2024 Apple Design Awards go to 14 ingenious apps and games

Тhe 2024 Apple Design Awards are in the books, and the graphics honchos from the interface department have announced their preference for the 14 best looking or most user-centric iPhone and iPad apps and games in 7 different categories.

The Design Awards are announced now, so that Apple can honor their creators on Monday, at the upcoming WWDC24 expo “for excellence in design and outstanding technical achievement in apps and games.” 

The notable Apple app design award winners in several major categories – delight and fun, inclusivity, innovation, interaction, social impact, visuals and graphics, as well as the new spatial computing category – were chosen among 42 finalists in total.

In the Visuals and Graphics section, for instance, the winners were Rooms, “a blank slate for building imaginative scenes, a platform for cozy gaming, and a social space that offers interactions with thousands of other people’s creations,” as well as the Korean game Lies of P whose “visual customization options like MetalFX upscaling and volumetric fog effects on Mac let users style the game to their liking.”

The new spatial computing category was awarded to the djay pro, DJ App & AI Mixer app by the Germans from algoriddim GmbH. “With remarkable technical ingenuity and best-in-class immersion, djay brings users high-definition sound quality and endless creativity for music mixing,” approves Apple.

The NYT Games app, of all things, got an interface award in the Delight and Fun category, and the Oko app of the Belgians from AYES won the inclusivity round with its ability to show visually impaired pedestrians the state of the traffic lights with audio alerts or haptic feedback.

The Innovation category got won by the Australians Procreate for their Procreate Dreams app that offers “a stunning design tool that allows creatives of all kinds to create 2D animations using the extensive and familiar library of brushes, gestures, and PencilKit-enabled behaviors from the original Procreate.”

As usual, there is at least one recipe app as a winner, and this time it is Crouton by Devin Davies from New Zealand. “With its effortless series of interactions, Crouton lets users keep their focus on the counter rather than the screen,” tips Apple.

According to Susan Prescott, its VP of Worldwide Developer Relations: