Apple Design Awards 2021
The Apple Design Awards honor excellence in innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement in app and game design.
Inclusivity Winners
Winners in this category provide a great experience for all by supporting people from a diversity of backgrounds, abilities, and languages.
HoloVista
Aconite
HoloVista supports a wide variety of accessibility features, including options for motion control, text sizes, text contrast, sound, and visual effect intensity. Purposeful interactions and considerations help achieve gameplay that can be experienced and perceived in more than one way.
Available on iPhone and iPad
Voice Dream Reader
Voice Dream LLC
Voice Dream Reader is a best-in-class text-to-speech app that reads text aloud from just about any digital source, whether it’s a web page or PDF, in more than two dozen languages. Its adaptive features and high level of customizable settings allow anyone to choose a voice with the perfect tone, timbre, accent, and speed for an optimal reading experience.
Available on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch
Finalists
Delight and Fun Winners
Winners in this category provide memorable, engaging, and satisfying experiences that are enhanced by Apple technologies.
Little Orpheus
The Chinese Room
Little Orpheus is an enjoyable platformer that brings easy controls, excellent storytelling, and a console-like experience to a casual game. Throughout its diverse variety of levels, this game packs a clever surprise at every turn while keeping things light with its comical dialogue.
Available on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV
Pok Pok Playroom
Pok Pok
Pok Pok Playroom is a playful, and beautifully animated app that captivates users with its thoughtful design and mesmerizing interactions. Thanks to its subtle haptics and spot-on sound effects, this app provides endless hours of fun for kids of all ages, while rewarding creativity and experimentation.
Available on iPhone and iPad
Finalists
Interaction Winners
Winners in this category deliver intuitive interfaces and effortless controls that are perfectly tailored to their platform.
Bird Alone
George Batchelor
Bird Alone’s explorative interactions combine gestures, haptics, parallax, and dynamic sound effects that imbues richness into its world. The game is brought to life through clever notification integration, graphics, and music that changes depending on the real-world weather, season, and time of day.
Available on iPhone and iPad
CARROT Weather
Brian Mueller, Grailr LLC
CARROT Weather is known for its humorous forecasts and unique visuals. A recent design update has brought simplicity and elegance to its experience across all Apple platforms. From witty weather projections, to a robust set of customizable widgets and a collection of useful watch faces, this app comes packed with endless entertainment.
Available on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch
Social Impact Winners
Winners in this category improve lives in a meaningful way and shine a light on crucial issues.
Alba: A Wildlife Adventure
ustwo games
With a natural reserve being bulldozed by the city to make a hotel, Alba saves local wildlife, repairs the bridge in the reserve, and cleans up trash around town. This game demonstrates the positivity that comes from respecting the environment, while telling a story about family, community, activism, and kindness. For every copy of the game downloaded, one tree will be planted to help a reforestation project in Madagascar.
Available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV
Be My Eyes
Be My Eyes
Be My Eyes enables people who are blind and low-vision to identify objects by pairing them with volunteers from around the world using their camera. The app supports more than 300,000 blind and low-vision users and more than 4.5 million volunteers, across 150+ countries and 180+ languages.
Available on iPhone and iPad
Finalists
Visuals and Graphics Winners
Winners in this category feature stunning imagery, skillfully drawn interfaces, and high-quality animations that lend to a distinctive and cohesive theme.
Genshin Impact
miHoYo Limited
Genshin Impact's heart-pounding battle scenes and far-reaching landscapes push the visual frontier for mobile gaming. Motion blur, shadow quality, and frame rate can be reconfigured on the fly whether players are obliterating slime monsters, summoning earthquakes, flinging lightning, or guiding the wind itself to supercharge flames and blizzards.
Available on iPhone and iPad
Loóna
Loona Inc
Loóna offers gracefully animated sleepscape sessions that combine relaxing activities, storytelling, and atmospheric sounds. Every aspect of its interface — type, color, animation, and 3D content — has been crafted with precision to create a soothing, calming experience.
Available on iPhone and iPad
Finalists
Innovation Winners
Winners in this category provide a state-of-the-art experience through novel use of Apple technologies that set them apart in their genre.
League of Legends: Wild Rift
Riot Games
League of Legends: Wild Rift takes a complex PC game and delivers its full experience on mobile. The team at Riot Games has reimagined this beloved title from the ground up, giving players total immersion in the League of Legends universe through polished touchscreen controls that have been designed specifically for mobile, an auto-targeting system to help newcomers find their footing, mobile-exclusive camera settings, and much more.
Available on iPhone and iPad
NaadSadhana
Sandeep Ranade
NaadSadhana is an all-in-one, studio-quality music app that helps musicians of all genres and any expertise perform and publish their music without boundaries. After first finding its tune as an app for practicing Indian classical singing, NaadSadhana has expanded to support seven different genres of music. And with the help of artificial intelligence and Core ML, the app listens as a singer improvises a vocal line, provides instant feedback on the accuracy of notes, and generates a backing track to match, all in real time.
Available on iPhone and iPad