Israa, Hosna, Nicole, Ryan, Mark, and Joe on the set of Web Dev Challenge. The text reads, "Web Dev Challenge community hackathon, S2.E7 Touch Grass by Apollo and CodeTV"

Photos: Jayme Fay

Build an app that connects us to the physical world

So much of the software out there today seems to be reducing our connections — we talk to fewer people, have fewer reasons to go outside, etc. — so let’s build apps that help connect us to the physical world.

Face-to-face. IRL. Meatspace. Between no-contact deliveries and every AI app trying to replace another human relationship — from pair programming to therapy to romantic partners — it feels like so much of the technology being produced right now is designed to minimize, or even eliminate, our need to interact with other humans.

Let’s do our small part to change that. Your challenge is to build an app that encourages people to connect with the physical world and/or each other.

What helps you disconnect from the digital firehose and spend time making offline connections? Go in whatever direction inspires you, whether that’s a hobby, different ways to spend time together with other people, connecting to nature, or something completely different.

Your app should help ground your users and reconnect them to the world beyond their screens.

The Tool: Apollo Connectors

Your app must use Apollo Connectors as part of the build.

Apollo has been helping developers build flexible APIs via GraphQL since the early days of the technology, and Connectors make it possible to bring any REST API into GraphQL quickly and painlessly. This is exciting because it means you can extend your own data with third-party API data (or vice versa) to build out anything you can imagine without a lot of data plumbing hassle.

For this challenge, you’ll have access to a large collection of pre-built Connectors for everything from Pokémon to Stripe data to LLM providers like Anthropic and OpenAI. You can also quickly hook up your own REST APIs to a custom Connector.

Make new connections and get expert guidance

We’ve set up a dedicated channel in the CodeTV Discord called #builder-chat for brainstorming, sharing ideas, and keeping each other accountable.

Win a ticket to GraphQL Summit!

The Apollo team will choose 3 hackathon submissions to win a free ticket to the GraphQL Summit.

In addition, the first 5 qualifying apps submitted will receive an item of their choice, up to $150 value, from one of the following sites:

Watch the episode for inspiration

See how Israa, Hosna, Nicole, Ryan, Mark, and Joe tackled the challenge in the latest episode of Web Dev Challenge to jumpstart your own creativity.

The rules and how to submit

If you want to play along, here’s how:

  1. Team up with a friend or work on your onw
  2. Build a web app that meets the challenge
  3. Spend 30 minutes¹ planning your app
  4. Spend 4 hours¹ building your app
  5. Use Apollo Connectors to build your web app
  6. Publish the source code as a public GitHub repo
  7. Publish the web app to a public URL
  8. Submit your web app by 11:59 pm Pacific on Monday, Sep 8, 2025

Submit your web app

Happy building! Let’s have some fun.