Apple’s Best Apps of 2025 Revealed

Apple has revealed the winners of its 2025 App Store Awards, highlighting apps and games that stood out this year for creativity, usefulness, and the way they shaped everyday digital life. The list spans Apple’s main platforms and also includes a Cultural Impact group for titles that resonated beyond pure entertainment or productivity. Below is a quick tour of the winners and what they’re known for.

App of the Year winners

These awards recognize one standout app for each major Apple device category.

• Tiimo (iPhone App of the Year)
  Tiimo is a visual planning and routine-building app designed to make daily tasks easier to organize. It’s especially popular for its calm, structured approach to schedules, using timers, reminders, and step-by-step layouts that reduce overwhelm.
• Detail (iPad App of the Year)
  Detail is a video creation and editing app built for iPad, aimed at lowering the barrier to making polished videos. It focuses on simple, fast workflows for creators who want strong results without a traditional desktop editing setup.
• Essayist (Mac App of the Year)
  Essayist is a writing tool for longer-form work such as essays, research papers, and structured documents. It combines drafting space with formatting and organization features that help users keep academic or professional writing in order.
• Explore POV (Apple Vision Pro App of the Year)
  Explore POV is a spatial video and immersive travel-style app designed for Vision Pro. It centers on high-fidelity, point-of-view experiences that let users feel as if they’re stepping into real places rather than watching them on a flat screen.
• Strava (Apple Watch App of the Year)
  Strava remains one of the most widely used fitness community apps, and on Apple Watch it functions as both tracker and social hub. People use it to log runs, rides, and workouts, and to compete or share progress with others.
• HBO Max (Apple TV App of the Year)
  HBO Max won for its Apple TV experience, offering a clean streaming interface and a strong lineup of series, films, and originals. It reflects how streaming platforms now compete as much on usability as on content.

Game of the Year winners

Apple selected top games for each platform, including one for Apple Arcade.

• Pokémon TCG Pocket (iPhone Game of the Year)
  A mobile take on the Pokémon trading card game, this title compresses collecting, deck-building, and quick battles into short sessions that fit phone play. It leans heavily on the joy of opening packs and building a personal card library.
• DREDGE (iPad Game of the Year)
  DREDGE blends relaxed fishing mechanics with a creeping sense of mystery. Players explore waters, upgrade their boat, and uncover strange stories, making it a slower, atmospheric game well suited to iPad’s bigger screen.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition (Mac Game of the Year)
  The Mac winner is a full-scale open-world RPG known for its dense city setting and narrative depth. The selection also signals how far big-budget gaming on Mac has come compared to earlier years.
• Porta Nubi (Apple Vision Pro Game of the Year)
  Porta Nubi is built around spatial play, designed to showcase how games can work in mixed reality. Instead of sitting inside a screen, gameplay is meant to occupy the user’s surrounding environment.
• WHAT THE CLASH? (Apple Arcade Game of the Year)
  This Arcade pick is a fast, playful multiplayer-leaning title focused on short rounds and chaotic fun. It represents the kind of accessible, family-friendly gaming Apple Arcade continues to emphasize.

Cultural Impact winners

These awards go to apps and games that Apple sees as having a broader social or cultural footprint.

• Art of Fauna
  A puzzle-style app that uses vintage-inspired animal illustrations and conservation themes to create a calm, thoughtful experience.
• Chants of Sennaar
  A narrative puzzle game built around deciphering languages and symbols, turning translation and understanding into core gameplay.
• despelote
  A story-driven game that uses football culture and everyday life as the lens for memory, identity, and place.
• Be My Eyes
  A long-running accessibility app that connects blind and low-vision users with volunteers and tools for real-time visual help.
• Focus Friend
  A simple, guided focus tool aimed at helping users stay present while working or studying, using friendly structure rather than pressure.
• StoryGraph
  A reading and book-tracking app that emphasizes mood-based recommendations, detailed stats, and a community feel without being tied to a single retailer.

What this year’s list says about the App Store

The 2025 winners point to a few clear currents. Apple continues to reward apps that reduce friction in daily life, whether that’s planning a week, editing a video quickly, or keeping fitness social and motivating. At the same time, the Vision Pro categories show Apple’s effort to carve out a new kind of app and game language for spatial computing.

And in Cultural Impact, the focus is less on spectacle and more on meaning: accessibility, storytelling, and tools that help people connect with the world in richer ways.

Taken together, the Awards are less about any single trend and more about a broad message: the platform is maturing in multiple directions at once, and the best apps in 2025 are the ones that feel genuinely designed around how people live now.