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Posts tagged with "apps"

Apple Unveils Apple Creator Studio App Suite

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced Apple Creator Studio, a suite of creativity apps for the Mac and iPad combined with premium content and features for productivity apps across the company’s platforms. This collection of apps, which includes the debut of Pixelmator Pro for iPad, offers tools for creative professionals, aspiring artists, students, and others working across a wide variety of fields, including music, video, and graphic design.

The bundle includes a number of apps:

  • Final Cut Pro for Mac and iPad (video editing)
  • Logic Pro for Mac and iPad (music creation)
  • Pixelmator Pro for Mac and iPad (photo editing and graphic design)
  • Motion for Mac (video effects)
  • Compressor for Mac (video encoding)
  • MainStage for Mac (music performance)

It also features a new Content Hub with premium graphics and photos for Apple’s iWork suite – Pages for word processing, Keynote for presentations, and Numbers for spreadsheets – as well as exclusive templates, themes, and AI features. The company says these features will also come to its Freeform canvas app soon.

Apple Creator Studio will be available on Wednesday, January 28, for $12.99/month or $129/year with a one-month free trial. Students and teachers can subscribe at a discounted rate of $2.99/month or $29.99/year, and three months of Apple Creator Studio will come free with the purchase of a new Mac or iPad. The subscription also includes Family Sharing, allowing users to share the apps and features with up to five family members.

With this offering, Apple is combining several disparate offerings for creatives into a single package that looks quite compelling. Because many of these apps are also available individually – some of them for free – there are a lot of details to get into regarding what’s new, what’s included, and what’s available elsewhere. Let’s get into it.

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App Marketing: My Extended Q&A for Paul Hudson’s Everything but the Code→

Earlier this year, Paul Hudson asked me to answer a few questions about app marketing for a book he was writing called Everything But the Code.

The book is finished now, and it’s full of great advice from Paul and a long list of indie developers whose apps are some of MacStories’ favorites. Paul covers the entire process of making apps, from validating an idea to selling your app and beyond. The only thing he doesn’t cover, as the book’s title makes clear, is building apps, which is the subject of other books and courses he’s created.

Paul was kind enough to ask me to share some insights on marketing apps to the press. You’ll find my contributions in the Prelaunch and Publicity and Aftermath and Evolution chapters, and now that the book is final, I thought I’d share extended versions of my responses with readers. Although the focus is on apps, I expect there are a few lessons here for anyone pitching their creative work to the world. So, here you go.

Paul Hudson: What common mistakes do developers make when pitching their app to the press?

Me: Most developers do a great job thinking through what they’re pitching but don’t spend enough time thinking about who they’re pitching to. I’d love to be able to tell developers do these five things, and you’ll have a pitch you can send to anyone, but it doesn’t work that way. Developers need to think about things like who at a publication typically covers certain types of apps.

For example, if you know a publication has a musician on staff who has covered music apps before, that person should be at the top of your list if you’ve built a guitar tab app. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t contact anyone else at the publication. People get busy, so don’t limit yourself. However, focus your efforts on the people who are most likely to be receptive to your app.

It also pays to make things easy for the person you’re pitching to. Keep your pitch short and to the point, link to a press kit, beta, and other materials, and follow up closer to launch.

A few other pitch pointers:

  • Don’t wait to send your pitches until the last minute. Personally, I prefer getting pitches at least a couple of weeks in advance of a launch, so I can make the time for testing and writing about them.
  • Don’t send pitches during WWDC, on Apple event days, or major holidays. Your pitch is much more likely to get lost in the shuffle on those days.
  • You don’t need to ask if it’s okay to send a TestFlight link. If the person you’re pitching to isn’t interested, they won’t use it.
  • It’s okay to copy multiple people at a publication if you’re unsure who to contact.
  • Try to understand where a writer likes to be contacted. Email is probably the safest bet, but social media DMs might be better for some people.
  • It’s okay to send follow-up reminders about your app launch. I personally appreciate them.
  • Don’t expect app feedback from most press contacts. I let developers know when I find the kind of bug I’d mention in a review, but unfortunately, I usually don’t have time for much more than that.
  • Don’t take it personally if you don’t get a response to a pitch. Remember, the people you contact are getting a lot of pitches.
  • Don’t close down your TestFlight beta immediately after you launch your app. If a publication can’t get a story out to coincide with your launch, closing down your beta immediately so it can no longer be downloaded makes it less likely they’ll cover it post-launch.
  • Don’t forget to include the name of your app in your pitch – yes, that happens.

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OpenAI Opens Up ChatGPT App Submissions to Developers

Announced earlier this year at OpenAI’s DevDay, developers may now submit ChatGPT apps for review and publication. OpenAI’s blog post explains that:

Apps extend ChatGPT conversations by bringing in new context and letting users take actions like order groceries, turn an outline into a slide deck, or search for an apartment.

