2025-12-20 02:34:41
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
This week, Federico and John reveal the winners of the 2025 MacStories Selects Awards, which celebrate the exceptional design, innovation, and creativity of apps across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.
On AppStories+, John has some Apple Music discovery tips for Federico, and they reveal the iPhone features they don’t use.
This week, handhelds are shipping for the holidays, AYANEO makes a bold bet on a phone, a new Strix Halo tablet one-ups the ASUS ROG Flow Z13, and John dips a toe in the Bazzite waters.
On NPC XL, Federico jumps into the Bazzite mini PC world, while Brendon is revisiting the iPod on handheld consoles.
Chris reflects on a big year of changes, Matt has turned his garage into a mini-factory, and the gang buys clothes, but in a techy way.
On Cozy Zone, we draft fonts…for real this time!
This week, Federico and John close out the year by sharing their favorite music of 2025.
This episode is sponsored by:
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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.
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.
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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.
2025-12-19 05:07:45
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.
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.
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.
2025-12-18 23:50:27
Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).
John: As 2025 comes to an end, Federico and I thought we’d cap off the year with a final update on our setups. We just went through this in November, but both Federico and I decided to take advantage of Black Friday sales to improve our setups in very different ways. Let’s take a look.
My changes were primarily to my office setup. I’ve wanted a gaming PC for a long time, but I never had a good place to set one up. The solution was to go with a high-end mini PC, the GMKtec EVO-X2, which features a Strix Halo processor, 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. It came with Windows installed, but after a few days, I installed Bazzite, an open-source version of SteamOS, which makes it dead simple to access my Steam videogame library.
Two things kept me from getting a PC earlier. The first was space, which the EVO-X2 takes care of nicely because it’s roughly the size of the Mac mini before its recent redesign.
The second and bigger issue, though, was my Studio Display. It’s an excellent screen, but it’s showing its age with its 60Hz refresh rate and 600 nits of brightness. Plus, with one Thunderbolt port for connecting to your Mac and three USB-C ports, the Studio Display is limiting. Without HDMI or DisplayPort, connecting it to other video sources like a PC or game console is nearly impossible.
The GMKtec EVO-X2 mini PC, Switch 2, and 8BitDo Ultimate 2 controller
So I also bought a deeply discounted ASUS ROG Swift 32” 4K OLED Gaming Monitor, which is attached to my desk using a VIVO VESA desk mount. I’d wanted a bigger screen for work anyway, and with its 240Hz refresh rate and bright OLED panel, the ASUS has been excellent. However, the ASUS display really shines when connected to my GMKtec and Nintendo Switch 2. As I covered on NPC: Next Portable Console recently, the mini PC combined with a great monitor, which also allows me to stream games to my handhelds over my local network, was the missing link in my setup, delivering a flexibility I just didn’t have before.
Along with the gaming part of my desktop setup, I updated my desktop lighting with two Philips Hue Play Wall Washer lights and a Hue Play HDMI Sync Box 8K, which casts light against the wall behind my desk that’s synced with what’s onscreen. In fact, the Sync Box 8K works with all the Hue lights in my office, allowing me to create a more immersive environment when I’m gaming.
I’ve been using a handful of other accessories lately, too, including:
That’s it from me for 2025, folks. Enjoy the holidays! Things will be a little quieter at MacStories over the next couple of weeks as we unwind and spend the time with family and friends over the holidays, but we’ll be back with lots more before long.
Federico: For this final update to my setup before the end of the year, I focused on two key areas: audio and my living room TV setup.
The biggest – literally – upgrade for me this month has been switching from my previous LG 65” TV to a flagship LG G5 77” model. I’d been keeping an eye on this TV for a while: it’s LG’s first model to use Tandem OLED technology, and it boasts higher brightness in both SDR and HDR with reduced reflections thanks to the new panel. I took advantage of an incredible Black Friday deal in Italy to buy it at 50% off, and we love it. The TV rests almost flush against the wall thanks to its compact design, but since it’s not completely flush, it allowed us to re-install our Philips Hue Gradient Light Strip behind it. Since I was in a renovation mood and I also wanted to future-proof my setup for the Steam Machine in 2026, I also upgraded to a Hue Bridge Pro and replaced my previous Hue Sync Box with the latest 8K edition that is certified for HDMI 2.1 connections. Speaking of gaming: as I discussed this week on NPC, I got a Beelink SER9 Pro mini PC and installed Bazzite on it to get a taste for SteamOS in the living room; this one will eventually be replaced by a more powerful Steam Machine.
