Melbourne schoolboy Yuma Soerianto impresses Apple CEO Tim Cook with his apps

THE youngest attendee at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is a 10 year old from Melbourne — and his work has just drawn praise from the very top.

TEN year old Melbourne schoolboy Yuma Soerianto has just done what most app makers dream about: he’s impressed Apple CEO Tim Cook with what he can do.

Yuma, who is a Year 5 student at Middle Park Primary School in Melbourne, is the youngest attendee this week at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple’s biggest event of the year that kicks off tomorrow in San Jose.

He decided at age six to start learning code because he said schoolwork was not a big enough challenge. He created his first app just last year and now has five apps in the App Store.

And today he got to tick off his main aim in coming to the biggest app conference in the world: he got to pitch his ideas to the head of Apple.

Yuma’s five apps include the Hunger Button, which he created to help families find a nearby restaurant for dinner, and Let’s Stack, which is a game involving stacking boxes that he made after seeing an arcade game at St Kilda’s Luna Park.

But the app that instantly impressed Cook today was the one he quickly made on the flight over from Australia to help his parents work out the price for goods by adding the local sales tax and doing the currency conversion when they go shopping for souvenirs on the trip.

“Very cool, that’s great,” Cook told Yuma after seeing a demo of his app.

“You did this when you were on the plane from Australia to the US? Wow.”

“You can make an app in one hour. I’m impressed. I can’t wait to see what you do next.”

It’s a bright digital future ahead for Yuma Soerianto. Picture: Supplied

Yuma learnt the programming code Swift he uses to create the app by following the online courses from Stanford University.

Yuma isn’t just an app developer, he’s also helping other kids, and adults, learn coding through his YouTube channel Anyone Can Code.

Even though he is just ten years old, he is already a kid with big ambitions.

“I want to be Batman,” he said when asked about his future.

“I’m joking. Actually I want to make apps that can revolutionise the world. And I also want to teach the world coding and get people into coding.”

Yuma said coding is something anyone can learn.

“You can code if you have the patience to do it and you really want to do it,” he said.

Yuma said there are parts of the app-making process where he needs help from his parents.

“I do all the coding but I know that a good app needs design, a good experience for the user,” he said.

So he gives his dad Hendri, an interactive designer, a brief on the artwork he needs and his dad draws up the graphics.

Yuma said when he started created apps, there were a few issues in understanding the logic behind the development process.

“I like logic so I just jumped over the hurdles,” he said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook with Yuma’s apps when the two met at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Picture: Rod Chester

Yuma’s five apps are Let’s Stack, Hunger Button, Kid Calculator, Weather Duck and Pocket Poke.

All of the apps are free but he earns money through advertising in the apps.

He said he gets his ideas “from anywhere”, and often is inspired by problems he wants to solve like how he created the Hunger Button app.

“When I go out with my parents for dinner, my parents and I don’t know where to eat,” he said.

The app uses the person’s location to recommend a random nearby restaurant, with ratings for the restaurant and directions on how to get there.

While Yuma is the youngest developer at WWDC, the oldest developer is 82-year-old Masako Wakamiya from Japan who created a gaming app aimed at older people and based on the Japanese doll festival Hinamatsuri.