Speechify, USA

iPhone, iPad

With hundreds of voices and more than 50 available languages, Speechify turns any written text into audio — everything from websites, documents, scans, PDFs, and more. The app offers an approachable UI with a variety of accessibility features — Dynamic Type and VoiceOver among them — that make it an instantly helpful tool for everyone: students, professionals, and leisure readers, as well as auditory learners and people with low vision. The design team clearly worked to reduce cognitive load all throughout the app too. Speechify is more than a great app; it’s a critical resource that helps people live their lives.

GTA Solutions, India

iPhone, iPad

A beautifully designed health and fitness app that’s uniquely focused on the LGBTQ+ community. Evolve offers thoughtfully conceived and well-designed breathing exercises, affirmations, and daily journaling. With a friendly and straightforward tone, inclusive language, and a variety of diverse voices, it’s clearly intended to be a safe space for all, and it’s nicely integrated with features like Image Playground and the State of Mind API. A welcome and comfortable resource that’s been brought to life with thought and care.

Train Fitness, Canada

iPhone, iPad

Train Fitness logs workouts by using CoreMotion and CoreML to track the motion of a user’s Apple Watch and AirPods, eliminating the need for interaction with a screen or UI. This thoughtful approach makes Train Fitness particularly useful for people who are blind or low vision, or anyone who may face challenges interacting with screens. With specific modes designed for workouts in wheelchairs and for users with limb differences, Train Fitness proves a dedication to both platform and audience.

Klemens Strasser, Austria

iPhone, iPad

A uniquely drawn puzzle game that prioritizes inclusivity and ecology in equal measure. Inspired by an encounter with 18th and 19th century science texts, Art of Fauna’s throwback-style wildlife puzzles can be solved by either re-arranging the image on the front of the cards, or re-ordering the text description on the back. As in his previous Apple Design Award finalists, Letter Rooms and Ancient Board Game Collection, Strasser designed with accessibility in mind, adding color themes, full VoiceOver support, and phobia settings that let players opt out of seeing potentially upsetting imagery. Plus, proceeds from every purchase support wildlife conservation organizations.

Lykke Studios, Thailand and Cyprus

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

Lykke Studios returns to the Apple Design Awards with a nostalgic puzzler built for everyone. Players assemble puzzles made of ’80s-era puffy stickers — more than 2,500 of them, all drawn by local artists from Bangkok and Bali. As in their 2023 Apple Design Award winner Stitch and 2022 finalist Tint, the studio prioritized accessibility from Day 1, integrating features like Reduce Motion, a high-contrast mode, and a series of “outline settings” that add focus to certain parts of the board.

Split Atom Labs, Australia

iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro

A low-key fantasy adventure you can play at your own speed. Battle oversized rodents, recruit companions, discover magical swords, and turn your zero into a hero by undertaking text-based quests that unfold while you’re away from the game. With support for VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, and Haptics, Land of Livia is specifically designed for players who are blind or low vision. And it takes advantage of App Intents to let players carry out complex actions.

Rabbit 3 Times, USA

iPhone, Mac

For such a sophisticated tool, Play offers incredibly approachable prototyping capabilities that make design and development easier for everyone. Play helps designers create interactive prototypes using native SwiftUI frameworks, which can then be sent to Xcode and used for shipping finished apps. The well-designed UI is nicely organized, visually pleasing, and cleverly integrated with App Clips. Plus, everything you create in Play — including logic and interactions — matches perfectly with Xcode.

Music.AI, Brazil

iPhone, iPad

This musical marvel isolates the instruments in a recorded song, using machine learning models to separate out the vocals, guitar, bass, drums, and more into individual tracks. The effect is absolutely mind-bending. You can remove a guitar solo and supply your own, turn any song into an a cappella, or play around with pitch and tempo, all of which can make it feel like you’re hearing a favorite song for the first time. But for all its technical magic, Moises is remarkably easy to understand and navigate, which leaves you not just astounded at its powers, but compelled to rediscover your music.

Digital Workroom Ltd., United Kingdom

iPhone, iPad

An impressive transcription, translation, and summarization tool that offers an astonishing level of accuracy — and an adorable aesthetic. A relaxed little capybara hangs out on the screen while the app is doing its thing, and the results are delivered right away, all powered by the Apple Intelligence Translate API. A simple and endearing interface for a complex task.

