With iOS 15.2 and macOS 12.1 Monterey available to all, users can download the updates to their devices, alongside updating any existing apps to take advantage of what these updates bring.
Apple’s App Store Awards are the company’s way of highlighting developers who created apps that stood out in their category compared to other apps, in a theme of what Apple calls, connections. Whether that’s in video editing, streaming or games, they take advantage of recent features brought out by Apple and its software in an innovative way.
The company announced the year’s winners this month, with Carrot Weather, LumaFusion, DAZN, and League of Legends each winning in their categories for certain devices.
We spoke to the developers behind these apps to find out the challenges in designing the apps and their plans for the future.
Reflecting on their past
Every developer received an award that mirrors the App Store logo and its icon made from 100% recycled aluminum. During a video announcing the winners, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO said, “From self-taught indie coders to inspiring leaders building global businesses, these standout developers innovated with Apple technology, with many helping to foster the profound sense of togetherness we needed this year.”
First up, LumaFusion is a video editing app on the iPad and iPhone for $19.99 / £19.99 / AU$19.99, that allows you to edit multiple videos at once with transitions and features that make it easy to turn a video into an engaging narrative. Its improvements this year made it the winner of the iPad app of the year award.
LumaFusion’s developers, Terri Morgan and Chris Demiris try to approach every release, whether that’s hardware or software, in how its users can benefit from their improvements in the app. “We couldn’t imagine where the iPad would go after ten years. Now, with Thunderbolt support and the M1 chip, we always see how we can adapt these updates into LumaFusion. Some of these features are easy to implement, such as ProRes and external storage support, but we're always looking to see which features would benefit users most.”
Morgan explains. "We’re inspired by how so many have used the app to help follow their passion, especially during lockdown, and it does help drive us to make the app even better, and more widely available to other users on Apple devices.”
League of Legends: Wild Rift was the winner of the iPhone gaming app of the year. Made by Riot Games, it's one of few franchises that's successfully made the jump from a console game to mobile with no compromises.
Michael Chow, executive producer on the game, reflected on developing the game since the start. "Usually when a game makes the move to mobile, there's a lot of negativity from their communities, so we wanted to make sure we avoided it with Wild Rift."
With our positive impressions of running Rift on an iPhone 12 Pro earlier this year, we wanted to know how Chow and the team felt about releasing the game after a very long beta-test period.
“We’ve spent the past year rolling out the game across the world, and the results are pretty stellar," Chow exclaims. "It’s not been an easy journey, as we weren’t sure if it was physically possible to bring League of Legends to mobile, but the results speak for themselves.”
“We quit our day jobs to start the company, and with Apple’s relentless efforts to make the iPhone better, it couldn’t make us more proud to receive this award from the company.”
DAZN is a streaming app for sports, and while it’s additionally available on iPhone and iPad, it’s available for AppleTV for which DAZN won the app award for. It allows subscribed users to watch sports such as MotoGP, UFC, UEFA, NFL and more for $19.99 / £19.99 / AU$19.99 a month.
Ben King, Director of DAZN at DAZN Group, explained to us that the aim of the app was to make it accessible, flexible and affordable to those who just wanted to easily access their sports for a price that didn’t lock them into two-year contracts.
“We’re absolutely honoured to receive this award from Apple, but it doesn’t mean we want to stop with how we can offer content to our users in way of features and more kinds of sports.”
The app uses push notifications for the latest updates in other matches, such as red cards and goals, while you’re using another app. You can also watch three consecutive sports or games at once, mirroring a scene in Back to the Future Part II when Marty Jr would watches 16 channels at once.
Brian Mueller, is the developer of Carrot Weather, and won the 2021 App Award for the Apple Watch. Its complications to allow certain weather forecasts on watch faces, alongside its push notifications for upcoming weather changes, has allowed Mueller to bring the app, and its sass to the watch with no compromise.
“When the app launched in 2015, it was purely an entertainment app, with its achievements and Carrot’s personality,“ Mueller explained. “It wasn’t until the Apple Watch arrived that forced me to focus on making a really great weather app, instead of relying on Carrot’s jokes and the bizarre imagery.”
As the app grew since watchOS 2, Mueller realised that he could add more complications to the watch faces. “I found out a workaround in early versions that could allow me to add more than the one complication per watch face that the operating system allowed.” Mueller reveals. “ After this, users were asking me for certain weather sources to add to the watch faces, and I still love that, that fans of the app are giving me feedback to make the watch app better.”
Where next for these apps?
While these developers are celebrating their success, they aren't stopping. We asked what’s coming up for their apps in the near future.
“We have a long list of feature requests, and in the past there's been features such as CoreML and smart background removal. But we have to pick and choose each time to really focus on how they best fit for LumaFusion.” Morgan explains. “I can see us doing cooperative editing with SharePlay eventually, but in the immediate future, key-frame easing where you can bring in images to videos, alongside subtitling and speed ramping are all coming soon.”
We also wanted to know whether there were plans for LumaFusion coming to macOS natively. “While you can export a project to Final Cut, we’re aware that there’s a need for LumaFusion on macOS.” Demiris explains. “We are working on a more complete version for macOS to take advantage of what the Mac brings.”
With League of Legends: Wild Rift, Chow was enthusiastic about how the on-screen controls work well on the iPhone. But we asked if keyboard support in games, a feature of iPadOS 15, would come to the game to help users control their character more easily on the bigger tablet.
“Control in Rift is something that we spent a lot of time on, so I don’t think we’ll implement keyboard support anytime soon,” Chow explains. “But gamepad support is something that could work, especially for the Apple TV, so who knows.”
With DAZN, SharePlay support is something that’s of interest to King and the rest of the team. ”We’re all about flexibility, and while you can already join with friends in watching a game, SharePlay does bring something to the table. If enough users give feedback to us that it’s a feature they want on their iPad or Apple TV, it’s something we’ll consider for a future update.”
Finally, with accessibility a big part of Apple’s focus in software interaction, we asked King if there’s upcoming features to help with those with certain impairments when using DAZN.
“We have some really interesting ideas for accessibility,“ King reveals. “We don’t have to give you one audio stream for instance, so there’s no reason for using sign language as an alternative commentary, but for the moment, subtitles and closed captions for pre-recorded content are something that we’re currently working on. But there’s far more options compared to cable content that we can provide to help cater to someone who is either visually or auditory impaired, and we want to help them.”
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