AYES, Belgium

iPhone

oko alerts pedestrians to the state of lighted signals through haptic and audio feedback, an immediately impactful approach for those with low to no vision. It’s a smart solution to a critical safety scenario that takes full advantage of flawless VoiceOver and Dynamic Type implementation.

Elsevier, Ireland

iPad, Mac

Complete Anatomy 2024 is beautifully designed and full of meticulously detailed models and educational content. And the ability for people to change skin tones and models shows a welcome attention to diversity.

tiimo ApS, Denmark

iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch

A thoughtfully considered calendar app for the neurodivergent community. The app takes tremendous advantage of accessibility features and its Live Activities bring the content to a person’s Lock Screen. Intelligently conceived, sharply executed.

Humble Bundle, Inc, USA

iPhone, iPad

A moving experience in more ways than one. Part zen puzzle, part life story, and part meditation on the objects that drift in and out of our lives, Unpacking follows a woman as she moves from her childhood bedroom to her college dorm room to her first apartment and beyond. The game reaches out to a wide audience through inclusive layouts, animations, and options.

Kovalov Ivan, Ukraine

iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro

Quadline is an ultra-calm and minimalist puzzler that focuses on simple mechanics like rotation, movement, and teleportation. It purposely uses no text or numbers, relying on single-tap controls for almost all interactions.

RED GAMES CO, LLC, USA

iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro

A colorful adventure that sets a new standard for inclusive and gender-neutral character-creation options, which include different skin tones, abilities, body types, pronouns, and more. Crayola Adventures offers inclusivity options across the board, including full narration for non-readers or those with reading challenges.

Copilot Money, Inc., USA

iPhone, Mac

With an approachable interface and high-quality animations, Copilot Money makes financial tracking just about as approachable as financial tracking can be. The native Swift app uses machine learning to automatically categorize budgets, investments, and spending data, and presents it in colorful, elegant, easy-to-parse charts.

Mateus Abras, Brazil

iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, Apple Vision Pro

SmartGym is a personal ML-powered trainer on your wrist, a friendly companion that impressively adapts to your skill set, goals, and performance on the fly. The app’s Smart Trainer feature constantly adjusts its workout suggestions, adjusting weights, recalibrating reps, and offering up recommendations from the app’s library of more than 620 exercises.

Savage Interactive Pty Ltd, Australia

iPad

The new standard in creating 2D animations on iPad. Procreate Dreams is a marvelously designed tool that allows creatives of all kinds to animate using the extensive and familiar library of brushes, gestures, and PencilKit-enabled behaviors from the original Procreate. And as is the case with its predecessor, every interaction in Procreate Dreams feels polished, thoughtfully considered, and ready to use out of the box.

Activision Publishing, Inc., USA

iPhone, iPad

Simply put: Call of Duty has never looked better. Warzone Mobile represents a huge leap forward in visual fidelity, thanks in large part to a Peak Graphics mode that provides 2K rendering, higher-quality lightmaps, and wildly improved texture on iPhone 15 Pro and iPad with an M1 chip or later. This is the total battle royale package, complete with mobile-only campaigns, unified progression between platforms, and a massive upgrade of the series’ combat.

Snapbreak Games AB, Sweden

iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro

A dark, imaginative tale that’s easy to get lost in. Lost in Play feels like a graphic novel come to life. Every corner of its inventive world — from its spooky forest to its clifftop village — brims with visual imagination and handcrafted charm. And the game is filled with endearing characters (like a surprisingly snarky flock of sheep) and fun mini-games.

Palm Court LLC, USA

iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro

Wavelength isn’t the mobile version of a board game; it’s a unique experience in its own right. Like its tabletop counterpart, Wavelength presents quizzes and questions designed to make players work together and maybe read each others’ minds. And it features loads of new content and fun upgraded designs, like real-time synchronous dial movements and live emotes.

Savage Interactive Pty Ltd, Australia

iPad

Procreate Dreams offers an incredible collection of tools to empower people to start their creative engines. And with universally intuitive controls — the app supports both multitouch interactions and Apple Pencil — it’s easy to plunge right into the canvas, no matter how much experience you bring to the table.