The other area of improvement was audio. I recently realized that I wanted to fully take advantage of Apple Music and Spotify’s support for lossless playback with wireless headphones, which is something that, alas, Apple’s AirPods Max do not support. So after much research, I decided to treat myself to a pair of Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2, which are widely considered some of the best Bluetooth headphones that you can buy right now. But you may be wondering: how do you even connect these headphones to Apple devices that do not support Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless or Adaptive codecs? That’s where the BT-W6 Bluetooth dongle comes in. In researching this field, I came across this relatively new category of small Bluetooth adapters that plug into an iPhone’s USB-C port (they work on a Mac or iPad, too) and essentially override the device’s built-in Bluetooth chip. Once headphones are paired with the dongle rather than the phone, wireless streaming from Apple Music or Spotify will use aptX Lossless instead of Apple’s legacy SBC protocol. The difference in audio quality is outstanding, and it makes me appreciate the Px8 S2 for all they have to offer.
While I was at it, I also took advantage of another deal for a Sonos Move 2 portable speaker; we’ll have to decide whether this one will be permanently docked on my desk or next to a record player that Silvia is getting me for Christmas. (We don’t like surprises for each other, especially when it comes to furniture-adjacent shopping.)
So that’s my update before we go on break for a couple of weeks. I can already feel that, when I’m back, I’ll have some changes to cover on the software front. But we’ll talk about those in 2026.
2025-12-18 00:12:23
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.
The Freo X10 Pro navigating around my living room.
For context, I live in a three-story condo, which isn’t ideal for robot vacuums. For the past two months or so, the Freo X10 Pro has been stationed in my kitchen tucked away in a nook next to my refrigerator on the second floor. I picked that spot because the second floor is our main living space where we spend most of our time, and as a result, it’s the floor that needs cleaning most often.
To use the vacuum on the first or third floors, the Freo X10 Pro needs to be carried up or downstairs. The vacuum’s app handles that just fine because it can store up to four maps. And, although Narwal’s device is heavier than my old Roomba, it’s not difficult to move between floors. In fact, I look forward to it because the Narwal talks, announcing that it is suspended in the air whenever I pick it up, which makes me laugh every single time.
Ready for action.
As a practical matter, though, I’ve found that I only move the Narwal to another floor for vacuuming, not mopping. That’s because the Freo X10 Pro needs to return to its base station frequently to clean its mopping pads. That’s not a big deal when it’s on the same floor as its base station. However, if I carry the Narwal to the third floor, I need to fetch it for a second floor self-cleaning five or six times during a mopping session, which is a hassle. In contrast, vacuuming can be done in one shot, which is a much better experience.
The Narwal uses LiDAR to navigate around your home. During setup, it drives around your home mapping obstacles, which didn’t take long. Vacuuming the roughly 500 square feet of vacuumable space on our second floor takes about 70 minutes, while mopping takes close to 90. That’s faster than our old Roomba could navigate the same space and it finishes the task using only about 30% of its battery life, allowing me to vacuum or mop multiple floors on one charge.
The faceplate of the Narwal’s base station is magnetic, providing access to the bag that collects the dirt it vacuums up.
At the end of a vacuuming run, the Freo X10 Pro returns to its base station, and while it charges, the dirt it collected is sucked into a bag in the base station, which Narwal says will last 120 days before needing to be replaced. When the bag fills up, you throw it out and replace it with a fresh one, which after two months I haven’t had to do yet.
The more frequent maintenance task is filling the Narwal’s tank with clean water and emptying the dirty water tank after a mopping run. The tanks hold about three mopping runs worth of water, but I typically empty and rinse the dirty water tank every time the Freo X10 Pro is finished mopping. The clean water tank uses little tablets that dissolve in the water to help it clean, which are sold separately. I got a box of 24 on Amazon that should last 4-5 months, but Narwal should throw at least a few in the box with the robot.
