Apple Design Awards

Apple revealed the winners of its prestigious 2025 Apple Design Awards Tuesday, celebrating 12 exceptional apps and games that showcase the very best of what’s possible on Apple devices. And the celebration of Apple Design Awards-winning apps and games will carry on at WWDC25, Apple said.

“Developers continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible, creating apps and games that are not only beautifully designed but also deeply impactful,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “We’re excited to celebrate this incredible group of winners and finalists at WWDC and spotlight the innovation and craftsmanship they bring to each experience.”

The Apple Design Awards recognized 14 “best-in-class” apps and games, the iPhone giant said Thursday. It will hand out the awards, which celebrate excellence in design and outstanding technical achievement, to winners at WWDC24 on Monday.

“It’s inspiring to see how developers are using our technology to create exceptional apps and games that enhance the lives of users,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “This year’s winners have demonstrated how apps can create powerful and moving experiences — and we’re excited to celebrate their hard work and ingenuity at WWDC this year.”

And this year the awards added a new spatial computing category.

Apple’s much-anticipated Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC24) will kick off with a 10 a.m. Pacific keynote address on June 10, followed by the Platforms State of the Union address at 1 p.m. Pacific, Apple confirmed Tuesday. Along with the WWDC24 schedule information, it also presented the finalists for the Apple Design Awards it will bestow at the show.

As usual, the conference will highlight what’s new and upcoming with the company’s software ecosystem.

A dozen “best-in-class” apps and games took honors in the Apple Design Awards Monday at WWDC23. Winning development teams hailed from around the world, delivering innovative apps with great design, Apple said.

“Apps and games are integral to how we live, work, and play. At Apple, we love to recognize outstanding developers whose apps reflect incredible creativity and design excellence,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.

Following the WWDC 2022 opening keynote Monday, Apple honored exceptional apps and games via the 2022 Apple Design Awards. In the ceremony, the company selected iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS app nominees that “demonstrated outstanding technical achievement” and more.

In this year’s awards, selection pared down a field of 36 nominated finalists to the 12 winners. Three apps and three games competed in each of the six categories: inclusivity, delight and fun, interaction, social impact, visuals and graphics, and innovation.

Check out the winners below.

With its Worldwide Developers Conference coming up, Apple revealed the finalists Tuesday for this year’s Apple Design Awards.

The Apple Design Awards, to be bestowed at WWDC22 next week, showcase apps with outstanding design, innovation, ingenuity and technical achievement, the company said.

The annual Apple Design Awards honor excellence in innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement in iOS and iPadOS application and game design. A dozen winners were named Thursday in categories ranging from outstanding Interaction to apps that are just fun.

Londoner David William Hearn is not a trained programmer. He has no university education when it comes to making software. And yet his musical notation app for iPad, StaffPad, just won a coveted Apple Design Award this week.

The iPad app gives composers and conductors powerful tools for writing and tweaking musical scores, and for sharing their changes instantly with musicians on a stage or in a recording studio. StaffPad places the iPad and Apple Pencil squarely in the center of the collaborative creative process.

Here’s how Hearn and his team created their award-winning music-notation app.

The eight winners of this year’s Apple Design Awards showcase “outstanding app design, innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement,” the company said Monday.

Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, said the four apps and four games honored “inspire not only their peers in the Apple developer community, but all of us at Apple, too.”

Apple has revealed the winners of its prestigious 21st Apple Design Awards, offering a nice boost to the indie developers in question and some good recommendations for users.

The awards span nine different countries and a variety of app types, from note-taking apps to games. Check out the winners below.

Despite removing its annual Design Awards show from the WWDC 2017 schedule last month, Apple still handed out awards for the best apps of the year at its developer conference and games were the biggest winners.

Apple has published its WWDC schedule ahead of kickoff on Monday morning, but there’s one glaring omission. The company’s annual Apple Design Awards is nowhere to be found.

Most Apple fans don’t start drooling at the mention of speech-recognition APIs, Xcode thread sanitizers, Metal tessellation or Pixar USD model support. However, if you’re a developer, those can be huge game-changers that mean you can make your apps better than ever.

While Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2016 keynote revealed loads of fresh features coming in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra — including some amazing stuff that should delight iPhone, iPad and Mac owners when the final versions launch this fall — developers watching Monday’s event saw tons of seemingly minor updates that will let them make apps better than ever.

To find out what the little updates could mean for typical users, Cult of Mac asked some of this year’s Apple Design Award winners what WWDC additions they’re most excited about.

Here’s what they told us.

To top off its monstrous opening day of WWDC 2016, Apple revealed the winners of its 2016 Apple Design Awards. The 10 developer apps and 2 student selections showcase the cutting edge of iOS technology by pushing their genres to new levels.

Games were the big winners last year, but this year Apple has highlighted everything from audio creation tools to a beautiful writing app.

And the winners are …

The Apple Design Award winners are in, and they showcase the cutting edge of game and app design.

At a ceremony Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple handed out 12 awards to the best apps of the past year. Games scored half of the nods, with some really cool productivity, finance and utility apps also taking honors.

Here are all of this year’s winning apps — and why they won.

When Ryan Orbuch and Michael Hansen set out to make a task manager for the iPhone, they were both 16 years old. Now they’ve won a 2013 Apple Design Award for Finish, their app that specializes in combating procrastination.

Today, version 2.0 of Finish landed in the App Store, and among a design refresh, the update packs a ton of new features.

Every year a few quality apps are selected to win the coveted Apple Design Award at WWDC. It’s a developer’s dream to be recognized by Apple for making great software, and the Design Award is the pinnacle of accolades in the Apple developer community. This year’s winners include some very popular titles you may have heard of, like Letterpress and the newest iOS version of Evernote.

Ironically, one of the apps Apple selected for a Design Award this year has been killed in iOS 7.

Apple has this morning announced that its 2013 Worldwide Developer Conference will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone West from Monday, June 10 through Friday, June 14. The five-day event will provide developers with a first look at the future of iOS and OS X.

Tickets will go on sale tomorrow, April 25, at 10 a.m. PDT.

Every year Apple picks the very best apps in the App Store as recipients of its prestigious Apple Design Awards (ADAs). iPhone apps like Infinity Blade and Mac apps like Pixelmator won last year, and this year’s winners are just as good.

11 apps were awarded ADAs today by Apple at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California during WWDC. The awards are meant to “celebrate excellence and recognize the outstanding work of iOS and OS X developers.”

Here are the winners of the 2012 ADAs:

Following the announcement of the already-sold-out WWDC 2012, Apple has officially begun accepting nominations for its 2012 Apple Design Awards. Mac and iOS apps can be nominated to win the most prestigious developer awards Apple gives each year, and past winners include apps like Infinity Blade and Things.

Registered iOS developers can nominate apps today and Apple will announce the winners at WWDC in June.

The Apple Design Awards just concluded at WWDC, and the winners are…