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Posts tagged with "featured"

Two Months with the Narwal Freo X10 Pro

In the depths of the pandemic, I bought an iRobot Roomba j7 vacuum. At the time, it was one of the nicer models iRobot offered, but it was expensive. It did a passable job in areas with few obstacles, but it filled up fast, had a hard time positioning itself on its base and frequently got clogged with debris, requiring me to partially disassemble and clean it regularly. The experience was bad enough that I’d written off robot vacuums as nice-to-have appliances that weren’t a great value.

So, when Narwal contacted me to see if I wanted to test its new Freo X10 Pro, I was hesitant at first. However, I’d seen a couple of glowing early reviews online, so I thought I’d see if the passage of time had been good to robo-vacuums, and boy has it. The Narwal Freo X10 Pro is not only an excellent vacuum cleaner, but a mopping champ, too.

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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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The MacStories Selects 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award

Unread

In the 16 years that I’ve been writing for MacStories, I’ve seen my fair share of new apps that have come and gone. Apps that promised to revolutionize a particular segment of the App Store were eventually acquired, discontinued, or simply abandoned. It’s been very unusual to witness an indie app survive in a highly competitive marketplace, let alone to find one that thrived after having been sold twice to different owners over the years. But such is the case of Unread, the RSS client now developed by John Brayton of Golden Hill Software and the recipient of this year’s MacStories Selects Lifetime Achievement Award.

Unread was originally created by indie developer Jared Sinclair in 2014, sold to Supertop (at the time, the makers of Castro), and then sold again to Golden Hill Software in 2017. When it first came out in 2014, Unread entered a crowded space: in the aftermath of Google Reader’s demise in 2013, third-party companies and developers rushed to offer comparable RSS syncing services and compatible apps to let users sync their RSS subscriptions and read articles across multiple devices.

In my original review from 2014, I noted how Unread set a new standard for elegant, gesture-driven interfaces optimized for phones that were getting progressively larger and harder to operate with one hand. With a fluid and minimal interface driven by “sloppy gestures” that didn’t require precision or specific buttons, Unread stood out because it followed Apple’s then-new “flat design” but imbued it with personality in the form of typographic choices, colors, share options (Sinclair created a custom share sheet before an official one even existed), and a novel interaction mechanism for an RSS reader.

After a three-year stint as a Supertop product, Unread was taken under the wing of John Brayton, who did something exceptionally rare: instead of following short-lived industry trends and fads, he doubled down on Unread’s essence while judiciously embracing modern technologies. Eleven years after its inception and eight years after its second sale to a different developer, Unread still stands out in the third-party indie app market because it’s managed to honor its lineage while adapting to the ever-changing nature of the Apple ecosystem.

Unread for iOS.

Unread for iOS.

Unread still is, at a fundamental level, an elegant and polished RSS client that syncs with multiple services and presents articles in a minimal, clutter-free UI that you can easily control with your thumb. Everything else around it, however, has evolved and expanded. Unread is now available on the iPad and Mac, where it supports features such as menu bar commands, windowing, and keyboard shortcuts. There is an Unread Cloud syncing service that is fully managed by its developer. Last year, Brayton shipped an incredibly powerful and custom Shortcuts integration that lets you trigger automations in the Shortcuts app from individual articles in Unread. This year, Brayton adapted to another new reality of the modern web: Unread can now securely store logins for paywalled websites – such as Club MacStories – so that all your articles that require a subscription to be read can be saved and accessed within the app. And in all of this, the modern Unread is both unmistakably the “same” app from 11 years ago, but also something far greater that has built upon Sinclair’s original idea thanks to the constant, relentless work of its current developer, John Brayton.

If you’ve been reading MacStories all these years, you know that this is no easy feat. Most app acquisitions don’t work out in the end, leaving users with the bittersweet nostalgia of something that used to be great and was eventually swallowed up by the greater scheme of economic factors, app rot, technical debt, and App Store changes.

Against all odds, Unread has successfully bucked that trend and evolved into a mature, powerful product that continues to stand alone in the sea of RSS clients as a beacon of hope for indie developers and our community as a whole. There is nothing else like it. For all these reasons, we couldn’t think of an app more worthy of the MacStories Selects Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025.

Learn more about Unread:

Awake: A Considered, Effective Alarm for Chronic Snoozers

Waking up on time is a quintessential human problem. Over the years, we’ve come up with all kinds of solutions, from ringing analog clocks to flashing lights to motorized digital clocks that roll away from our bedsides as they chime, forcing us to get up and find them to turn them off. But what if there was a way to use a device you already have – your phone – to help you break the habit of snoozing and actually get out of bed when you’re supposed to?

That’s what unorderly, the team behind the day planner app and App Store Awards 2025 finalist Structured, have set out to do with their new alarm app Awake. Built on the newly introduced AlarmKit API, which gives third-party alarm apps the same level of system access as Apple’s Clock app, Awake takes a comprehensive approach to setting alarms that’s meant not only to wake you up but to help you feel more alert and prepared for the day when you do.

