Apple on Thursday shared its annual list of App Store Award winners, continuing its tradition of celebrating the best apps and games of the past year.
For 2025, the winning iPhone app was visual planner Tiimo, and the iPhone game of the year was the card game Pokémon TCG Pocket.
Although Apple has continued to avoid naming a dedicated AI app or AI chatbot as its app of the year, AI was showcased among this year’s winners.
Apple’s app of the year, Tiimo, for instance, is described as a visual AI planner that turns to-dos into plans with visual timelines. The app uses AI to break down your tasks into a realistic schedule by estimating how long each step of a task could take and helping you to create a plan.
Meanwhile, the iPad app of the year, Detail, simplifies video editing with an “Auto Edit” AI feature that handles things like silence removal, zoom cuts, and adding titles and captions.
A Cultural Impact winner, StoryGraph, uses a machine learning AI to make book recommendations based on your reading data, while another, Be My Eyes, offers an AI assistant that provides visual descriptions of real-world images for blind and low-vision users.
And the Apple Watch app of the year, Strava, includes an AI assistant that turns workout data into insights.
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The company also announced winners for the iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and a standout within its own game subscription service, Apple Arcade.
Plus, Apple gave a handful of apps a “Cultural Impact” award. These apps, the company said, offered helpful tools, promoted understanding, or shaped a more inclusive world.
Apple first named 45 apps and games as finalists for its awards in November, and the list has now been narrowed down to 17 apps and games. The winners include:
- 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 Arcade Game of the Year: WHAT THE CLASH?
- 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
- Cultural Impact Winners: narrative-driven puzzle game Chants of Sennaar; a helpful tool for the blind and others with low vision called Be My Eyes; Hank Green’s distraction blocker Focus Friend, (also Google Play’s app of the year); relaxing puzzles app Art of Fauna; “slice of life” soccer game despelote; and reading tracker and book recommendations app StoryGraph
Original Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/04/ai-finds-its-way-into-apples-top-apps-of-the-year/
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