Is Building an App a Good Extracurricular?

This question requires the ultimate "it depends" type of answer.

The truth is that app development can be one of the most compelling extracurriculars on a college application. or one of the most forgettable, and the difference between the two has almost nothing to do with the quality of the code.

There are essentially two scenarios where building an app genuinely moves the needle. The first is public traction: your app gets published on the App Store or Google Play, earns a strong rating, and accumulates meaningful downloads. The second is institutional impact: your app is adopted and actively used by a local government agency, a nonprofit you do pro bono STEM work for, or another organization with a real mission, and it demonstrably helps them better serve the people who depend on them. Think an app that helps a food bank track inventory more efficiently, or one that a city's parks department uses to manage volunteer scheduling. Those are stories that write themselves on a college application.

Apps built purely to demonstrate that you can build an app, with no user base and no measurable outcome, carry no weight. And this is where a lot of students misread the moment we're in.

Here's the hard truth: as of right now, anyone can generate a functional app with a few prompts into an AI program. The barrier to entry for app creation has essentially collapsed. Admissions officers at elite universities are aware of this. An app that exists simply as proof of technical effort no longer signals what it once did. Colleges have always valued outcome over effort, and this shift in the landscape has made that principle more relevant than ever. What you built matters far less than what it did.

This is actually one of the most underappreciated aspects of app development as an extracurricular: it transcends intended major. A student applying as a history major who built an app for a local historical society to catalog and share archival documents, one that the society's staff continues to use, has demonstrated initiative, community investment, and technical adaptability all at once. A future English major who partnered with a literacy nonprofit and built a reading-tracking tool their volunteers rely on is telling a story about mission-driven problem solving. Admissions committees at schools like MIT and Stanford aren't just looking for future engineers when they evaluate technical projects. They're looking for people who identify real problems and build durable solutions.

There is one more factor that separates a strong app extracurricular from a weak one, and it's something most students never think about: maintainability. What happens to the app after you get your acceptance letter and move on?

Colleges are skeptical of extracurriculars whose entire legacy rests on one person's continued involvement. If the nonprofit's app breaks the moment you leave for college and no one can fix it because you were the only one who understood it, that's not an institutional contribution, it's a dependency. Before you submit your application, you need to be able to honestly answer: Is this app documented well enough for someone else to maintain? Did I train a staff member or hand it off to another student? Is it hosted somewhere stable with a renewal plan in place?

The students who can answer yes to those questions aren't just building apps. They're building systems. And that's exactly what the best colleges in the country are looking for.

If you need help trimming the fat of your current extracurriculars so you can use your time better to distinguish yourself, need help selecting which activities to participate in, or have any other questions related to the college admissions process, schedule a free consultation with an admissions expert today.