It’s a bit like the Academy Award for apps on the Mac and iPhone platform. Win the annual award, be among the top 15 whose apps have been recognized by Apple as the best and most important of the last 12 months for customers, it can be the point of arrival for an independent programmer or the certification of success for a software big that has produced a successful new app.
Apple’s editorial team has selected the best and the company has announced the winners of the award for 2021: they are the apps of the year in the various sections (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch), to which are also added games and themed apps. In order, the winners are: Toca Life World (per iPhone), LumaFusion (via iPad), Craft (per Mac), dazn (for Apple Tv) e Carrot Weather (for Apple Watch). But there are also games: League of Legends: Wild Rift, Marvel Future Revolution, Myst, Space Marshals 3 and, with Apple Arcade, Fantasian.
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the official reasons: According to Apple, “This year’s best apps and games have delivered amazing experiences across all devices. Ten years after its App Store debut, Toca Life World continues to work on the art of play and self-expression for children. The developers of Dazn have brought local sports culture into the spotlight around the world, while Carrot Weather has brought its weather forecasts, the best in the industry, and the witty character that sets them apart, to the wrists of users ”. Still: “LumaFusion has made video editing faster, more accessible to the less experienced and more portable for creators of all levels and Craft has made efficiency and creativity possible through a notebook with seemingly limitless capacities. There graphics incredible and rich stories intertwined of League of Legends: Wild Rift, Marvel Future Revolution, Myst, Space Marshals 3 and, in Apple Arcade, of Fantasian they have transported players of all ages into engaging experiences ”.
Following the connection theme, very appropriate in times of pandemics and lockdowns, that is, apps that somehow helped people get in touch with each other and not feel isolated, are there other winning apps: da Among Us! a Bumble, from Canva to EatOkra, up to Peanut.
Tim Cook, Apple’s number one, said that “the developers who won the App Store Awards in 2021 have used their vision to offer the best apps and games of the year, sparking the creativity and passion of millions of people around the world”
Beyond the very wide spectrum of themes and functions touched by this set of apps selected by Apple’s international editorial team, not only the technical performance is striking, but also the stories of the developers and the teams who have worked on it: “From independent self-taught programmers to inspirational leaders who create global businesses – said Cook – these extraordinary developers have innovated with technology Apple and many have helped foster the deep sense of unity we needed this year. ”
We briefly met some of the winners: dal Carrot Weather developer Brian Muller, who started almost by chance, with a background as a screenwriter and who included in his apps both the stick and the virtual carrot (hence the name) made from jokes with corrosive humor inspired by the 3 women in his life (the mother , sister and wife), a Joe Lee, head of development for Marvel Future Revolution, a masterpiece of sci-fi graphics capable of bringing mass multiplayer gaming to smartphones and doing it with customizations for 400 million possible combinations in the Marvel multiverse, which is proudly Korean and claims to be the first from that country to have won this type of award.
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Again: the couple of co-founders of LumaFusion, an extraordinary app for video editing on iPad and iPhone, which allows you to do a lot in a different way from the giants of the sector (from Premiere by Adobe and Final Cut by Apple itself), bringing maximum power with the lightness of the Cupertino tablet. The two co-founders, Terri Morgan and Chris Demiris, prefer to put in front of the customers for whom this app is designed, such as the Italian videomaker Angelo Chiacchio, who is traveling the world to build a documentary on climate change.
Finally, Mattias Olsson and the team of 8 Swedish developers of Space Marhsall 3, serial space western epic game, adventure and puzzle, which is more than a movie and more than a game at the same time, with a story written in 2014 that is slowly unfolding, one chapter after another (the third episode of the current season will be released at the beginning 2022).
There are 4 stories that are intertwined with the satisfaction perceptible also via Zoom in receiving an award that is a certificate of often ten or twenty years of passion for programming and creating apps. A “nice heavy” recycled aluminum accolade, as pointed out by Morgan and Demiris, which “will run among the developers of the team”, as Olsson added, and then will be in the lobby of the office building or in the developer rooms, as explained by Lee and Muller. An award that sets a point e makes an otherwise virtual goal real, as software might seem.
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