Apple moves this year's Worldwide Developers Conference online

Apple has announced that it has been forced to cancel the in-person Worldwide Developers Conference due to the pandemic. Instead, a digital version of the conference will kick off on June 22.

This yearly conference draws in millions of viewers and thousands of attendees, all of whom are fans of, or make their living within, the Apple ecosystem of platforms.

“WWDC20 will be our biggest yet, bringing together our global developer community of more than 23 million in an unprecedented way for a week in June to learn about the future of Apple platforms,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, in a release.

“We can’t wait to meet online in June with the global developer community and share with them all of the new tools we’ve been working on to help them create even more incredible apps and services. We look forward to sharing more details about WWDC20 with everyone as we get closer to this exciting event.”

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Alongside the WWDC20 change, Apple revealed its Swift Students Challenge.

A new platform for app-developing students to showcase their ideas and prowess, the Swift Students Challenge utilizes the in-house Swift coding language for iOS devices, which allows for easy code-writing learning and application assistance.

The challenge will award a handful of winners with an exclusive WWDC20 jacket and pin set, but more importantly, it will prop up some pretty stellar submissions from coding students from all over the globe.

“Students are an integral part of the Apple developer community, and last year WWDC saw attendance from more than 350 student developers spanning 37 different countries,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.

“As we look forward to WWDC20, although our gathering will be virtual this year, we want to recognize and celebrate the creative contributions of our young developers from around the world. We can’t wait to see this next generation of innovative thinkers turn their ideas into a reality through the Swift Student Challenge.”

Submissions for the Swift Student Challenge are now open until May 17. Be sure to check out the rules and regulations on the SSC website.