Apple CEO Tim Cook emails 8-year old Indian-origin girl over free iPhone app

This young girl has left Apple CEO Tim Cook quite impressed! The Indian-origin girl, who lives in Dubai, did something unusual by any standard- she developed an iOS app for iPhones when she was just an 8-year old. According to a Gulf News report, Hana Muhammad Rafeeq had had listed her achievements and claimed to be the youngest app developer in an email to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

To her surprise, Tim Cook responded and lauded her for achieving so much at such a young age in an email. He said, “Hana, Congratulations on all of your impressive achievements at such a young age! Keep at it and you will do amazing things in the future. Best, Tim.”

What Hana did was to develop a free app on the App Store, called 'Hanas' which features stories for children. “This application will help parents and children because there is an option to make audio stories, so the parents can make audio stories. When the parents are busy, the children can play those audio stories,” Gulf News quoted Hana as saying.

What inspired her to make such an app is even more interesting. She shared that the idea to make Hanas app came when she realised that many parents find it difficult to get time and read stories for their children. Hana has also added her own audio stories on the app.

How did Hana learn coding at such a young age?

It is surprising that Hana managed to actually develop an app for iPhones at such a young age. But what’s more surprising is that she got introduced to coding by the age of five! The report quoted her, “...I almost avoided using any third-party ready-made codes, libraries, or classes in my app. I hand-wrote more than 10,000 lines of codes for this app."

She has posted links to her YouTube videos too.

Hana was born and brought up in the UAE.