If you’ve ever used Structured before, you’re aware of how deeply the unorderly team considers every element of their work, from the color scheme to the fine details of editing events, to make tools that are both elegant and powerful. I’m happy to report that the same level of care is reflected in Awake, both in its design and in the balance of simplicity and customization it offers.

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Activas: Modern Design with a Sprinkling of AI

Activas is a new health and wellness tracker for the iPhone and iPad from developer Brian Hough, who built it from the ground up with Apple Intelligence and Liquid Glass in mind. The app serves as a dashboard that brings together information from the Health app in a colorful and easy-to-understand way, using progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users with data. It’s a fantastic example of modern design that marries form and function to elevate the user experience.

The app has just two tabs that adopt iOS 26’s Liquid Glass design without sacrificing legibility. The default view is the Dashboard, which can display your recent health and wellness metrics for the last 7, 15, or 30 days. At the top of the Dashboard is a Momentum Score that’s calculated based on a composite of step count, sleep, resting heart rate, and BMI targets, plus your calorie goal. Unlike many similar apps, Activas links to research supporting its targets, which I appreciate. The Momentum Score and a handful of additional stats can also be tracked using one of the app’s Home Screen widgets.

The Momentum Score is followed by an AI-generated insight about your metrics. Because I haven’t been tracking my calories or weight recently, the app suggested I should. That’s followed by overviews of Activity, Nutrition, Sleep, Vitals, and Body Measurement. Each of these sections appears as a SwiftUI-style card that includes graphs showing recent trends, an insight about your metrics, and a suggested question that you can ask the Activas AI with a tap. Sections can be turned on and off and reordered in the app’s settings, too.

The Dashboard’s design is superb. By collecting individual measurements in groups of related statistics and providing a takeaway about each section, the app allows users to get a quick, understandable overview of where they’re succeeding and what needs work.

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Coming Soon: What’s Next on Apple TV and Apple Arcade in December 2025

This month is a relatively quiet one for Apple TV, but there are a few gems coming soon, and Apple Arcade has a bunch of new games that are out tomorrow, so let’s dig into the highlights of both.

Apple Arcade Games (December 4)

SpongeBob Patty Pursuit 2

SpongeBob Patty Pursuit 2

Apple Arcade is kicking things off this month with four new games:

SpongeBob Patty Pursuit 2

This sequel to the popular platformer SpongeBob: Patty Pursuit is filled with the same colorful mayhem as its predecessor.

PowerWash Simulator

I was pretty excited to see PowerWash Simulator coming to Apple Arcade. I know a lot of people find these types of simulator games relaxing, but I’ve never tried one, so I think I’ll dip into PowerWash over the holidays.

Cult of the Lamb Arcade Edition

Cult of the Lamb is a great roguelite from Massive Monster that was originally published by Devolver Digital in 2022 and is coming to Apple Arcade. According to Apple’s press release:

This version includes exclusive content, including new follower forms, decorations, and outfits, along with all existing content updates and paid packs.

If you haven’t played it yet, be sure to check out Cult of the Lamb. It’s a game I have returned to several times since its initial release, and I expect it will do well on Apple platforms.

Subway Surfers+

Subway Surfers is an App Store classic that remains popular more than a decade after its original release. With the plus version on Arcade, subscribers can enjoy the game uninterrupted by ads or in-app purchases.

NARUTO: Ultimate Ninja STORM+

NARUTO: Ultimate Ninja STORM+ originally debuted on the Sony PS3 and was later ported to other platforms including mobile phones. On iOS, the 3D arena fighting game that’s based on a manga and anime series was available as a paid upfront game. With the plus version, there’s no upfront cost beyond a subscription to Apple Arcade, and the game adds new characters and a new stage.

The First Snow of Fraggle Rock (December 5)

The holiday season is upon us, and Apple TV is kicking things off on Friday with The First Snow of Fraggle Rock, featuring the characters from the Apple TV series.

Add to your Calendar:

F1: The Movie (December 12)

The biggest event of December for Apple TV is the streaming debut of F1: The Movie. The film has been available to buy or rent for a while after playing in theaters last summer, and now it will be available to stream as part of an Apple TV subscription, too. I haven’t seen F1 since WWDC in June, so I’m looking forward to rewatching it with my family over the holidays.

Add to your Calendar:

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The AI App Experience Matters More Than Benchmarks Now

Different experiences with app connectors in Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.

Different experiences with app connectors in Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.

I was catching up on different articles after the release of Claude Opus 4.5 earlier this week, and this part from Simon Willison’s blog post about it stood out to me:

I’m not saying the new model isn’t an improvement on Sonnet 4.5—but I can’t say with confidence that the challenges I posed it were able to identify a meaningful difference in capabilities between the two.