Philipp Stollenmayer, Germany

iPhone, iPad

A charming story game with polished execution and impressive production values — and did we mention it’s a snack-based musical reboot of “Romeo and Juliet”? Created by Philipp Stollenmayer and sandwiched somewhere between narrative and game, PBJ tells the story of star-crossed condiments through paper cutouts animated by hand and a soundtrack full of sticky earworms (complete with a karaoke mode) — and it even jams in a few puns. With delightful controls, creative camera angles, cool haptics, and countless clever moments, PBJ never stops spreading joy.

Bootloader Studio Holdings, Singapore

Apple Vision Pro

A clever example of ambient gaming on Vision Pro, Pawz leverages passthrough technology to integrate virtual pets into real-world environments — or, put another way, to let you play with (or meditate alongside) an animated furry friend that evolves with your interaction and reacts to the environments you customize. It’s all good fun, full of charming moments, meaningful progressions, and a playful personality.

Resolution Games AB, Sweden

Apple Vision Pro

A fresh take on tower defense, Gears & Goo on Apple Vision Pro is a polished experience that makes expert use of spatial audio, hand tracking, and eye tracking. Gears & Goo is dripping with fun; it’s fluid, responsive, and smartly uses the 3D space to create a deep strategic experience. It’s easy to pick up and enjoy — who doesn’t love throwing goo around? — and the cartoon steampunk style really pops, making the experience feel like a miniature world floating in your space.

Zhejiang Taobao Network, China

Apple Vision Pro

An exceptional example of how to render, interact with, and design for 3D elements on Apple Vision Pro. Taobao provides incredible 3D models that are comparable to their physical counterparts, each with smooth interactions, transitions, and intuitive controls. For each 3D product, Taobao takes into consideration placement, position, controls, size, and function, and offers the super-useful ability to compare items side-by-side.

Information Architects AG, Switzerland

iPhone, iPad, Mac

A smart solution for distraction-free writing. Substantially updated since its initial release, iA Writer offers useful features like a customizable keyboard, selective text highlighting, and iCloud sync. It’s got an array of intuitive interactions — like swiping right to access your library and left to preview a document — that emphasize its goal of helping people tune out interruptions and focus on the words.

Silvio Rizzi, Switzerland

iPhone, iPad, Mac

Like a perfectly prepared dish, this recipe app is all about getting the details right. When the app’s sharp-looking cooking mode is activated, recipe steps, measurements, and timing details are subtly dimmed and highlighted at the proper time. Timers integrate with the Dynamic Island, recipe scanning is powered by the Vision framework, and ingredients plug right into the Reminders app. And for the cherry on top, Mela lets you subscribe to RSS feeds from cooking sites and can extract recipes from social media video descriptions.

Black Salt Games, New Zealand

iPhone, iPad, Mac

A two-word idea — “Lovecraftian fishing” — inspired this appealingly creepy debut from Black Salt Games, whose creative team all admits to spending more time fishing in video games than in real life. DREDGE is a slow-paced horror adventure set in a maritime town where dark and large secrets lurk below the surface. The game’s submerged monsters may be unsettling, but its interactions are smooth sailing across touch and controller, both in its main narrative and fun mini-games. And it’s a seamless experience across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Resolution Games AB, Sweden

Apple Vision Pro

What’s more fun than defending your tower by throwing around blobs of goo? This polished and sticky spatial game features top-of-the-line integration of eye tracking and hand control. The experience of picking up and plopping down your units on the battlefield feels tactile (and awfully fun). And the game is easy to pick up, understand, and enjoy.

Snowman, Canada

iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV

Packed with cool combos to perform and obstacles to navigate, Skate City: New York plays equally well with touch and controller. Its patient onboarding affords plenty of time to learn its wealth of kickflips, manuals, and grinds, which you can then upgrade through smartly spaced-out lessons. The result is easy to pick up, but with enough challenge to keep even expert digital skaters glued to its virtual boards.

Sherwood Forestry Service, USA

iPhone, iPad

When wildfires tore through southern California in January, Watch Duty served as a primary source for essential, ever-changing, and sometimes life-saving information. A non-commercial operation run by volunteers, Watch Duty once again proved itself the go-to app for a community impacted by wildfires, clearly and reliably offering updates, resources, and real-time guidance. Watch Duty’s core functions and integrations are certainly impressive in their own right. But the best thing that can be said is that the app continued to step up when it needed to.

Snapwise, Canada

iPhone, iPad

A news aggregator that helps people view how media outlets across the political spectrum are covering or downplaying a topic. Ground News presents news coverage from thousands of publications worldwide alongside a graph that evaluates the political bent of an article or outlet (which is ranked by a third-party service and users). Every design element, from color-coded bias markers to user-friendly layouts, has been carefully crafted to inspire trust, transparency, and a desire to explore multiple viewpoints.