The Narwal’s clean and dirty water tanks.
Overall, I’ve been impressed with the Freo X10 Pro’s cleaning power. Its 11,000 Pa of suction and 8N of mop pressure don’t mean much to me, but what I can say is that using the Freo X10 Pro to vacuum once per week and vacuum and mop a second day of the week has kept our house clean. The Freo X10 Pro won’t magically reach areas that are narrower than it, which means you’ll still need to do a little manual vacuuming. However, the Narwal does a meticulous job criss-crossing the areas it can reach, deftly navigating around furniture and across rugs and hardwood floors.
The Freo X10 Pro’s mop works well, too, lifting up and out of the way when it’s not in use. I was curious how wet the robot would leave our floors, and while you can see dampness in its wake, the water evaporates quickly. However, because it takes so many trips up and down the stairs to mop our other floors, I’ve found that it’s more convenient to mop those floors manually myself.
The Narwal is short enough that it fits under nearly every piece of furniture in our house.
About the only area where the Roomba j7 has a slight leg up on the Narwal is with electrical cords and charging cables. That may come down to the difference between a camera-driven vacuum and one that navigates by LiDAR, but whatever the case, I do need to make sure there aren’t charging cables in the way of the Freo X10 Pro more than I ever had to with the Roomba. The Freo X10 Pro also has trouble with our rather lightweight bath mats, but that was true of the Roomba too, and they’re easily moved when it’s time to clean.
Another nice feature of the Freo X10 Pro is that it’s relatively quiet; at least compared to our old Roomba. I can still hear the Freo X10 Pro from other parts of the house, but it doesn’t knock into furniture loudly or rumble across the floor the way the Roomba did.
Like other robot vacuums, the Narwal is controlled using an app or the buttons on the robot itself. There’s a lot going on in Narwal’s app, which can be a little confusing at first. As a practical matter, though, once I had it map our home and set up a vacuuming and mopping schedule, I haven’t used the app much. It sends me push notifications when a cleaning session is completed and when the robot gets stuck somewhere, which happens occasionally. That said, you can use the app to tweak your cleaning routines, track the wear on replaceable parts, and more if you want.
One thing that hasn’t changed over the years since I got that first robot vacuum is the fact that robot vacuums both debut at high prices, but are frequently discounted, given the intense competition among their makers. When I started using the Freo X10 Pro, it was retailing for $700. However, in the months since, and even now as this is published, it’s been significantly discounted whether you buy directly from Narwal or a third-party retailer like Amazon.
However, what’s different about the Narwal is that it’s a far better value than my Roomba j7 was when it was brand new. It’s faster, quieter, better at cleaning, and also mops my floors. The Freo X10 Pro can’t climb stairs or reach every tight spot around my house, but it’s significantly cut back the amount of time we spend vacuuming and mopping our floors. In fact, the floors are cleaner simply by virtue of the fact that Narwal’s robot takes care of it unfailingly on a schedule. It doesn’t procrastinate, putting off chores like I do. Instead, it just goes about its business, cleaning up a couple of times a week, which makes it well worth this kind of investment to me.
The Freo X10 Pro is available directly from Narwal. The list price on Narwal’s website is $699.99 but the company is currently running a sale reducing the price to $419.99. You can also buy the Freo X10 Pro from retailers like Amazon.
2025-12-17 00:56:03
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:
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.
[table_of_contents]
Jonathan: Blogger, YouTuber, and co-host of MacStories’ own Comfort Zone podcast Matt Birchler has been making moves in the software space over the last couple of years with a series of web-based tools called Quick Stuff. One of the first utilities in this collection was Quick Reviews, a simple way to create a shareable image of a movie you’ve watched. The image includes your review, rating, and a poster in the color scheme of your choice.
I really liked this utility on the desktop, but the web app was calling out for a native iOS version. This year, Matt created precisely that, alongside three other apps. (He’s had a very busy year.) However, it’s not just a like-for-like copy of the web version, but a fully formed mobile app that integrates both first- and third-party APIs – and one I now use shortly after the credits roll on any movie I watch.
