Pranav Bhuvanagiri: From UT Austin to App Store

Winter break, freshman year. Everyone else is home eating leftovers. This kid spends the entire break writing an app... and the week classes start, he's standing in a dorm lobby at Jester West doing a product launch.

A launch event. In a dorm.

In a dorm. And the app he built was an unofficial version of a UT Austin safety service. Which raises the obvious question — what does a university do when a nineteen-year-old builds a better front end for its own program?

Okay, I need the answer to that. But back up. Who is he?

Pranav Bhuvanagiri. Grew up around Houston, Clements High School, then computer science and math at the University of Texas at Austin. His own portfolio says he's into cloud computing, mobile computing and machine learning. Totally normal CS student résumé... except he'd already shipped apps to the App Store before he ever set foot on campus.

Before campus? In high school?

February two thousand twenty-one. He puts out an app called SAT Daily. Free, no micro-transactions — the listing literally says they're a non-profit team of students. The pitch is one question a day, word of the day, explanations for everything, so you're studying in the gap while you wait for the bus.

The classic teenage insight: nobody's doing three-hour prep sessions, but everybody's on their phone in line.

Right. And here's the part I find genuinely telling. Look at the version history on that App Store page and it's... relentless. Twenty twenty-one alone: June twenty-first, June twenty-fourth, July ninth, July twenty-first, July twenty-fifth, July thirtieth.

Wait, that's six updates in about six weeks.

Including a note that just says "COMPLETE redesign from the bottom up." Then later: new test generation, a calculator for the math section, an education mode. And in January twenty twenty-three, version four point oh — labelled "Complete Rewrite."

He rewrote the whole thing. Again. For a free app with — what's the rating?

Eleven ratings. Three point four stars.

Eleven! That's the thing I can't get past. Most people would've quietly let that die.

And he didn't. He also shipped an ACT version. His developer page lists three apps on the store. Meanwhile he's doing hackathons — he joined Devpost in July twenty twenty-one and won a prize at his very first online hackathon that same month.

What was the project?

Around then he builds EyeglassML — point your camera at an object, get its history, its attributes, a material breakdown. Written in Swift. It placed fourth at a two-day event called Hack the Cloud. And the GitHub readme has this very him line: this is the latest public build... a more updated one, with bug fixes and better parsing, exists on the App Store.

Even his readme is apologizing for being out of date.

So now we're at UT. Freshman year. A student named Maddisetty has a business communications class project — find something at UT that needs improving. She picks Sure Walk.

Which is what, exactly?

A campus service. You request it, and two Sure Walkers walk you home, or you get a cart or a car ride, as long as you're inside a boundary around campus. The catch: it ran through a Google form.

A Google form. For a safety service. At night.

She reached out to Pranav just to help make a mock-up for her presentation. He built the real thing over winter break. Saved details, trip history, a queue system so you can see where you are while you wait. The Daily Texan covered it in February twenty twenty-three.

And UT's reaction?

UT's Sure Walk website says it is not affiliated with and does not endorse any Sure Walk app. Pranav told the paper it was going through approval with Parking and Transportation, and that once approved it'd verify students with their UT EIDs — likely the next academic year.

So the honest answer is... it was in limbo.

That's the honest answer, and that's where the public record stops. But the two of them were already talking about an admin panel for Sure Walk staff, and algorithms for where to park the vehicles.

Right, he's not sulking about the disclaimer, he's designing version two.

October twenty twenty-three. HackTX, UT's annual hackathon. He and three teammates build Fishbowl — an investment platform for local startups, inspired, in their words, by Shark Tank and TikTok. It wins Capital One's Best Financial Hack.

There it is.

Thirty-one public repos on GitHub. A teaching assistant job for intro to programming. Research assistant at UT's Computational Communication Laboratory. Then a software engineering internship at Fidelity Investments. By late twenty twenty-four he's blogging about debugging a BigQuery anomaly and cramming C++ for an interview.

So what's the lesson? Because "build apps" is not advice.

The lesson is the version history. Eleven ratings, and he rewrote it from scratch — twice. Nobody was watching. The hackathon win, the TA job, the internship — those all came after years of shipping to an audience of basically nobody.

The reps happen before anyone claps.

His own tip, from his blog: break the big thing into chunks you can actually finish. Turns out that's not study advice. That's the whole career.