This represents a growing problem for me. My favorite moments in AI are when a new model gives me the ability to do something that simply wasn’t possible before. In the past these have felt a lot more obvious, but today it’s often very difficult to find concrete examples that differentiate the new generation of models from their predecessors.

This is something that I’ve felt every few weeks (with each new model release from the major AI labs) over the past year: if you’re really plugged into this ecosystem, it can be hard to spot meaningful differences between major models on a release-by-release basis. That’s not to say that real progress in intelligence, knowledge, or tool-calling isn’t being made: benchmarks and evaluations performed by established organizations tell a clear story. At the same time, it’s also worth keeping in mind that more companies these days may be optimizing their models for benchmarks to come out on top and, more importantly, that the vast majority of folks don’t have a suite of personal benchmarks to evaluate different models for their workflows. Simon Willison thinks that people who use AI for work should create personalized test suites, which is something I’m going to consider for prompts that I use frequently. I also feel like Ethan Mollick’s advice of picking a reasoning model and checking in every few months to reassess AI progress is probably the best strategy for most people who don’t want to tweak their AI workflows every other week.

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Just the Best: MacStories’ Black Friday 2025 Picks

Black Friday deals started very early this year, and we’ve covered a lot of ground on the MacStories Deals Mastodon and Bluesky accounts since publishing our Early Black Friday Picks. A lot of those deals are ongoing, so it’s worth revisiting that story as you start your holiday shopping in earnest.

However, today, I wanted to hit the highlights of what we’ve covered over the past week on MacStories Deals and add some new deals to the mix that you probably haven’t seen yet, so buckle up, it’s time to go shopping.

MacStories Pixel Icons

All three MacStories Pixel Icon sets are 40% off until Monday, December 1.

Two of the icon sets are specially-designed for Shortcuts. We’ve all been there. You work hard on a shortcut and want to give it the perfect icon, only to realize that Apple doesn’t offer what you want in the Shortcuts app. The MacStories Pixel Icons fill that gap with an extensive set of painstakingly hand-crafted icons with multiple color options created by MacStories’ long-time designer, Silvia Gatta. We also offer a set of Perspective icons that are perfect for OmniFocus Pro and other uses.

Visit our dedicated MacStories Pixel page today to preview all three icon sets and purchase them for 40% off until Monday, December 1.

Apple Hardware

There are a lot of Black Friday deals on Apple hardware, but most of them are good, not great. I’m picky, so I’m only going to focus on just the great deals.

One of the best deals on Apple hardware during Black Friday is the M4 13” MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage. If you want more memory or storage than that, you’ll have to settle for a smaller percentage discount, but even with more memory and more storage, you’re still doing better than any other deal this year. The 15” M4 MacBook Air with 16GB of memory and a 256GB SSD is a good deal, too.

Among the many iPad deals, the best is on the 128GB iPad mini with an A17 Pro chip. I’ve had a mini since they were released and love it. The size makes it an excellent reading and video-watching device.

AirPods 4 are also heavily discounted for Black Friday. Apple’s most affordable wireless earbuds come with active noise cancellation and without. The model with no active noise cancellation slightly edges out the model with ANC as far as the discounts are concerned, but both models are a bargain.

However, the very best deals available from Apple in terms of the percentage discount are a 4-pack of AirTags and the Apple Pencil Pro. If you need either, now is the perfect time to buy them.

Smart Home

The holiday season is a great time to catch up on projects and start new ones. For me, that’s often tuning up my smart home setup and setting up some new devices thanks to Black Friday sales. Here are the best ones I’ve seen:

Aqara already makes some of the most affordable smart home devices out there, so you really can’t go wrong with their Black Friday deals. One of my favorites is the FP2 Presence Sensor. It’s far more sophisticated than a simple motion sensor. To start with, it can tell when you’ve left a room, which motion sensors can’t do. I’ve used an FP2 Sensor in my office to control lighting for a couple of years, wrote about it for Club members, and have been really happy with it.

Other great deals from Aqara include its U100 Smart Lock that works with Apple Home Key and HomeKit, the Aqara M3 Home Hub that I recently set up at home and love, and 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro, an outdoor HomeKit camera that I reviewed earlier this year.

My Aqara 4MP Camera Hub G5 Pro is paired with an Ecobee Smart Video Doorbell, which is also on sale for Black Friday. I’ve used various Ecobee smart home products for years and have never been disappointed. The same goes for its smart doorbell. I’ve had it installed for over a year, and it’s been reliable despite facing the sun on some very hot summer days.

Black Friday is also a great time to buy a robot vacuum and mop. There are lots of deals, but the model I’ve tested for the past couple of months and love is the Narwal Freo X10 Pro. It handles vacuuming and mopping, navigating via LiDAR and does an excellent job compared to other robot vacuums I’ve tried. I’ll be reviewing the Freo X10 Pro about it soon, but now’s the time to get it at a steep discount.

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