iOS 757: Apple Design Awards 2025 - CapWords, Feather, Taobao, & more!
iOS Today (Audio)
Leo Laporte
4.1 • 616 Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard go over Apple's 2025 Design Award winners, exploring groundbreaking apps that showcase the best of Apple's platforms. From AI-powered language learning tools to visually stunning adventure games, these winners represent the pinnacle of mobile innovation and design excellence.
Delight and Fun Category
- CapWords - Revolutionary language learning app that transforms everyday objects into interactive stickers, supporting nine languages with AI-powered photo recognition
- Balatro - Award-winning poker-inspired deck builder that cleverly teaches poker fundamentals while delivering addictive gameplay across multiple platforms
Innovation Category
- Play - Developer-focused app enabling interactive SwiftUI prototype creation with seamless cross-device syncing between iPhone and Mac
- PBJ, the Musical - Quirky Shakespeare adaptation telling Romeo and Juliet with condiments as characters, featuring original soundtracks and creative storytelling
Interaction Category
- Taobao - Pioneering Apple Vision Pro shopping experience with photorealistic 3D models allowing users to visualize furniture and products in their actual spaces
- DREDGE - Atmospheric horror fishing adventure with seamless gameplay continuity across iPhone, iPad, and Mac platforms
Inclusivity Category
- Speechify - Accessibility-focused text-to-speech app supporting 50+ languages and hundreds of voices, designed for users with dyslexia, ADHD, and low vision
- Art of Fauna - Beautiful wildlife puzzle game featuring vintage-style artwork with full voiceover support and innovative block-based puzzle mechanics
Social Impact Category
- Watch Duty - Critical wildfire tracking app providing real-time evacuation updates and emergency information faster than traditional services
- Neva - Emotionally resonant adventure game exploring environmental themes through the relationship between a girl and her wolf companion
Visuals and Graphics Category
- Feather - Intuitive iPad app enabling users to transform 2D designs into stunning 3D models using touch and Apple Pencil interactions
- Infinity Nikki - Visually spectacular open-world adventure game featuring magical outfits, whimsical creatures, and breathtaking rendering quality
Shortcuts Corner
- New "Use Model" action in Shortcuts enables cloud, local, or ChatGPT model integration for AI-powered automation
- Apple's Shortcuts Gallery now features dedicated Apple Intelligence examples including leftover recipe generation and PDF summarization
App Caps
Mikah's Pick: Gigapixel
- AI-powered photo upscaling app that enhances image resolution and quality using sophisticated machine learning models
- Features standard and low-res enhancement modes plus specialized face recovery for portrait photographs
- Particularly useful for printing older photos or enlarging images without quality loss
Rosemary's Pick: Dark Noise
- Premium white noise app enabling custom sound mixing with extensive library of ambient sounds
- Supports audio layering with other apps, iCloud sync across devices, and Siri Shortcuts integration
- Includes whimsical features like "unnamed goose mode" and developer-friendly privacy controls
These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/ios-today/episodes/757
Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary Orchid and I cover the Apple Design Award winners of 2025. |
| 0:08.4 | Stay tuned. |
| 0:11.4 | Podcasts you love. |
| 0:13.4 | From people you trust. |
| 0:16.0 | This is Twitter. |
| 0:20.3 | This is iOS Today, episode 757 with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday, June 10th, 2025, for Thursday, June 19th, 2025. |
| 0:33.9 | Apple Design Awards 2025. |
| 0:37.4 | Hello and welcome to iOS today. The show, talk all things iOS, iPad OS, WatchOS, HomePod OS, and, well, frankly, all the various OSs, all the various platforms that Apple offers up to us. |
| 0:50.4 | This is our opportunity to talk about the apps, the software, the settings that you out there should know about to help you make the most of those devices you are bringing around with you. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent. |
| 1:05.0 | And my name is Rosemary Ochshut, and I'm really excited to look at all these winners, Micah. There's going to be so many |
| 1:11.0 | great things to talk about today. Yes, so every year around this time, we've just done the |
| 1:16.5 | WWDC coverage itself. And in years past, at WWDC, Apple would unveil and award the winners of |
| 1:26.8 | the Apple Design Award. This year, Apple announced it earlier |
| 1:31.3 | than the event, which was kind of interesting. But essentially what happens is there are two |
| 1:36.8 | kind of big awards that take, or two big awards that take place in regard to apps. There are the App Store |
| 1:43.1 | Awards and there are the Apple Design Awards. |
| 1:45.0 | The App Store Awards are often the apps that are just popular and interesting and fun and good, |
| 1:54.0 | and they have captured attention. The Apple Design Awards are specifically for apps that make use of the tools that Apple has, |
| 2:06.2 | and in some cases, surprise and delight the developers who work at Apple that are making these tools available to the developers who do not work at Apple. |
| 2:17.2 | And so these apps get awarded for creativity, for design, and for all aspects of kind of innovating |
| 2:28.9 | while also honoring Apple's design choices and developer options that are available. |
| 2:41.1 | So this year, there was one app and one game awarded across six categories. |
... |
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