After last week’s issue, I received a couple of emails asking if I had seen the App Store Award winners. I had seen it and had linked to it but deleted it as I was doing a final read-through before pressing send.

It’s always a good indicator that a link isn’t a good fit for the newsletter if I’m unhappy with what I write about it when I read the draft. What I had written for that link was, “Here’s something to aim for! Congratulations to all the winners.” Hardly Shakespeare 😂

What would have made it a must-link article would have been some information on why the various apps won in their categories. What made DAZN the best Apple TV app, LumaFusion the best iPad app, or CARR…. Actually, scratch that last one. CARROT won because the judging team feared the consequences if it didn’t! 😂

I checked a few of the apps out over the weekend and found something new as I did. Some had App Store stories, and they started with phrases like:

Toca Life World is our 2021 iPhone App of the Year because…

and

EatOkra is one of our 2021 Trend of the Year winners because…

These stories are not easy to find, though. You need to scroll down, past the screenshots and description, and past the What’s New and privacy nutrition cards. Don’t stop when you get to platform compatibility either, or when you get to whether it supports Family Sharing or Game Center. Only after all that scrolling will you see the “Featured In” section where these wonderful articles are. 🤷‍♂️

If you’re interested in learning more about why these apps won, you should read the App Awards stories for Toca Life World, LumaFusion, MARVEL Future Revolution, Space Marshals 3, Fantasian, Among Us!, Canva, Peanut, Bumble, and EatOkra. They won’t tell you how to be next year’s App Award winner, but they do include pointers in the right direction and plenty of inspiration.

I don’t know why DAZN, CARROT Weather, Myst, Craft, and Wild Rift didn’t get stories, but they didn’t! 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and congratulations to all the winners, and thanks for giving us all something to aim for! 😍

Dave Verwer

The world’s first virtualized M1 CI/CD environment on Bitrise

Optimize for speed, stability, and extensibility. Build natively for Macs featuring Apple Silicon, and benefit from greatly improved performance. Find out more!

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Apple Open Source

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New features for App Store product pages

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Monitoring HTTP Traffic with Instruments

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Placeholder Data vs Real Data

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SwiftUI allows you to move so incredibly fast... 😂