Ryan Nair, a Penn State sophomore majoring in computer science, has always had a love for developing iOS products and creating apps meant to make things easier for others.

Nair did exactly that in the summer of 2023 when he created the app “Meet and Eat,” which allows Penn State University Park students to share a profile about themselves and find other people interested in eating together. However, Meet and Eat began long before that.

Nair and the friends he met freshman year, Asa Reynolds and Jason Selsley, wanted to create something to help students find people to eat at the dining halls with — a problem they ran into in their first year on campus.

“We were all freshmen at the time. We had just moved into school, and we didn’t know anybody,” Nair said. “They were like, ‘What if we built an app to connect people at dining halls, so kids don’t have to eat alone and they can make friends?'”

The question quickly turned into the group entering “HackPSU,” Penn State’s hackathon held each semester with the app idea in mind.

The idea turned into Meet and Eat, which won first place and led to Nair deciding to develop the concept into a real app after receiving honors at HackPSU.

Nair spent last summer writing code and compiling data to turn the app into what it currently is. Users can create a profile, view menus from each Penn State dining hall, and match with others in search of people to eat with.

“The app was written in a language called Swift, which is a language made by Apple, and it uses Penn State Eats as a back-end server,” Nair said.

Nair also utilized Google Firebase which allows you to store data, he said.

Nair entered another competition with the app: Apple’s annual “Swift Student Challenge,” which allows students to submit their apps to a competition.

Nair was selected as one of 350 students to win the challenge, but one of just nine to earn the more selective honors of joining Apple CEO Tim Cook at Apple Park in Cupertino, California.

“Nine of us got to go to Apple Park a few days before their annual Worldwide Developers Conference and meet Tim Cook, present the app to him, and hear feedback from him,” Nair said.

The encounter with Cook gave Nair a new perspective on creating apps, specifically Meet and Eat, and even made him want to publish it to the App Store.

“That was just an amazing experience. That just inspired me to continue,” Nair said. “At the time, I had no plans to develop this and release it on the App Store. It helped me keep on this path of wanting to continue to do development and learning as much as I can.”

Meet and Eat is available at Penn State’s University Park campus, and although nothing has been made official yet, Nair has plans to bring it to other schools in the future.