Another place movie lovers like me log what we watch is Letterboxd, and Quick Reviews smartly integrates with the popular movie community platform to pull in your latest activity. You can, of course, create a review from scratch in Quick Reviews, but this integration is ideal for someone who wants to share their views on a movie in a visually delightful way with minimal effort, just by auto-importing a title they’ve already logged on Letterboxd.
Like Matt’s other apps, Quick Reviews is a simple concept that’s well thought out and executed, making it a joy to use. It’s now part of my movie-watching ritual, and I suspect that’s the case for many others. It’s a pleasure to be able to name Quick Reviews the Best New App of 2025.
Learn more about Quick Reviews:
Federico: Look, I don’t know if the issue is that I’m becoming a worse typer or that Apple’s software keyboard has gotten progressively worse, but the thing is, over the past year, I’ve noticed that I’m sending texts with more typos than ever. Sometimes, I don’t catch those typos in time, messages are sent with them, and – if I can – I use the ‘Edit’ feature in iMessage or Slack to fix them. But other times I do see my typos, and I spend way too much time dealing with the iPhone’s keyboard and text cursor to fix them. It’s exhausting. So months ago I decided to go all-in on embracing dictation as a way to write messages in Slack, Messages, and Superhuman, as well as to append quick notes to my Notion, and the best app I’ve found to do this on all my devices, but especially on iOS, is Wispr Flow.
Wispr Flow is part of a new wave of dictation apps that leverages LLMs under the hood to understand you in multiple languages (including a mix of languages within the same sentence), learns from you over time, and supports a custom dictionary of words to make sure that specific terms aren’t misspelled. Wispr Flow became popular on macOS and Windows first, but a few months ago, it launched on iOS, too, with a genius implementation of AI-based dictation: the app is a custom keyboard that you can use anywhere. To make it work in the background after the first launch, the app uses a Live Activity that persists in the Dynamic Island/Lock Screen and can be terminated at any time.
Wispr Flow on iOS has been a game changer for me when it comes to sending long messages to my team on Slack or responding to a long iMessage thread with John. The app syncs my custom dictionary and snippets with the Mac, and the performance has been outstanding with my Pro account, both in terms of speed and overall accuracy. Wispr’s dictation on iOS is leagues ahead of the experience provided by Apple – so much so that I’ve outright disabled iOS’ default dictation and solely rely on Wispr Flow’s now.
Wispr Flow for iOS is arguably the best third-party keyboard I’ve ever tested, combined with two modern technologies (AI speech-to-text and Live Activities) that make it one of the most exciting app debuts on Apple platforms this year.
Learn more about Wispr Flow:
John: I just reviewed Activas by Brian Hough last week and can’t recommend it highly enough. Apple’s Health app contains a wealth of information, but it’s not always presented in the most meaningful way for users, and it rarely puts pieces of information together in a way that paints a complete picture.
That’s where Activas excels. Using the same data paired with modern design and explanations generated by carefully controlled AI prompts, the app presents your health data with graphs and text that are more meaningful for someone trying to understand how their health and fitness fit together.
Activas shares the Health app’s approach to privacy, too. Your data remains on your device, and the AI insights are also generated on-device. I appreciate the constrained use of AI here as well. Activas includes a chatbot, but the questions you can ask are predefined, lowering the risk of potentially harmful hallucinations. This limits what you can get out of the Activas AI feature, but it doesn’t ruin the experience. Instead, the concise, focused responses fit in nicely with the design of the rest of the app, giving users a wealth of glanceable information to help them track their health and fitness.
Learn more about Activas:
Federico: I’ve gone back and forth between read-later apps over the years. It’s been a recurring topic on AppStories; I’ve written up several shortcuts for MacStories and the Club involving different apps; I’ve tried my best to keep our Discord members up to date on my latest read-later workflow whenever possible. This year alone, I switched multiple times between GoodLinks, Readwise Reader, and Matter. Ultimately, though, I always went back to Matter, primarily for two reasons:
Now, unfortunately, we’re not giving out awards to our favorite people here (but maybe we should), so I’ll just focus on the app. Matter is an exquisitely designed read-later app for iOS, iPadOS, and the web that has wholly embraced Liquid Glass and is better because of it. Toolbars and tab bars float gracefully above text and get out of the way when not needed, putting the focus on the actual content you want to read; when they animate, they do so beautifully with liquid effects that feel right at home in iOS 26. I know that the point of a read-later app isn’t to look pretty, but after all, we’re all Apple users here, and if we thought about user experience like that, we would have used Linux – and we don’t. (Shout-out to SteamOS, though.)
