Apple announces winners of the 2021 Apple Design Awards

Apple today hosted its annual Apple Design Awards, celebrating 12 best-in-class apps and games from developers around the globe. Every year, Apple Design Award winners bring bold, creative and distinctive ideas to life. Through their brilliance, vision, style, determination and hard work, the people who design and build these award-winning apps and games inspire not only their peers in the Apple developer community, but everyone at Apple too.

“This year’s Apple Design Award winners have redefined what we’ve come to expect from a great app experience, and we congratulate them on a well-deserved win,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “The work of these developers embodies the essential role apps and games play in our everyday lives, and serve as perfect examples of our six new award categories.”

Winners in this category provide a great experience for all by supporting people from a diversity of backgrounds, abilities and languages.

App: Voice Dream Reader
Developer: Voice Dream LLC (United States)

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 PDF, web page or e-book, in more than two dozen languages. Its adaptive features and high level of customisable settings allow anyone to choose a voice with the perfect tone, timbre, accent and speed for an optimal reading experience.

Game: “HoloVista”
Developer: Aconite (United States)

“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.

Winners in this category provide memorable, engaging and satisfying experiences that are enhanced by Apple technologies.

Game: “Pok Pok Playroom”
Developer: Pok Pok (Belgium)

“Pok Pok Playroom” is a playful and beautifully animated app that captivates users with its thoughtful design and mesmerising 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.

Game: “Little Orpheus”
Developer: The Chinese Room (United Kingdom)

“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.

Winners in this category deliver intuitive interfaces and effortless controls that are perfectly tailored to their platform.

App: CARROT Weather
Developer: Brian Mueller, Grailr LLC (United States)

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 customisable widgets and a collection of useful watch faces, this app comes packed with endless entertainment.

Game: “Bird Alone”
Developer: George Batchelor (Canada)

“Bird Alone” features explorative interactions that combine gestures, haptics, parallax and dynamic sound effects to imbue 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.

Winners in this category improve lives in a meaningful way and shine a light on crucial issues.

App: Be My Eyes
Developer: S/I Be My Eyes (Denmark)

Be My Eyes enables people who are blind or have low vision to identify objects by pairing them with volunteers from around the world using their camera. The app supports more than 300,000 users who are blind or have low vision and more than 4.5 million volunteers, across 150+ countries and 180+ languages.

Game: “Alba”
Developer: ustwo games (United Kingdom)

With a nature reserve being bulldozed by the city to make way for a hotel, Alba saves local wildlife, repairs the bridge in the reserve and cleans up rubbish 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.

Winners in this category feature stunning imagery, skilfully drawn interfaces and high-quality animations that lend to a distinctive and cohesive theme.

App: Loóna
Developer: Loóna Inc (Belarus)

Loóna offers gracefully animated sleepscape sessions that combine relaxing activities, storytelling and atmospheric sounds. Every aspect of its interface — type, colour, animation and 3D content — has been crafted with precision to create a soothing, calming experience.

Game: “Genshin Impact”
Developer: miHoYo Limited (China)

“Genshin Impact” features heart-pounding battle scenes and far-reaching landscapes that 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.

Winners in this category provide a state-of-the-art experience through novel use of Apple technologies that sets them apart in their genre.

App: NaadSadhana
Developer: Sandeep Ranade (India)

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 practising 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.

Game: “League of Legends: Wild Rift”
Developer: Riot Games (United States)

“League of Legends: Wild Rift” takes a complex PC game and delivers its full experience on mobile. The team at Riot Games has re-imagined 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.

In addition to the prestigious physical Apple Design Award, this year’s winners will receive a prize package that includes hardware for every developer to continue creating great apps and games.

For more information on this year’s winners and finalists, visit the Apple Design Awards.