2025-11-19 22:03:45
Source: Apple.
Today, Apple announced the finalists for the 2025 App Store Awards. The App Store Awards are Apple’s annual celebration of exceptional apps and games across 12 categories spanning the company’s platforms. It’s an excellent collection that includes solo developers, small indie teams, big companies, and many MacStories favorites.
Here’s the complete list of finalists.
It’s great to see all of these developers’ hard work recognized, and I was especially pleased to see long-time MacStories favorites like Acorn by Gus Mueller of Flying Meat, The Art of Fauna by Klemens Strasser, Camo Studio by Reincubate, and Structured by the Unorderly team, plus games like Is This Seat Taken?, Gears & Goo, Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, DREDGE, and Prince of Persia: Lost Crown on the list.
As you can probably imagine, though, I’m partial to Detail’s inclusion as one of the iPad App of the Year finalists. My son Finn has worked on the app’s development team since graduating from college, and it’s fun to have an App Store Award finalist in the family.
Proud-dad bias aside, congratulations to all the finalists. It’s quite an honor to be recognized as one of the best among the millions of apps and games on the App Store.
2025-11-19 03:19:55
Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).
As we head into the final weeks of 2025, Federico and I figured it would be a good time to update the MacStories Setups page. There’s an ebb and flow to the gear and apps we test each year, and as the fall OS update season fades into the past, it’s not unusual for one or both of us to take stock of our setup and make changes. That’s been very true for both of us this year, but in different ways.
Federico has been focused on simplifying his hardware setup and testing a long list of apps and services. In contrast, I’ve made fewer gear cuts, focusing more on strategic changes to the gadgets I use and settling on a core set of work apps.
The result is that Federico’s hardware setup changes have primarily been updates to his Apple and portable gaming gear. He made the transition from the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the iPhone Air, and couldn’t be happier with the result. He also replaced the M4 iPad Pro with the latest M5 model and moved from the AirPods 4 to the AirPods Pro 3.
Both of us ditched our previous Apple Vision Pro head strap solutions for the Apple Dual Knit Band, which has been a big upgrade. It’s comfortable, and having one dial to adjust both bands is both clever and far simpler than other solutions I’ve tried.
Ayn Thor.
Federico also added the Ayn Thor to his handheld gaming lineup. The Thor, which I also bought this fall, is a dual-screen OLED gaming handheld that runs Android. It’s perfect for emulating dual-screen systems like the Nintendo DS and 3DS, but it has also been excellent for game streaming and testing the emerging world of emulating SteamOS on Android. If game tinkering is your thing and this sounds intriguing, we have two episodes of NPC: Next Portable Console that go in-depth on the Ayn Thor.
Among the many apps and services that Federico has settled on and that we’ve been covering this fall on AppStories are:
Yes, there’s a lot going on at my desk.
The story of my setup changes is a little different. I’ve also updated my iPhone, although I’ve stuck with the Pro Max, getting the Deep Blue iPhone 17 Pro Max with 512GB of storage. Plus, I updated from the original Apple Watch Ultra to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and from the AirPods Pro 2 to the AirPods Pro 3. It’s been excellent to have two-day battery life with the Apple Watch Ultra again, and I love the better fit and sound I get from the AirPods Pro 3.
I’m also a huge fan of the Ayn Thor dual-screen Android handheld. I’ve tried so many handhelds since we started NPC: Next Portable Console, but nothing can beat the compact size and clamshell form factor of the Thor, which tops it all off with two gorgeous OLED screens. It’s the closest thing to a perfect gaming handheld I’ve tried.
Over the summer, I also started revisiting my smart home setup. This is a long-term project that I’ll write about more in the new year, but I’ve added several gadgets to my setup since our last update. The biggest addition is the Narwal Freo X10 Pro, which the company sent me for testing and I will write about soon. It’s a combo robot vacuum and mop that is light years ahead of the Roomba I bought several years ago in terms of its capabilities. I also wanted to highlight SwitchBot’s Smart Desk Fan, which I got at the end of the summer to help cool my office. The thing I appreciate most about it is that I can control it from the buttons on the fan itself, with a remote control, or with an automation that I created to turn the fan on when the indoor temperature crosses a certain threshold.