Under the hood, OpenAI is using MCP, Model Context Protocol, which was pioneered by Anthropic late last year and donated to the Agentic AI Foundation last week.

Apps are currently available in the web version of ChatGPT from the sidebar or tools menu and, once connected, can be accessed by @mentioning them. Early participants include Adobe, which preannounced its apps last week, Apple Music, Spotify, Zillow, OpenTable, Figma, Canva, Expedia, Target, AllTrails, Instacart, and others.

I was hoping the Apple Music app would allow me to query my music library directly, but that’s not possible. Instead, it allows ChatGPT to do things like search Apple Music’s full catalog and generate playlists, which is useful but limited.

ChatGPT's Apple Music app lets you create playlists.

ChatGPT’s Apple Music app lets you create playlists.

Currently, there’s no way for developers to complete transactions inside ChatGPT. Instead, sales can be kicked to another app or the web, although OpenAI says it is exploring ways to offer transactions inside ChatGPT. Developers who want to submit an app must follow OpenAI’s app submission guidelines (sound familiar?) and can learn more from a variety of resources that OpenAI has made available.

A playlist generated by ChatGPT from a 40-year-old setlist.

A playlist generated by ChatGPT from a 40-year-old setlist.

I haven’t spent a lot of time with the apps that are available, but despite the lack of access to your library, the Apple Music integration can be useful when combined with ChatGPT’s world knowledge. I asked it to create a playlist of the songs that The Replacements played at a show I saw in 1985, and while I don’t recall the exact setlist, ChatGPT matched what’s on Setlist.fm, a user-maintained wiki of live shows. I could have made this playlist myself, but it was convenient to have ChatGPT do it instead, even if the Apple Music integration is limited to 25-song playlists, which meant that The Replacements’ setlist was split into two playlists.

We’re still in the early days of MCP, and participation by companies will depend on whether they can make incremental sales to users via ChatGPT. Still, there’s clearly potential for apps embedded in chatbots to take off.

MacStories Selects 2025: Recognizing the Best Apps of the Year

John: 2025 was a different sort of year for apps, which is reflected in this year’s MacStories Selects Awards winners. App innovation comes from many places. Sometimes it’s new Apple APIs or hardware, and other times it’s broader shifts in the tech world.

Last year was marked by a series of App Store changes in the EU, U.S., and elsewhere that have begun to reshape the app landscape. The updates have been slow to roll out and have been met with resistance from Apple, but we’re starting to see policy updates, like developers’ ability to offer web-based purchases, translate into new business models, expanding the kinds of apps that are available.

Political and regulatory pressures on Apple continued to affect the apps we use this year, too, but the lion’s share of the change we saw in 2025 came from more traditional sources. This year, it was great to see a surge in app innovation sparked by Apple Intelligence and other AI services, the Liquid Glass design language, and other new APIs and features from Apple. The result has been a broad-based acceleration of app innovation that we expect to continue into 2026 and beyond. But before looking ahead to what’s next, it’s time to pause as we do each year to reflect on the many apps we tried in 2025 and recognize the best among them.

This year, the MacStories team picked the best apps in six categories:

  • Best New App
  • Best New Feature
  • Best Watch App
  • Best Mac App
  • Best Design
  • App of the Year

Club MacStories members were part of the selection process, too, picking the winner of the MacStories Selects Readers’ Choice Award. And as we’ve done in the past, we also named a Lifetime Achievement Award winner that has stood the test of time and had an outsized impact on the world of apps. This year’s winner, which joins past winners:

is the subject of a special story that Federico wrote for the occasion.

As usual, Federico and I also recorded a special episode of AppStories covering all the winners and runners-up. It’s a terrific way to learn even more about this year’s honorees.

You can also listen to the episode below.

And with that, it’s our pleasure to unveil the 2025 MacStories Selects Awards.

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How Stu Maschwitz Vibe Coded His Way Into an App Rejection and What It Means for the Future of Apps→

This week on AppStories, Federico and I talked about the personal productivity tools we’ve built for ourselves using Claude. They’re hyper-specific scripts and plugins that aren’t likely to be useful to anyone but us, which is fine because that’s all they’re intended to be.

Stu Maschwitz took a different approach. He’s had a complex shortcut called Drinking Buddy for years that tracks alcohol consumption and calculates your Blood Alcohol Level using an established formula. But because he was butting up against the limits of what Shortcuts can do, he vibe coded an iOS version of Drinking Buddy.