The Browser Company of New York Inc., USA

iPhone

It’s not easy to come up with a new approach to the humble internet search, but the fresh and effective Arc Search provides smart, concise results summaries that have been smartly powered by AI. The app’s information is nicely designed, easy to parse, powerfully researched, and creatively delivered — and all with a focus on privacy.

Devin Davies, New Zealand

iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro

Recipe apps rise and fall on their organization and information hierarchy, and Crouton serves up a clean, tasty interface for stashing away recipes, creating grocery lists, and presenting step-by-step instructions in the kitchen — even if you’re not exactly a chef. Everything in Crouton, from the next recipe step to the name of that missing spice, is easy to find and right where you need it.

Playdigious, France

iPhone, iPad

This engagingly eerie game conjures up its dark atmosphere from its very first moments, offering up vaguely unsettling characters, appropriately creepy fog, and the kind of well-executed and evocatively off-kilter lighting effects you’d expect from a scary dream. Plus, the curious and compelling story unfolds at just the right pace.

Floppy Club ApS, Denmark

iPhone, iPad

A world music-inspired rhythm game that looks as good as it sounds. Rytmos challenges players to solve puzzles by creating pathways using simple drag gestures, and every completed level adds a new element to an evolving song. The onboarding makes gameplay instantly clear, and the gestures are simple and fun, even when the game starts delivering more and more complexity.

Seabaa, Inc., USA

iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV

A meditative matching game with smooth interactions, a chill color palette, and a deeply satisfying soundscape. finity. puzzles come with a limitation: You can only make a certain number of moves in each level before you hit gridlock. As you might suspect, this simple rule demands tremendous strategy.

The How We Feel Project, Inc., USA

iPhone

How We Feel is out to help people better understand and manage their emotions by identifying the specific factors that spark them. That’s a lofty goal, and the app approaches it with a thoughtful design based on a “feelings grid” of four colors, with gradients for the level of intensity of each.

ahead solutions GmbH, Germany

iPhone

An app experience that feels like an ongoing conversation between person and coach. Each interaction in the expertly designed Ahead: Emotions Coach contributes to a sense of rapport.

Gentler Stories d.o.o., Slovenia

iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch

With its thoughtful focus on both physical and mental health, Gentler Streak is chasing the elusive goal of improving everyone’s lifestyles, no matter who or where they are. As its name suggests, the app is powered not by insistent reminders but an optimistic and encouraging vibe that takes into account not just physical fitness but mental well-being too.

The Pixel Hunt, France

iPhone, iPad

A lush visual novel about sisterhood, motherhood, grief, and survival. The Wreck tells the story of Junon, a writer who’s abruptly called to a hospital to make a life-changing decision. The story is far from light, but it’s beautifully written and eloquently told, especially through fleeting thought bubbles that reflect the swirl and scatter of stressful situations.

MagicFuel Games, USA

iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Vision Pro

An environmental focus powers this inventive city-building simulator, which rewards players for making green decisions like investing in clean energy, preserving natural wildlife, and building parks to reduce pollution. The more players think about the world around them, the better — and more fun — the game can be.

Mucks Games UG (haftungsbeschrnkt), Germany

iPhone, iPad

An interactive bedtime story, and a touching tale of togetherness. The Bear is all about hand-drawn animation, nighttime audio, and calming vibes. But its secret power comes from its characters, which are all relatable avatars for anyone who’s ever felt lost, unsure, or scared at any age.

Nicolas Mariniello, Italy

iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch

Sunlitt shines as an elegant way to track the sun’s position and movement, anywhere and at any time. Its visuals are certainly a bright spot, but the app’s power lies in data — sun position and path, a 3D sundial, solar event times, and more — all of which can arrive via widgets, Live Activities, and the Dynamic Island.

