2020 Apple Design Awards
Taking the recent years’ trend toward ignoring Mac apps to its logical extreme (see our Apple Design Award series), there wasn’t a single winner for the Mac.
Such a great year for the Mac at WWDC, but not one ADA winner. But yet the ADAs are currently the top feature story in the Mac App Store app.
Except all the download buttons are disabled, because none of the apps are available on the Mac.
Previously:
Update (2020-07-09): Craig Grannell:
I’m surprised people are surprised by this. The same thing happened at WWDC 2019 and 2018. (I don’t remember the awards further back than that.)
One might have expected this year to be different given Apple’s strong rhetoric about how much it cares about the Mac.
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Sure there were Mac apps. Every app which won will run natively on the new "Apple Silicon" Macs. Apple is making it clear what the aesthetic of Mac apps is expected to be in the future: no different from iOS. Get with the program people!
Apparently all these apps will be on the Mac App Store next year, so problem solved (at least as far as Apple is concerned).
Isn't it also a bit weird that all the winners seem to be either games or graphic design / pencil apps? What about all the other creative apps outside of these limited uses?
I don't mean this as a judgment on the apps (they all look amazing), but what does it say about the health of all of Apple platforms that they try to find the best of the best and what they come up with is a group of apps that all do kinda-sorta the same things? The musical notation app was the only one that really stood out as completely different from the rest.
And maybe it's just me because I'm not a gamer (not even a little bit) but I really don't understand selecting games as winners. Seems like a cop-out to me. In my admittedly limited experience, games on iOS aren't fundamentally different than games on Switch (except for having touch screen vs buttons).
With the exception of graphic design (due to the pencil), I feel like iOS app quality overall hit a peak maybe 4 or 5 years ago. It could just be my personal experience, but new apps that have come out since then haven't really blown me away like they used to. It's like the momentum of great quality new apps (especially on iPad) has been lost. Maybe it's a function of the platform being so old (though I wouldn't say 'mature'), that so many of the great apps that were going to be made have already been made? I dunno.
The Mac is basically dead. It's being replaced with iOS devices with keyboards that say "Mac" on the outside.