Two things struck me about Maschwitz’s experience. First, the app he used to create Drinking Buddy for iOS was Bitrig, which Federico and I mentioned briefly on AppStories. His experience struck a chord with me:

It’s a bit like building an app by talking to a polite and well-meaning tech support agent on the phone — only their computer is down and they can’t test the app themselves.

But power through it, and you have an app.

That’s exactly how scripting with Claude feels. It compliments you on how smart you are, gets you 90% of the way to the finish line quickly, and then tortures you with the last 10%. That, in a nutshell, is coding with AI, at least for anyone with limited development skills, like myself.

But the second and more interesting lesson from Maschwitz’s post is what it portends for apps in general. App Review rejected Drinking Buddy’s Blood Alcohol Level calculation on the basis of Section 1.4, the Physical Harm rule.

Maschwitz appealed and was rejected, even though other Blood Alcohol Level apps are available on the App Store. However, instead of pushing the rejection with App Review further, Maschwitz turned to Lovable, another AI app creation tool, which generates web apps. With screenshots from his rejected iOS app and a detailed spec in hand, Maschwitz turned Drinking Buddy into a progressive web app.

Maschwitz’s experience is a great example of what we covered on AppStories. App creation tools, whether they generate native apps or web apps, are evolving rapidly. And, while they can be frustrating to use at times, are limited in what they can produce, and don’t solve a myriad of problems like customer support that we detail on AppStories, they’re getting better at code quickly. Whether you’re building for yourself, like we are at MacStories, or to share your ideas with others, like Stu Maschwitz, change is coming to apps. Some AI-generated apps will be offered in galleries inside the tools that created them, others will be designed for the web to avoid App Review, and some will likely live as perpetual TestFlight betas or scripts sitting on just one person’s computer, but regardless of the medium, bringing your ideas to life with code has never been more possible.

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2025 App Store Award Winners Revealed

From a pool of 45 finalists, Apple has named 17 App Store Award winners comprised of apps and games across all of its platforms. This year’s App Store Award honors were presented to:

Apps

iPhone App of the Year: Tiimo from tiimo. 

iPad App of the Year: Detail from Detail Technologies B.V. 

Mac App of the Year: Essayist from Essayist Software Inc. 

Apple Vision Pro App of the Year: Explore POV by James Hustler.

Apple Watch App of the Year: Strava from Strava, Inc. 

Apple TV App of the Year: HBO Max from WarnerMedia Global Digital Services, LLC.

Games

iPhone Game of the Year: Pokémon TCG Pocket from The Pokemon Company. 

iPad Game of the Year: DREDGE from Black Salt Games. 

Mac Game of the Year: Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition from CD PROJEKT S.A. 

Apple Vision Pro Game of the Year: Porta Nubi by Michael Temper.

Apple Arcade Game of the Year: WHAT THE CLASH? from Triband ApS.

Cultural Impact

Art of Fauna by Klemens Strasser

Chants of Sennaar from Playdigious

despelote from Panic, Inc.

Be My Eyes from Be My Eyes

Focus Friend by Hank Green from B-Tech Consulting Group LLC

StoryGraph from The StoryGraph

Tim Cook had this to say about the winners and their apps:

Every year, we’re inspired by the ways developers turn their best ideas into innovative experiences that enrich people’s lives. This year’s winners represent the creativity and excellence that define the App Store, and they demonstrate the meaningful impact that world-class apps and games have on people everywhere.

This year’s list of App Store winners is one of my favorites for a bunch of reasons. There are excellent games ranging from Art of Fauna by indie developer Klemens Strasser to Cyberpunk 2077 by CD PROJEKT S.A., as well as other great titles like despelote, which was published by our friends at Panic, Chants of Sennaar, and DREDGE, whose creators Federico and I interviewed at WWDC this year. There were other excellent apps, too, like Essayist, the academic-focused word processor.

Of course, my favorite app among the bunch is Detail, this year’s iPad App of the Year. Yes, I’m hopelessly biased because my son Finn is part of the team that built the app. But it’s also a great example of an app that lowers the barriers to creativity by leveraging Apple’s hardware in a unique way.

Congratulations to all of this year’s App Store Award winners. Of all the apps on the App Store, it’s quite an honor to be among the 17 apps recognized by Apple’s editorial team.

Finally, the year-end award season isn’t over. We’ll be presenting the 2025 MacStories Selects Awards later this month, so keep an eye out for more award-winning app coverage from us.

Black Friday 2025 App Deals

There’s more than just gadgets on sale this Black Friday. There are also hundreds of excellent app deals from collections and bundles to one-off sales. We’ve gathered some of our favorites for you here, which are generally available through Monday, December 1, but check for details on the websites linked below:

The biggest collection I’ve seen is from Indie App Sales with ouver 475 app deals. Indie App Sales has been curating a list of apps from indie developers for years now, and there are always a bunch of gems on this list. Be sure to check it out for deals on apps like:

There are hundreds more deals in the Indie App Sale, so be sure to visit the site to browse through them all.