A closer look at the MOTU M4.
The other highlights of my setup update all revolve around audio. First, I got a MOTU M4 audio interface for recording podcasts and videos for a very specific reason: it’s the only USB-C-connected audio interface I could find that has an on/off switch. That way, I don’t need to stare at its LED lights all day, and unlike the Elgato Wave XLR interface it replaces, the M4 doesn’t needlessly generate heat.
For personal audio, I also recently picked up the Beats Studio Pro headphones when they were on sale. I love my AirPods Pro 3, but I’m not a fan of having them jammed in my ears for long stretches. With the Beats Studio Pro, I now have the option to work at my desk or do other things around the house without the AirPods Pro in my ears, and they have great battery life, too.
That’s it for our latest setups for now. Be sure to visit the Setups page for the full list of additions and to browse what hasn’t changed, too. It’s a battle-tested collection of recommended gear that has been years in the making, and it comes with a changelog, so you can also see what has changed in the years since we began Setups. Happy browsing!
2025-11-18 23:24:30
Following the comeback of Slide Over in iPadOS 26.1, Apple is continuing to iterate on iPadOS 26 multitasking by restoring functionalities that had been removed from the launch version of iPadOS 26.0 in September. Yesterday, in the third developer beta of iPadOS 26.2, the company brought back drag and drop gestures to put app windows directly in Split View and Slide Over without having to interact with additional menus. To understand how these old gestures work in the context of iPadOS 26, I recommend watching this video by Chris Lawley:
As you can see, the gestures are pretty much the same ones as iPadOS 18, but the interaction is slightly different insofar as the “pull indicator” for Slide Over (re-introduced in iPadOS 26.1) now serves two purposes. That indicator now acts both as a signal that you can drop a window to instantly tile it as one half of a Split View, and it’s also a drop target to enter Slide Over right away. The design is clever, if maybe a little too hard to discover…but that’s always been the case with multitasking gestures that aren’t exposed by a menu – which is exactly why Apple is now offering plenty of options in iPadOS 26 to discover different multitasking features in different menus.
I’m glad to see Apple quickly iterate on iPadOS 26 by finding ways to blend the old multitasking system with the platform’s new windowing engine. Based on the comments I received after publishing my iPadOS 26 review, enough people were missing the simplicity of Split View and Slide Over that I think Apple’s doing the right thing in making all these multitasking systems coexist with one another.
As I argued on last week’s episode of Connected, and as Myke and Jason also elaborated on this week’s episode of Upgrade, the problem with the iPad Pro now is that we have a great foundation with iPadOS 26 and very few third-party apps that take advantage of it beyond the usual names. I suspected as much months ago, when I explained why, in a world dominated by web apps, the iPad’s next problem was going to be its app ecosystem. The web services I use on a daily basis (Slack, Notion, Claude, Superhuman, Todoist – the list goes on) simply don’t make iPad apps of the same caliber as their desktop/web counterparts. So I find myself using Safari on the iPad to get my work done these days, but, for a variety of reasons and dozens of small papercuts, Safari for iPad simply isn’t as good as Safari on the Mac.
Given how the third-party app ecosystem story for iPad is outside of Apple’s control and how most companies aren’t incentivized to make excellent native iPad apps anymore, now that multitasking has been largely “fixed” in iPadOS 26.2, I hope Apple turns its attention to something they can control: making Safari for iPad truly desktop-class and not a baby version of Safari for Mac.
2025-11-17 21:54:41
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.
2025-11-15 04:00:58
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
Matt has a mouse that looks like a zebra, Niléane quotes some cool new stuff in the Mastodon world, and everyone pitches their dream app. (One of them may already exist!)