Opal OS, USA

iPhone, iPad

Opal helps people establish a more intentional relationship with technology by encouraging less time on devices. And it’s a delightful experience in its own right, full of helpful tools like widgets, Shortcuts, and easy-to-set-up customizations. And fun touches like haptics when unlocking “gems” deliver a charming way to create focus.

Devolver Digital, USA

Mac

A powerful, sometimes somber, and richly illustrated story about the emotional effects of environmental decline. Created by the team behind the gorgeous Gris, Neva follows a girl and her wolf as they make their way through a decaying world, using the changing of the seasons to illustrate not just the challenges of their reality but the evolution of their relationship. Players are charged with escorting the pair safely through the game’s breathtakingly realized world, which shines in every season. But the game’s true heart is the connection between the pair, which reminds us what it means to care for something — or someplace.

Daniel Jones, USA

Apple Vision Pro

A whimsical experience that’s part redemption arc and part environmental warning. This inventive game features a character named Picardy, a man who’s desperate to make up for past mistakes and bring beauty into his part of the world. The game maximizes the potential of the spatial canvas, offering many compelling ways for players to interact with the richly drawn world (and take in its wonderful soundscapes), all in service of a message about environmental stewardship — and the difficulty in changing institutions.

Klemens Strausser, Austria

iPhone, iPad

A uniquely drawn puzzle game that prioritizes inclusivity and ecology in equal measure. Inspired by an encounter with 18th and 19th-century science texts, Art of Fauna’s classical wildlife puzzles can be solved by either re-arranging the image on the front of the cards or re-ordering the text description on the back. It’s a warm, serene way to bring awareness to the plight of endangered species, and a bit of a love letter to science. And it backs up its message: Proceeds from every purchase support conservation organizations.

Sketchsoft, South Korea

iPad

An incredible modeling tool that allows artists to easily transform their 2D designs into fully immersive 3D creations. Feather is designed from the ground up with user experience and creativity in mind, packing powerful and advanced 3D modeling features inside a minimalist interface that’s accessible to all skill levels. The iPad-only app makes full use of touch and Apple Pencil interactions.

Monkey Taps, USA

iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch

A subtle example of excellence. Vocabulary is powered by charming, consistent illustrations that create a clean visual style and rhythm throughout. Typography and iconography feel modern and balanced, themes are nicely varied, and the use of haptics is a nice touch. A lovely instance of an app that quietly does everything right.

Timothy Davison, Canada

Apple Vision Pro

CellWalk is a biology class like none other. This highly evolved visionOS app allows organisms to explore a 3D cell model delivered with incredible fidelity and detail. It’s a revelation to regard a 300 million-atom bacterial cell through this kind of beautiful, real-time Metal-powered rendering — which has been optimized for Apple Vision Pro — and by simulating the effect of looking into a microscope, it offers a neat twist on the expected experience.

Infold Games, Singapore

iPhone, iPad

A wonderland of texture, light, and animation, Infinity Nikki is one of the best-looking games of the year. This open-world game — which challenges players to collect clothes instead of weapons — is awash in wildly detailed fabrics, beautifully realized lighting, and effects from advanced shading techniques like Global Illumination. Notice how Nikki’s dress sways and waves, and marvel at the sparkle on every last piece of fabric in every world. Lavish yet cozy at the same time, Infinity Nikki is an often literally glowing example of what mobile graphics can be.

Remedy Entertainment PLC, Finland

Mac

Twisting hallways, looming cityscapes, creepy stone-white heads — they’re all part of the visual masterpiece that is Control. The game is a visual feast, making remarkable use of hardware-accelerated ray tracing to conjure up battlegrounds like the ominously clean offices of the Federal Bureau of Control. Every detail — from the reflections in the boardroom windows to the characters’ subtle eye darts while speaking — is expertly drawn and choreographed. Take a moment to marvel at the particle, smoke, and 3D effects as you’re busting up environments.

Devolver Digital, USA

Mac

Created by the team behind the gorgeous adventure Gris, Neva is a masterful connection of visual language and emotion. The game follows a girl and her wolf as they make their way through a decaying world, using the changing of the seasons to illustrate not just the challenges of their reality but the evolution of their relationship. Each Neva level has its own color palette, and the camera skillfully zooms in and out to showcase extended horizons or sumptuously animated combat. Neva is an artistic achievement and an emotional powerhouse.