Code Week is a week-long celebration of coding in Europe, encouraging everyone to learn more about technology and develop essential skills for creating apps that solve problems they care about. For this year’s Code Week celebration, the App Store has collaborated with some outstanding European developers to learn about their experiences of developing apps and inspire future generations of app creators.

Building a brilliant app is one thing, but helping it thrive on the global stage is quite another. These three developers have done exactly that.

Oskar Larsson started coding in elementary school, but could never have imagined that the photo collage app he co-founded, SCRL, would reach more than 10 million downloads worldwide. Espen Janson was on paternity leave when he created baby sleep tracker Napper, which now has more than 1.5 million downloads. And Hanna Grevelius was a longtime user of the virtual golf scorecard Golf GameBook before joining the company and helping the app to grow in markets around the world.

They talked to us about their journeys in app development and shared their insights into designing for a global audience.

Oskar: When we started making our apps, we made them in Swedish. We were in high school and we didn’t think about it that much. But after a year or so, we realised they could be used by anyone, so we started making them in English and our downloads went like a hundred times up. Make it English first because it’s the broadest used language and has a global audience.

Espen: Until you get to that point where you decide to launch your app globally, it’s good to play around in your own country because it’s so easy to understand the cultural nuances. It’s good for testing purposes and to make sure that you actually have a product that has the potential to work in other countries.

Hanna: It’s about being global but also sticking to a very specific niche and it’s up to you to decide what country you want to be in. When you do go global, you have the opportunity to be picked up in markets that you perhaps didn’t expect.

Oskar: Once you gain some traction, you can start localising to more markets and languages. When you’re more intentional and want to focus really closely on one market, you need to understand the population and the cultural context.

Espen: For us it’s been key to recruit local people who can flag when something is wrong. For instance, our French translator told us that it’s very common in France to use nannies. Now you have an entirely different audience within France with a third of all the kids being taken care of by a nanny. That’s very important because otherwise you’re not going to get the cultural annotations.

Hanna: If you’re starting a new app and you don’t have the possibility to hire people or work with good translators, trying to connect with the users that you have in that country can also be very helpful to make sure that the design of the app is good specifically for that market.

Hanna: What’s become clear over the past couple of years is that it’s not going to be one winner that takes it all. You can tweak a product to be good for niche markets. And the more niche it is, the easier to reach your audience. Another thing that makes you stand out is to leverage different technologies – as a solo developer on a small team you can use these technologies to differentiate, because the bigger apps might not have them on their roadmaps.

Oskar: If you just focus on what you’re building, on making sure that your customers are happy, there will be a spot for you. Markets are quite fragmented, so even if there are a lot of different apps in our category they might have different niches. There’s room for a lot of different apps to co-exist and make a really successful business. It’s about you tracking your app closely and seeing how it’s used and what the users love about it.

Espen: People are obsessed with competition, but the market is infinite! So build what you believe in and disregard any competitor. If you do what you believe in and you sell some subscriptions, you’re going to be able to live your life and have a good time building that app with passion.

Apple is proud to support and uplift the next generation of developers, creators and entrepreneurs through its Swift Student Challenge program.

Over the past three decades, thousands of students have built successful careers in technology, founded startups and created organisations focused on democratising technology and using it to build a better future.

If you want to learn more about the Swift Student Challenge, you can find a link to the program website below. You could be the next scholarship winner!