Apple Design Awards 2015: The Best Apps You Should Download As An iPhone User

Every year at WWDC, Apple celebrates excellence in mobile and desktop software with the Apple Design Awards. Apple recognizes apps that demonstrate technical excellence, innovation and outstanding design to provide an immersive, fun, and compelling experience.

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Elementary Minute is a simple and fast-paced quiz game… You will be confronted with different statements regarding topics like mathematics, famous people or geography. It is up to you to distinguish whether the statements are right or wrong by swiping up or down. There are two available game modes, the Classic mode, where you have one minute to get as many answers right as possible, and the Rush mode, where you have four lives and lose one each time you are to slow or get an answer wrong.

9to5mac.com

Jump-O is a minimalist game, with minimalist art, where you play as a circle in a square world. Jumping and moving at the right time, to avoid spikes and bullets, is the key to complete every single level.

9to5mac.com

The concept of Metamorphabet is exceedingly simple. You go through the alphabet one letter at a time, tapping on a letter will cause it to animate in different ways. Tap the big green A once and it grows antlers, tap it again and it morphs into an arch. Once more and that arch starts to amble along, before moving you on to the letter B. The interactions and animations are charming and intuitive: it's fun just to watch things happen.

theverge.com

Getting a MOBA -- a genre known for hectic online multiplayer experiences -- right on mobile is a tricky thing to do, yet that's precisely what Vainglory has done, thanks to a team that includes veteran developers from Riot (League of Legends) and Blizzard (World of Warcraft). Aside from some absolutely stunning, top-notch graphics, it offers some genuinely riveting competitive gameplay.

Does Not Commute is split up into several different levels that consist of 10 or more parts in each. Players need to complete these one-by-one and in chronological order, so while it starts off pretty easy, things get difficult quickly. You start by controlling one car with the directional buttons, getting the driver from their starting point to the end point that is shown on the map. Then the next step will be to control another car, but it takes place at the same time as the car before it (temporal paradox). The process needs to be repeated for all drivers in that area.

appadvice.com

Crossy Road launched late last year for mobile devices and is now available for iOS and Android. A new spin on Frogger, Crossy Road challenges players to dodge traffic and more in an attempt to reach the other side of the road. Your adventure usually ends, however, in getting splattered by a car or destroyed by a train.

gamespot.com

Shadowmatic is an imagination stirring puzzle where you rotate abstract objects in a spotlight to find recognizable silhouettes in projected shadows, relevant to the surrounding environment. The game combines stunning visuals with relaxing and captivating gameplay. On your journey to discover the right solution you will stumble upon many unexpected and infinitely varied silhouettes.

Pacemaker Music AB is a slick new music player that allows you to easily create your own customized DJ mixes with iTunes or Spotify. If you’ve ever wanted your own personal DJ to carry around in your pocket (or wear on your wrist), then Pacemaker is the best app to do it with.

appadvice.com

The online brokerage space just got more crowded with the launch of the Robinhood app for iOS. Robinhood aims to spur millennial investing with $0 trades. Billing itself as “a stock brokerage built with the needs of a new generation in mind,” Robinhood lets traders buy and sell individual stocks for $0 a trade. In doing so, the company hopes to capitalize on the vast, largely untapped market of would-be millennial investors.

investopedia.com

Affinity Designer is a vector-design app that’s been created specifically for the Mac and OS X. It offers smooth panning and zooming, and more than 1,000,000 percent zoom, so you can close in on the finest detail without a loss in quality.

maclife.com

Workflow lets you create automated workflows based on actions in an interface that's inspired by Apple's Automator and Ole Zorn's work on Editorial. Actions take input and generate output, and they're connected in a vertical flow that is run from top to bottom to execute multiple tasks in rapid succession. Workflow can show native UIs such as alerts and lists, it lets you enter manual input with the keyboard, and, like Editorial, is based on a variable system to use different pieces of data across actions in a workflow.

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