Apple names 17 top apps in 2025
Apple announces winners of App Store Awards 2025 (photo: Unsplash)
Apple has officially announced the winners of the 2025 App Store Awards. This year, the Cupertino giant highlighted 17 apps across three categories: Apps, Games, and Cultural Impact.
According to TechRadar, most of these apps are user-friendly, combining unique design with practical functionality: they help solve everyday tasks or provide a way to unwind and relax.
Apple continues to present awards across multiple platforms: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro, as well as Game of the Year for Apple Arcade and six awards in the Cultural Impact category.
Full list of App Store Awards 2025 winners:
- iPhone App of the Year: Tiimo
- iPhone Game of the Year: Pokémon TCG Pocket
- iPad App of the Year: Detail
- iPad Game of the Year: DREDGE
- Mac App of the Year: Essayist
- Mac Game of the Year: Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition
- Apple Vision Pro App of the Year: Explore POV
- Apple Vision Pro Game of the Year: Porta Nubi
- Apple Watch App of the Year: Strava
- Apple TV App of the Year: HBO Max
- Apple Arcade Game of the Year: WHAT THE CLASH?
- Cultural Impact winners: Art of Fauna, Chants of Sennaar, despelote, Be My Eyes, Focus Friend, StoryGraph
As in 2024, AI plays a key role in many of the apps, either on the front end or in the background, enhancing the user experience.
Features and highlights
One notable change this year is that the Apple TV App of the Year award went to HBO Max, not F1 TV. HBO Max introduced a new navigation bar in 2025.
Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition won Mac Game of the Year thanks to its complex development for macOS. CD Projekt Red optimized the game for all Macs with Apple Silicon, ensuring smooth performance.
Essayist automates the creation of correct citations in academic papers and supports multiple formats, saving time and effort.
Among the Cultural Impact winners, Be My Eyes stands out: the app connects volunteers with AI to help people with low vision or blindness perform everyday tasks, such as recognizing objects or providing quick visual descriptions.
On the Apple Vision Pro platform, the winners were Explore POV (App of the Year) and Porta Nubi (Game of the Year). Explore POV allows users to immerse themselves in remote locations, while Porta Nubi overlays fantastic puzzles onto the real world.
Earlier, we shared that Apple removed a popular feature from the iPhone 17 Pro that was present on all previous models.
