Each year, Apple gives out Design Awards to the most beautiful and brilliant apps and games. The awards span several categories, with a Spatial Computing category added this year to celebrate the cream of the Vision Pro crop. Though we won’t find out the winners until next week, the finalists have been revealed and there are some fantastic entries to check out.
We’ll be back next week with more detail on the 14 lucky winners, but for now here’s Apple’s shortlist of 42 finalists. Often the runners up are more interesting than the winners, so it’s worth diving into the full selection if you’re interested in amazing apps.
Note that for each section, the first three entries are apps and the next three are games.
Delight and Fun
Dudel Draw: A delightful drawing app with fun prompts, perfect for artists of all levels.
Bears Gratitude: An adorable journaling app that encourages daily gratitude and self-reflection.
Rooms: A creative collection of user-generated 3D spaces, games, and themes, emphasizing community and imagination.
WHAT THE CAR?: A hilarious racing game with unpredictable gameplay, charming car characters, and endless dad jokes.
NYT Games: An expanded catalog of engaging games, including classic crosswords and new hits like Connections, perfect for replayability.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure: A sweet and approachable adventure game where players restore an island, meet new characters, and unlock new areas.
Inclusivity
oko: Alerts pedestrians with low to no vision to signal changes through haptic and audio feedback, leveraging VoiceOver and Dynamic Type.
Complete Anatomy 2024: Features meticulously detailed models and educational content with attention to diversity, beautifully designed for learning.
Tiimo: A thoughtfully designed calendar app for the neurodivergent community, featuring Live Activities and Widgets for easy access.
Unpacking: A zen puzzle and life story game that follows a woman through various stages of life, with inclusive layouts and animations.
Quadline: A minimalist puzzler focusing on rotation, movement, and teleportation, with single-tap controls and no text or numbers.
Crayola Adventures: A colorful adventure game with inclusive and gender-neutral character creation options, and full narration for non-readers or those with reading challenges.
Innovation
Copilot Money: With an approachable interface and high-quality animations, Copilot Money uses machine learning to automatically categorize budgets, investments, and spending data, presenting it in colorful, elegant charts.
SmartGym: A personal ML-powered trainer that adapts to your skill set, goals, and performance, offering workout suggestions from a library of over 620 exercises.
Procreate Dreams: A new standard in creating 2D animations on iPad, Procreate Dreams uses familiar tools from Procreate, offering a polished and ready-to-use animation experience.
Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile: Call of Duty has never looked better, with Warzone Mobile offering 2K rendering, higher-quality lightmaps, and improved textures, alongside mobile-only campaigns and unified progression between platforms.
Lost in Play: A dark and imaginative tale that feels like a graphic novel come to life, featuring a visually inventive world, endearing characters, and fun mini-games.
Wavelength: A unique experience with quizzes and questions designed for teamwork and mind-reading, featuring real-time synchronous dial movements and live emotes, offering loads of new content and fun designs.
Interaction
Procreate Dreams: Procreate Dreams offers an incredible collection of tools to empower creativity, with intuitive controls that support multitouch interactions and Apple Pencil, making it easy to dive into the canvas regardless of experience level.
Arc Search: Arc Search provides smart, concise AI-powered results summaries, delivering well-researched and creatively presented information with a strong focus on privacy.
Crouton: Crouton is a recipe manager with a clean, organized interface for storing recipes, creating grocery lists, and presenting step-by-step cooking instructions, making everything easy to find and use in the kitchen.
Little Nightmares: This engagingly eerie game creates a dark atmosphere with unsettling characters, creepy fog, and evocative lighting effects, all while unfolding a curious and compelling story at the perfect pace.
Rytmos: A world music-inspired rhythm game where players solve puzzles using drag gestures, adding new elements to an evolving song with each completed level, featuring instantly clear gameplay and increasing complexity.
finity.: A meditative matching game with smooth interactions, a chill color palette, and a satisfying soundscape, where players must strategically navigate limited moves to solve each level.
Social Impact
How We Feel: Helps users better understand and manage their emotions through a thoughtfully designed “feelings grid” that identifies specific factors and intensity levels.
Ahead: Emotions Coach: Offers an expertly designed app experience that feels like an ongoing conversation between person and coach, building a sense of rapport.
Gentler Streak Fitness Tracker: Focuses on both physical and mental health, promoting an optimistic and encouraging vibe to improve lifestyles without insistent reminders.
The Wreck: A lush visual novel about sisterhood, motherhood, grief, and survival, telling the story of Junon through beautifully written thought bubbles that capture the swirl of stressful situations.
Cityscapes: Sim Builder: An environmentally focused city-building simulator that rewards players for making green decisions, like investing in clean energy and preserving wildlife, making the game more engaging and fun.
The Bear: An interactive bedtime story with hand-drawn animation and calming nighttime audio, featuring relatable characters that resonate with anyone who’s ever felt lost or scared.
Visuals and Graphics
Sunlitt: An elegant app for tracking the sun’s position and movement, featuring detailed data like a 3D sundial and solar event times, available through widgets, Live Activities, and the Dynamic Island.
Meditate: A clever meditation timer and tracker from an indie developer in India, creating beautiful mandalas for completed sessions, and offering seamless functionality on iPhone and as an independent Apple Watch app.
Rooms: An incredible canvas for creativity set in a nostalgic 8-bit world, blending imaginative scene building, cozy gaming, and social interaction with thousands of other creations, all executed with a delightful retro twist.
DEATH STRANDING: With some of the best graphics on a mobile device, Death Stranding redefines what’s possible with Metal, offering a fun and visually stunning experience that maintains its console-quality visuals on mobile.
Lies of P: In this beautifully rendered adventure, players control a robotic puppet created by Geppetto, navigating a stunningly detailed and customizable ruined city with visual options like MetalFX upscaling and volumetric fog effects.
Honkai: Star Rail: From the creator of Genshin Impact, this massive RPG features turn-based combat that rockets players across the stars to explore strange lands, recruit powerful heroes, and unleash endlessly creative over-the-top attacks.
Spatial Computing
Sky Guide: Sky Guide offers a magical means for space exploration with immersive graphics, soaring sounds, and custom interactions like pulling constellations down from the sky, making it easy to explore celestial objects by simply looking up.
NBA: The NBA app is a basketball fan’s dream, featuring live feeds, stats, and scores, with unique features like resizing viewing windows to make players appear life-size and constructing multi-view setups to track multiple games simultaneously.
djay: djay pro is a groundbreaking app offering an entirely new way to interact with music, featuring high-quality turntables, interactive effects panels, and immersive environments that make it feel fresh and alive.
Synth Riders: An energetic rhythm game where players use their hands to match the beat of electronic, pop, and rock music, playable in various immersive modes.
Blackbox: A puzzle game that challenges players to think creatively within a spatial canvas, featuring unique and surprising details.
Loóna: Cozy Puzzle Games: An immersive and meditative puzzle game with rich graphics and intuitive gestures, designed to provide a relaxing and refined gaming experience.