Apple today announced the winners of the 2024 App Store Awards, recognizing apps and games that “helped users ignite their creativity, achieve new milestones, and cherish everyday moments with family and friends.”
I had the chance to spend time with three of this year’s winners and ask them about how they created their Apple award-winning apps.
How to make an Apple award-winning app in 2024
Kino from Lux Optics
Kino from Lux Optics was crowned the iPhone App of the Year for 2024. The filmmaking app comes from the same team behind Halide, co-founded by Sebastiaan de With and Ben Sandofsky. Kino was built around the motto of creating “an app for filmmaking, not filmmakers.”
“With Kino, we decided to do something a little different from our previous apps and really focus on something that wasn’t for the enthusiasts with a lot of experience in filmmaking. We wanted to make an app that anyone could just tap the record button and get incredible results,” Ben told me. “The goal with Kino was to enable anyone to just pull out their phone and get cinematic video.”
Ben also shared another ethos he and Sebastiaan had when developing Kino:
“One of the reasons we developed Kino is that we have young children at home. I have a 10-month-old and you only have a fraction of a second to pull out your phone and hit record before you’ll miss that precious moment. And so that’s kind of the ethos we had when we were developing the app.
To have an app that you just pull up and create a cinematic moment, kind of like our parents would shoot something on 16 millimeter film or their parents would. We wanted cinematic film for our everyday lives.”
“Making a camera app means you get to see the world through our users eyes. And we’ve seen shots and clips from Kazakhstan. We’ve seen Antarctica. We’ve seen Iceland. We see all sorts of places. And it’s really cool,” Sebastiaan added.
Ben and Sebastiaan both told me they were grateful for Apple’s support as indie developers, knowing full well that it would be in Apple’s best financial interest to work with other large companies.
“I think it’s incredible how supportive Apple is of small indie apps like us because, certainly, we’re not at the scope of a multi-billion dollar corporation. Apple could make a lot more money working with other larger companies,” Sanfosky said. “But because they’re supportive and working with us, like us reaching out to engineers to answer questions, they’ve sent emails about how we can eke out the most performance. They’ve been incredibly generous with their time.”
You can check out Kino on the App Store today.
Adobe Lightroom
This year’s Mac App of the Year title went to Adobe Lightroom. I was particularly interested in hearing how Adobe’s commitment to the Mac has evolved and what it means for Lightroom to be crowned Mac App of the Year nearly two decades after its original launch on the platform.
“Apple is a really strong partner with Adobe. Many of our customers are using the platform, and we want to make sure we show up there,” Stephen Baloglu, Adobe’s director of product marketing, explained.
“What’s great about this partnership is that Apple is constantly pushing for the envelope of what’s possible with lenses on your phones and the technology in the Mac to accelerate. We build right on top of that,” Baloglu told me. “It’s a really great symbiotic way for us to collectively deliver just an amazing experience for customers.”
Katrin Eismann, product manager for Adobe Lightroom learning and inspiration, added:
“I’ve worked with Apple products for over 30 years and they have the same dedication to quality usability. And I really appreciate that. Here’s a specific example: their HDR displays allowed us to develop our HDR imaging. You can see [pictures] on the phone display in HDR. HDR without a display is not that interesting, so it’s a really good relationship. We go hand in hand.”
You can download Adobe Lightroom for Mac today.
Moises
Moises is this year’s iPad App of the Year, and it’s an app all about giving musicians more control over their creations. Moises uses AI to separate vocals and instruments from any song, detect chords, change pitch, generate a metronome, and much more.
One of the most fascinating things the team behind Moises shared with me was how Slipknot drummer Elo Casagrande uses the app. Moises cofounder and COO Eddie Hsu told me:
“Elo Casagrande won best metal drummer for 2024, and we bumped into him in the studio once and he said, ‘Hey, the reason I’m in Slipknot now is because of you guys.’
He said that one of his videos that he posted on YouTube making a Slipknot cover got the attention from the band. And they ended up inviting him to participate in the auditioning processes that the band was conducting. Elo ended up having to rehearse 32 songs and he put all of them in Moises.
He shared with us that he isolated the drums to understand the specific parts and the nuances of each drum part.
And then he slowed down the song to practice more slowly and then really get confident to go to the auditions and perform with the band. So the band ended up hiring him and it’s a beautiful story.”
In our conversation, the Moises team also highlighted how the app’s initial version focused on the iPhone. Thanks to Apple’s support and developer tools, however, they were able to easily bring the app to iPad:
“We have a really good relationship with the people at Apple, and they’ve been providing feedback since the very beginning, not only about the features to adopt but also overall user experience,” Moises co-founder and CEO Geraldo Ramos told me.
Jardson Almeida, cofounder and chief experience officer, continued:
“In addition to gathering feedback from our users and musicians, we also participated in Apple workshops to understand the human interface guidelines, learning how to really port this experience to the iPad to become more native and more user-friendly.”
“Apple will go hands-on with us, even on the design side of things, going into specific graphics and how to build certain user experiences and so on. This partnership has been very hands-on,” Hsu concluded.
You can download Moises on the App Store today.
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