App Store Awards 2025: Apple's Top iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro Games Revealed

App Store Awards: Games of the Year

• 🏆 The App Store Awards distinguish between apps and games, with the latter being editorially chosen by the App Store team for their standout quality.
• 📱 iPhone Game of the Year is Pokémon TCG Pocket, a digital version of the trading card game allowing global play, immersive 3D card illustrations, and card trading.
• 🎮 iPad Game of the Year is Dredge, a dark, sinister fishing adventure RPG where players explore, catch fish, and uncover a spooky story, with a free playable first area.
• 💻 Mac Game of the Year is the well-known Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, requiring M1 Mac or later, 16GB RAM, and 159GB storage.
• 👓 For Apple Vision Pro, Porta Newbie is highlighted as a free puzzle game that uses portals and interactive elements to guide a beam from source to destination in virtual space.
• 🕹️ Apple Arcade Game of the Year is What the Clash, a chaotic 1v1 PvP game featuring various silly mini-games like tennis, archery, and card battles, with regular events and seasons.

Cultural Impact Winners

• ✨ Art of Fauna is recognized for its accessibility, featuring a slide puzzle with visual and text-based solutions, extensive customization for difficulty, and voiceover support.
• 💬 Chants of Sennaar is a game that explores the power of language and communication, focusing on decoding enigmatic languages through conversations and observations, inspired by Mobius and classic comics.
• ⚽ Despelote from Panic is a game that uses the shared love of soccer (football) in a country facing hardship to bring people together, aiming to evoke strong emotions.

New iFixit App: Fixbot

• 🛠️ iFixit has launched a new app called Fixbot, designed for mobile devices, featuring repair guides, a workbench to track repairs, a battery lifespan indicator, and an AI buddy to assist with troubleshooting and repair guidance via text or voice.
• 💡 Fixbot is trained on millions of iFixit community repairs, offering specific guidance, and can even share images for identification of parts or issues.

Shortcuts Corner: Backing Up Shortcuts

• 🔒 Heath encountered a bug where shared Apple Watch shortcuts vanished across all devices, highlighting that shortcuts are not automatically backed up and lack a 'recently deleted' function.
• 💾 Rosemary Orchard recommends backing up shortcuts as files rather than relying solely on iCloud sync.
• 📁 A shortcut can be created to export all shortcuts (or a specific folder) into a designated folder, allowing for versioning with dates and integration with backup solutions like Back Blaze or Time Machine.
• 🔗 While iCloud links can be used, backing up as files to cloud storage is suggested for greater reliability and offline access.