Every WWDC, Apple hands out Design Awards to its favorite apps and games of the past year, to “excellence in innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement.” Fourteen developers picked up prizes this week for their exemplary design work.
Like last year, there were awards up for grabs for best app and best game across six categories: Inclusivity, Delight and Fun, Interaction, Social Impact, Visuals and Graphics, and Innovation. This year, Apple also featured a Spatial Computing category to celebrate the best apps for Vision Pro.
The winners were quietly announced a few days ago, but with all the recent AI fanfare from WWDC, it was easy to miss the announcement. So here it is again!
Delight and Fun
Bears Gratitude: An adorable journaling app that encourages daily gratitude and self-reflection.
NYT Games: An expanded catalog of engaging games, including classic crosswords and new hits like Connections, perfect for replayability.
Inclusivity
oko: Alerts pedestrians with low to no vision to signal changes through haptic and audio feedback, leveraging VoiceOver and Dynamic Type.
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
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.
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.
Interaction
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.
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.
Social Impact
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.
Visuals and Graphics
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.
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.
Spatial Computing
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.
Blackbox: A puzzle game that challenges players to think creatively within a spatial canvas, featuring unique and surprising details.
For more info on the winners, head to the Apple Design Awards microsite. Here you can read Apple’s reasoning behind every win, check out the other finalists, and even watch an awesome compilation video showing off each winning app in under a minute.
Interestingly, none of the winners overlapped with our own TapAppGame App Awards, which we pick at the end of every calendar year. We tend to go for alternative picks that might not get celebrated by Apple, although our 2023 App of the Year was at least shortlisted by Apple this time. No such luck for our 2023 Game of the Year.