met with Tim Cook and even though we could not talk a lot, I

managed to get an autograph from him.’

Later he could take part in an exclusive tour in the headquarters of the company in Cupertino. Roland believes that today everything can be reached and learned with the help of the Internet. It just needs to be searched – he added.

Featured image: wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

Source: hvg.hu