How to make Apple’s App Store Awards great again

Apple announces its App Store Awards each year during the final weeks of the year. Ostensibly, these reward developers for building apps and games that push creative boundaries on Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, TV, and Vision Pro.

Selected by the App Store editors, the prize-winning apps should be seen as cutting-edge products that shine light on the emerging future of app design on Apple’s platforms. To reflect this, Apple introduced a new ‘Cultural Impact’ category this year.

At the crossroads of design and technology

That’s the idea behind the awards, and to some extent this is realized by the collection of apps Apple puts together each year. However, some of the leading lights in Apple analysis are growing a little less impressed by the awards and the selected apps. I suspect this reflects the need to innovate these innovation awards. To figure out how to do that, it makes sense to consider where the awards began.

It was humans, specifically human curation. You see, Apple has understood for years that people want human guides, rather than guidance from intelligence machines/bots. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its Apple Music service, which has human curators to help guide your music discovery on the service. (Having human guidance matters a lot when you have half the smartphone population of some countries using the service.)

Designed for humans

It’s the same at the App Store, where humans manage the process and the store itself. Those humans are allegedly the same ones who submit the suggested winners for the App Store Awards, which are selected by those editors. The principle should be that the editors pick the apps that most deserve praise for pushing app design boundaries.

Looking at this year’s awards, Apple has clearly made a few decisions in the background pertaining to how it chooses the apps. This year’s winning iPhone app, Tiimo, is remarkable in that it attempts to be a to-do app for neurodivergent people, which is laudable. What is less remarkable is its lack of a native Mac app. (Users are directed to the web app for desktop interactions.) Apple commentator John Gruber seems quite critical of the choice. I’m less so, but it does strike me that if accessibility is to be seen as a differentiator within the awards, then it would be even better served by giving it a dedicated category. 

I’d much rather thousands of app developers were competing to win the coveted Apple Accessibility App of the Year award than that the need for such apps — and admirable goal of serving that need — became an unspoken subtext to the more general iPhone App award. If we are going to shine a light on the bricks on the road to positive change, then let’s elevate the importance of the illumination.

Wisdom of the Terminator

I’ve also come across some App Store Award critics who say that winning apps don’t always do such a great job of following Apple’s own human interface guidelines, or argue that rather than showing us what’s great in the world of app design, the awards actually show us the kind of apps Apple wants to promote. 

Everyone is a critic, so when I come across a problem, I can’t help but consider the wisdom of the Terminator. In his self-help book, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California and star of the Terminator movie franchise, tells us that if you complain about something, then you should also “come to the table with a potential solution.” If you don’t, then the problem isn’t very big. It’s an approach I use when managing community projects. I use it because it works.

So, what is the solution for the App Store Awards? How can the company breathe life and build credibility into something that seems to have become a bit formulaic? Apple is obviously trying to do something about this — hence the new Cultural Impact category — but it does seem to me that the missing piece in the App Store Awards equation is the people using the apps. 

Credibility is earned

With that in mind, perhaps one thing that could improve the awards, boost their credibility, and also make them into something developers compete to receive is to widen the selection and judging panel. 

It needs to be a panel rather than a popular vote, as with hundreds of millions of app users, a popular vote would almost certainly favor the most widely known developers, or the ones who paid for PR and marketing services to win votes. (Elections get won by money, as we all know to our cost.) That means it makes more sense to build an awards panel, partly based on users and partly based on credible names from digital design, development, and research. 

While Apple’s editors would inevitably contribute to the shortlist, panelists should also be able to raise apps they come across for consideration — and there would need to be guardrails that prevent nepotistic choices. To avoid gaming the results, the identities of the panelists should be confidential until the winners are announced and liable to change each year. 

This process, while more complicated, would also be more credible, helping transform the App Store Awards into something even Apple’s worst critics take seriously. Which, given the creativity that is still visible at the App Store, they probably should.

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