Apple CEO Tim Cook complimented a 9-year-old Indian girl living in Dubai for designing an iOS app for iPhones. The girl, Hana Muhammad Rafeeq, had initially written to him claiming to be the youngest iOS developer. She had developed “Hanas,” a storytelling app that allows parents to record stories.
According to the Gulf News report, in his response to her email, in which she described her app and other accomplishments, Apple’s CEO complimented her.
There are kid-friendly stories in Hana’s free iOS app. She was motivated to create the app after realising how few parents have the time to read to their kids. At the time this app was created, Hana was eight years old.
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According to the Gulf News report, Hana wrote in an e-mail, “I was introduced to coding by the age of five, and it seems I am the youngest in the world to achieve this. In addition, 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 code for this app. Please have a quick preview,”.
She also shared links to her works on YouTube.
According to the Khaleej Times report, Hana was sleeping when her father, Mohammed Rafeeq, first read the email. “I woke her up and conveyed the news to her,” he said. “She immediately sat up and ran to the washroom. Usually, it takes several minutes to wake her up.”
In his email, Tim Cook wrote to her, “Congratulations on all of your impressive achievements at such a young age. Keep at it and you will do amazing things in the future.”
Hana has stated that she had to write 10,000 lines of code to create the storytelling app that allows parents to record stories for their children in their own voices.
She got the idea after seeing a documentary. Before starting their day at work, parents can record stories for their kids to listen to while they fall asleep.