On Cozy Zone, the gang roasts their very lovely listeners’ desk setups.
This week in a special early release of NPC, the guys dig into Valve’s announcement of the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Stream Controller, a trio of SteamOS devices poised to make a big splash in 2026.
On NPC XL, Federico, John, and Brendon cover the Steam Frame but are mostly excited about it means for Windows gaming on ARM.
This week, John shares how he plans weekend activities with Instagram and Apple Maps, Federico tests dictation apps, and both share their first impressions of the new Apple TV show Pluribus.
Sigmund and Devon highlight Apple Original documentary Come See Me in the Good Light and return to Palm Beach for the second season of Palm Royale. Then, they discuss changes coming to profiles in tvOS 26.2.
For even more from the Comfort Zone crew, you can subscribe to Cozy Zone. Cozy Zone is a weekly bonus episode of Comfort Zone where Matt, Niléane, and Chris invite listeners to join them in the Cozy Zone where they’ll cover extra topics, invent wilder challenges and games, and share all their great (and not so great) takes on tech. You can subscribe to Cozy Zone for $5 per month here or $50 per year here.
NPC XL is a weekly members-only version of NPC with extra content, available exclusively through our new Patreon for $5/month.
Each week on NPC XL, Federico, Brendon, and John record a special segment or deep dive about a particular topic that is released alongside the “regular” NPC episodes.
You can subscribe here.
We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free with high bitrate audio every week.
To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page.
MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, NPC: Next Portable Console, and First, Last, Everything that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media.
If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees.
2025-11-14 02:06:24
Today on its news site for developers, Apple announced a new Mini Apps Partner Program for the App Store. The announcement is brief but backed by a more detailed explanation about the eligibility requirements. Here’s how it works.
As Apple explains, mini apps are “self-contained experiences that are built using web technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript” that are hosted within a native app. That’s not something new. Companies like WeChat and Line have offered this sort of thing for a long time, and Apple has supported mini apps officially since 2017. What’s different is that now, developers who meet Apple’s eligibility requirements can offer those mini apps at a reduced commission. That means for any mini app not made by the developer of the native app that hosts them, the hosting developer will pay Apple a flat 15% commission.
To be eligible for the program, developers must ensure that the mini apps they host support certain APIs, including the Declared Age Range API and the Advanced Commerce API, the In-App Purchase system, and the Send Consumption Information endpoint that enables the processing of refunds. In other words, native app developers who do the work to ensure that mini apps meet the program requirements will pay Apple a reduced commission on mini app sales in return.
If you’re wondering what constitutes a mini app, Apple has provided some examples. Mini apps are “software packages, scripts, or game content that are added after app installation and executed on the device, provided such code is written in HTML5 or JavaScript, or another language approved by Apple”, such as mini games, streaming games, chatbots, plug-ins, and game emulators. As I mentioned above, it’s also important to keep in mind that mini apps are apps that are not controlled by the developer of the native app that hosts them.
Also, to participate in the Mini App Partner program, developers must apply – that link takes you to a form requesting information about the mini apps a developer wants to offer, so eligibility can be determined.
App Store users stand to benefit from the program, too. APIs like the Declared Age Rating API will help ensure that only age-appropriate mini apps are available to kids. Plus, by supporting the Advanced Commerce API, mini apps will include more metadata, providing users with a richer experience in places like their App Store purchase history.
Mini apps based on web technologies are a growing part of the App Store. The App Review Guidelines have accounted for mini apps since 2017 and the rules around them have continued to adapt to the market ever since. The Mini App Partner Program reflects the further evolution of the category, promoting privacy and transparency for users, while offering the carrot of lower commissions to developers.
What will be interesting to watch is the extent to which developers sign up for this new program. The program isn’t required (although compliance with App Review Guideline 4.7 still applies), so it will come down to whether the reduced commission provides sufficient incentive for developers to further police the mini apps they host.