RhythmicWorks Software LLP, India

iPhone, Apple Watch

From an indie developer in India comes this clever meditation timer and tracker, in which successfully completing meditation sessions creates a mandala that’s been beautifully rendered in SwiftUI. Meditate shines on iPhone — where you can keep tabs through Standby mode on your nightstand or Lock Screen widgets — and as an independent Apple Watch app.

Things Inc., USA

iPhone, iPad

An incredible canvas for creativity, set in a nostalgic 8-bit world. Rooms is tough to categorize: It’s a blank slate for building imaginative scenes, a platform for cozy gaming, and a social space that lets you interact with thousands of other people’s creations. Quirky, compelling, and executed with a delightful retro twist.

505 Games, Inc., USA

iPhone, iPad, Mac

With some of the best graphics you’ll see on a mobile device, Death Stranding redefines what’s possible with Metal — and it’s a monster amount of fun to play. The game is a marvel that crunches its massive console history onto mobile devices while maintaining astonishing visuals powered by MetalFX, the Metal shader converter, and more. The apocalypse has rarely looked this good.

NEOWIZ Corporation, South Korea

Mac

In this gorgeously rendered adventure, players control a robotic puppet created by Geppetto — yes, that Geppetto — who must survive a battle march through a burned-out city to find his maker. One look at the visuals reveals a world of beautiful textures, detailed lighting, and stunning effects — and visual customization options like MetalFX upscaling and volumetric fog effects let you style the ruined city to your liking.

COGNOSPHERE PTE. LTD., Singapore

iPhone, iPad

This massive RPG from Genshin Impact creator HoYoverse is a turn-based combat game that rockets you across the stars to visit strange lands, recruit powerful heroes, and battle fierce foes. The game’s over-the-top attacks — like an impossibly huge orbital strike that takes out enemy aliens — are endlessly creative.

Fifth Star Labs LLC, USA

Apple Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad

Sky Guide is a magical means for space exploration, with its immersive graphics, subtly soaring sounds, and near-constant moments of wonder. Inspecting celestial objects is a simple matter of looking up at the heavens, where people can drink in a palette of gorgeous illustrations, astrological animations, and custom interactions, like the ability to pull a constellation down from the sky.

NBA MEDIA VENTURES, LLC, USA

Apple Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch

The NBA app is a basketball fan’s dream, one that presents a well-considered mix of live feeds, stats, and scores around the league. Plus, viewers can resize a viewing window to make players appear almost life-size, explore statistics that appear in ornaments around the main window, or construct a multi-view setup to track multiple games at once.

Algoriddim GmbH, Germany

Apple Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch

djay pro isn’t just a groundbreaking app; it’s an entirely new way to interact with music. With incredible technical ingenuity and best-in-class immersion, it feels fresh and new and alive. The app spins up high-quality turntables that you can scratch to your heart’s content, a cool interactive effects panel, and an array of magnificently considered environments.

Kluge Strategic Inc., USA

Apple Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad

An effervescent rhythm game in which your hands are all you need to keep the beat. Powered by a driving soundtrack of frenetic electronic, pop, and rock music, the challenges of Synth Riders are all about energy. Cleverly, players can accept the challenge in either a fully immersive space or in their own surroundings with passthrough — and they can play seated, standing, or in a one-handed mode.

Shapes and Stories, USA

Apple Vision Pro

Blackbox on iOS challenged players to think outside the screen; Blackbox on visionOS challenges them to think about every (metaphorical) corner of the spatial canvas from its very first moments. Revealing too much about Blackbox would spoil its many surprises; suffice it to say that wonderful details abound — like the soapy floating bubbles that drive level selection.

Loona Inc., USA

Apple Vision Pro

A meditative, immersive experience driven by rich graphics, moody sound design, and intuitive native gestures. Like its iOS predecessor — which won an Apple Design Award in 2021 — Loóna on visionOS delivers puzzles that are designed to be intuitive, forgiving, and pleasant to navigate. And while that may sound simple, achieving the proper levels of refinement and relaxation clearly required passion and effort — particularly in its interaction mechanics, which lets players rotate, move, and inspect pieces as they choose.