Listening to an article in Matter.
The fact that Matter looks great helps, but for me this year, the reason it’s stood out among the competition has been its incredible text-to-speech functionality that lets you listen to articles and newsletters as if they were podcast episodes. I don’t know with absolute certainty which AI provider the Matter team is using (my theory is that it’s a non-compressed version of Unreal’s voices, though I may be wrong), but we should applaud their business decision to support high-quality voices (which tend to be expensive for developers, especially when not compressed) and the UI they designed around them. Matter’s audio player – again, thanks to Liquid Glass – natively docks at the bottom of the page, just like Music, when you’re listening to a story. Tap on it, and you’ll be presented with a full-screen audio player that includes playback controls, menus for speed and voices, and even a sleep timer.
I’ve tried several read-later apps over the years, and particularly in the past year, I’ve focused my research on finding the best-sounding AI voices for catching up on my read-later queue while I’m doing other things throughout the day. The simple reality is that Matter’s implementation of text-to-speech has allowed me to “read” more, be more informed, and stay inspired. For all these reasons, Matter’s text-to-speech functionality is the Best New Feature for MacStories Selects 2025.
Learn more about Matter:
Using Longplay for Mac in Claude.
Federico: Longplay, created by indie developer Adrian Schönig, has long been one of our favorite companion apps for Apple Music that puts the focus on listening to albums rather than playlists or algorithmic discovery. And earlier this year, Schönig was one of the first developers to pioneer a new frontier for hybrid automation in macOS apps with Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration in Longplay for Mac.
As John explained in our review a few months ago, the MCP integration in Longplay allows you to query your Apple Music library with natural language, leveraging the processing capabilities of Claude to explore your library and control music playback in a way that isn’t possible with Apple Music and the Music app alone. Thanks to a built-in installation flow based on the native .mcpb bundle format, Longplay can be added as a native connector to Claude, which gives the assistant a variety of tools to find albums and collections, play media, and control playback. In less than 30 seconds, you can enable an integration that lets you ask questions like, “Which albums have I added to my library lately?” or send commands like, “Create a collection of Oasis singles and B-sides,” and have Claude complete those requests from its chat interface. This feature is excellent, and it’s a fantastic example of how AI can complement human creativity and music enjoyment without displacing them.
Longplay and its MCP server for Mac played an important role in my decision to try Apple Music again after a year spent using Spotify. Exploring the nooks and crannies of my music library is an experience I’ve never had before with any music streaming service, and as it stands right now, it’s exclusively made possible by Longplay and Schönig’s vision for a different kind of music search. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber (or a lapsed one, like I used to be) and have Claude installed on your Mac, you owe it to yourself to play around with Longplay’s MCP integration.
Learn more about Longplay:
Devon: I’ve been using Bridges, the app for saving, organizing, and sharing links from Jonathan Ruiz, in my regular workflow for Magic Rays of Light for years now, and it is excellent. No other app offers both the organizational features and flexibility that Bridges does for storing links to share in podcast show notes, YouTube video descriptions, newsletters, and more.
If you’re the type of person who needs a tool like Bridges, you’re also likely someone who tends to automate their workflows as much as possible. That’s where the app’s Shortcuts actions, introduced this fall, come in. Bridges’ Shortcuts integration includes a comprehensive set of actions that allow you to perform all of the app’s core functionalities – saving links, sharing folders of URLs in various formats, searching through stored links, and more – without opening the app at all. Even better, the actions are all customizable, giving you the capability to tweak them and combine them with other actions to fit your exact use cases.
Before it added Shortcuts actions, Bridges was already my favorite way to create show notes for the podcast; now, the app makes me feel like I have superpowers. Using a shortcut I built with Bridges’ actions, I can save a link from any app to the precise section and in the exact format that I want it in my show notes, and I’m even able to further act on those links depending on which section I save them to, such as automatically adding a movie trailer to my queue in Play. When it comes time to actually put out an episode, a single run of another shortcut generates my show notes in the precise format I need them for publishing and clears out my saved links in preparation for the next episode.