There are other great sales happening elsewhere too, including the following:

Happy deal hunting!

Wading Back Into the Liquid Glass Pool: The MacStories OS 26 App Roundup Continued

Last month, we featured 15 great examples of apps that have adopted Apple’s Liquid Glass design language and latest APIs. Today, the MacStories team is sharing nine more of our favorite updates that take advantage of Apple’s latest technologies.

We’ll have additional coverage in the weeks ahead, but for now, let’s dive into even more of the best OS 26 updates we’ve seen this fall.

Denim

John: I remember when Denim was first released. It was a great idea that filled a gap in Apple’s Music app, allowing users to create their own playlist covers. The designs you could make with that first version were nice, though fairly modest. But Denim is one of those indie developer stories that I love. Through relentless iteration, the app has evolved into something very special, being named an Apple Design Award finalist in the Delight and Fun category earlier this year.

With the OS 26 release cycle, Denim is all-in on Liquid Glass. We’ve covered a lot of great Liquid Glass implementations already, but Denim’s is extra special. The design is present in the app’s tab bar, where you’ll see the glass blob effect, but it’s also in the animations, like when you return from the cover picker to your playlists. Similar animations are on display when you tap the ‘+’ button to add a new cover or the ‘…’ button.

Denim’s Gallery interface is an excellent example of Liquid Glass used to display a collection of artwork. The view has a lot in common with apps like Music, but it does a better job of implementing the design without sacrificing legibility, thanks to its buttons’ frosted treatment.

Denim’s Liquid Glass update aside, if you haven’t tried the app in a while, it’s worth taking another look at. I get tired of the auto-generated playlist art in Music, and the alternative covers Apple added a couple of years ago are uninspired. In contrast, Denim offers a wide variety of styles with highly customizable artwork, fonts, and colors. The gallery is incredibly deep, allowing you to make some fantastic covers.

Denim, which is iPhone-only, is available on the App Store for $2.99/month, $9.99/year, or a one-time payment of $29.99.

Drafts

Federico: 2025 has been the year that I’ve fully embraced Drafts as my Markdown text editor/notepad of choice, and that’s all thanks to AI. Let me explain: thanks to the advancements in coding for models like GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5, I’ve been able to turn Drafts into a highly personalized, extensible plain text editor that – unlike Obsidian – is natively integrated with Apple’s design language and latest platform features. That was never the case with Obsidian, which is an Electron app at its core and can’t match the pace of truly native apps for iOS and iPadOS. With Drafts, I get to have my cake and eat it too; I can “vibe-code” my own actions thanks to Claude, and I don’t have to give up on the nice perks that come with an application that is frequently updated for the latest Apple APIs.

Over the past two months, Drafts has received a series of notable updates for the 26 family of OSes. The app has been updated for Liquid Glass, which I think pairs well with Drafts’ UI, but more importantly, it’s also been optimized for iPadOS 26. That means full integration with the menu bar, multi-windowing, and keyboard shortcuts. Greg Pierce has done a solid job integrating with App Intents: Drafts actions can now be triggered from Control Center on the Mac and Apple Watch, and there’s a new ‘Show Capture’ action in Shortcuts that opens the app’s Capture window with the ability to pre-fill some text in it. Last but not least, Pierce also added support for the on-device Foundation model, which can be invoked from Drafts’ JavaScript-based scripting library to access tools that let you query drafts, create new ones, and more.

In a sea of so-called “opinionated” text editors that often use that adjective as an excuse for their lack of features, Drafts has managed to keep its simplicity while unlocking incredible potential for power users. If you haven’t played around with Drafts in a while, its latest updates for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26 are a great opportunity to test the app again.

Drafts is available as a free download for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, with the full feature set available as part of Drafts Pro for $1.99/month or $19.99/year.

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Apple Beefed Up Its Rule Against Copycat Apps→

Last week, I wrote about Apple’s new policies surrounding mini apps. However, that wasn’t the only change made to the App Review Guidelines last week. Apple also added a new subsection “c” to its rule against Copycat apps:

4.1(c) You cannot use another developer’s icon, brand, or product name in your app’s icon or name, without approval from the developer.

As I wrote earlier this year, this isn’t a new problem, especially for developers of popular games on other platforms. Copycat versions of Blue Prince, Palworld, Wordle, Cuphead, Balatro (before it was released on the App Store), and Unpacking have all appeared on the App Store in recent years.

The update to App Guideline 4.1 shows that Apple is aware of the problem, which is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the awareness will lead to better enforcement, too.

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