Apple's Developer Academy is reportedly expanding to Saudi Arabia

Apple Developer Mac Hero (Image credit: Joe Keller / iMore)

What you need to know

Apple is reportedly expanding its Developer Academy to include a new HQ in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, is set to benefit from the new move.

Apple will build a new Apple Academy HQ in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, according to reports. The move comes after Apple also opened a similar venture in South Korea earlier this year.

According to local reports spied by AppleInsider, the move is in partnership with Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones (SAFCSP).

Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Al-Swaha thanked the Apple Developer Academy for choosing the Kingdom to be the first country in the MENA region to host the global Apple academy for programming and development."This qualitative move is an investment in the digital minds and skills of our girls in their journey of building the innovative future of the nation and the transformation towards an economy based on innovation and digital transformation."

The program is designed to help people learn the skills needed to create apps for iPhones, iPads, and Macs so they can eventually get their work into the App Store. Apple already has similar academies in multiple countries including Brazil and of course the United States.

Programs like this could ultimately lead to the best and brightest minds bringing their apps to Apple's platforms, something Apple will obviously benefit from. If the best iPhone apps of the future come out of an academy it'll be money very well spent.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.