Apple names the 17 apps you should download now – here are the 2024 App Store Awards winners

Just about three weeks after Apple revealed the 45 finalists in its 2024 App Store Awards, it’s time to unveil the best of the best. That’s right – Apple just announced the 2024 App Store Award winners, and there are 17 of them, including the best apps and games for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and the Apple Vision Pro. Additionally, six apps are walking away as Cultural Impact winners.

Many big names and smaller titles have been chosen to receive the highest honor for an app from Apple. The winners walk away with a hefty – trust us, we briefly held one – aluminum, bright blue App of the Year award engraved with the app’s name. It’s roughly the size of an oversized Mac Mini.

We’re sharing a few of our favorites across categories and the full list of winners. But as you might expect, these apps are definitely worth a download, considering Apple’s deemed them to be its 2024 App Store Award Winners.

2024 App Store Award Winners – the full list

You’ll likely know the makers of Kino, aka Lux Optics, for their popular camera app Halide, but this one is all about video recording and even packs in support for Apple’s Log Recording standard.

Kino is like a Halide for video, but is instead designed for beginners as well as enthusiasts. You can shoot ‘cinematic’ video – which covers color, tone and motion – by quickly applying what Kino’s makes call an ‘instant grade’. You can choose from one of many grades created by artists, or instead go into full manual mode with Apple ProRes and tweak settings like frame-rates, shutter speed and more.

As is the theme with most year-end lists, AI is involved here and likely best represented via the iPad App of the Year, Moises. The name is a subtle pun at its ability to separate sounds on a track, and that makes sense as it’s for musicians and producers. You can either record sessions within the app or upload files into Moises to have its AI models split instruments, including vocals, on a given track, automatically add an approximately timed metronome, or even change the key.

It’s pretty neat, and in a quick demo where we did not sing or play an instrument, it did work quite well on a 13-inch iPad Pro via the built-in microphones. From a generative AI standpoint, a future update will allow it to automatically play on a track, much like session players within Logic Pro for iPad. Similarly, Adobe Lightroom – the 2024 Mac App of the Year – boasts several AI features and runs well on any M-series-powered Mac.

2024 is also the first year that Apple Vision Pro apps are included in the App Store Awards, and we can’t agree more with What If…? – An Immersive Story getting the top brass for Apple’s spatial computer.

In our hands-on with the story that you basically get immersed in and play through, we called it the “most fun [we’ve] had on the device” and a taste of future impactful, immersive content that would arrive. And if you…