Bridges’ integration with Shortcuts is an excellent example of how well-implemented automation tools can empower users to make an app their own, get things done more efficiently, and spend more time creating. It’s a fantastic addition to an already very powerful app, and one that’s made my life easier on a weekly basis ever since it was introduced.
Learn more about Bridges:
Jonathan: Athlytic has been on the scene for several years, and so far, it’s flown under most people’s radars. However, the two-person development team has continued to add value to the app at an impressive rate. It’s a fitness app that aims to help you train smarter and learn more about your metrics, such as sleep quality, recovery, and energy levels, with easily accessible data points that are clearly laid out and explained. Athlytic touts its use of AI, but it’s important to note that all results you are presented with, including recovery, battery, and sleep debt, are obtained by analyzing hard data from your Apple Watch.
While the iOS version is wide in scope, what’s impressive about its watchOS counterpart is how it trims down various areas while still feeling full-featured and valuable on a day-to-day basis. Your key statistics – recovery, exertion, sleep, energy, stress, and battery – are available on the main screen for you to glance at or, with a further tap, analyze in more detail.
You can kick off a workout from within the app without your iPhone, too. One of the frustrations of Apple’s Fitness and Workout apps on watchOS is the limited amount of post-workout data there is for you to review. It’s fine for casual users, but Athlytic provides so much more, and in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you.
I’ve noted Athlytic in my past two annual watchOS reviews as something Apple should take note of in its first-party efforts. If you’re interested in delving deeper into your fitness and health statistics, Athlytic is a valuable app to have on your wrist, and it well deserves this year’s MacStories Selects Award for Best Watch App.
Learn more about Athlytic:
Jonathan: The Apple Watch was never meant to be used for browsing the web. If it were, you know Apple would have built a version of Safari for watchOS. That said, one of the enormous benefits of having an Apple Watch is that it negates the need to pull your iPhone out of your pocket every time you get a message or a notification. We’ve all fallen into that trap of checking a text only to discover we’re suddenly ten minutes into a social media scroll.
This is where having a browser on your wrist like µBrowser (“µ” means “micro” in Greek) can be helpful. Typing a URL into the app – or better yet, opening a bookmark saved using its iOS version – will display a website on the small Apple Watch screen. There are limitations to what watchOS allows, so you won’t see any flashy animations, but text-based sites work great. This is perfect for a quick check of the headlines without the danger of doomscrolling.
In the latest version of µBrowser for watchOS 26, developer Arno Appenzeller has added support for the new Controls API. This puts your favorite websites just a tap away inside Control Center. µBrowser does one thing, and it does it well, and support for new watchOS features (not too common this year) adds a lot of value to this clever little utility.
Learn more about µBrowser:
John: Replacements for the Mac’s Finder have been around a long time, but I never really felt the need to use one until about a year ago. Part of it was the increasing burden of managing dozens of articles and podcast production files every week, but the change was also driven by the lack of interesting Finder improvements over the past several years. As with most of the core apps I use for my work, I felt it was time to shake things up a little and see if there was something better out there. It turns out there is: Bloom by Asia Fu.
Bloom has so many of the qualities that we love at MacStories. It’s a native app that you’ll feel right at home in, and it’s actively developed with new features and refinements coming out at a remarkable clip. But best of all, it manages to tuck a lot of innovative features into a package that feels familiar, which makes it easy to get up and running fast but also do more than you can in Finder.
The star of the show is Bloom’s ability to create multi-pane views. There are 12 pane configurations, ranging from a single pane that entirely fills the app’s window to a four-pane quadrant setup. My personal favorite is a three-pane view with a bigger pane on the left and a couple of smaller ones on the right. It’s perfect for my podcast production workflow, allowing me to put working files in the left pane and completed audio and video files in the right two panes.
A Bloom workspace I saved for producing NPC: Next Portable Console.
What’s especially nice is that you can save pane configurations as presets that Bloom calls Workspaces. For me, that’s meant setting up workspaces for each of the podcasts I produce. When it’s time to start processing audio and editing, I can quickly open a window with my predefined panes from the app’s toolbar or with a keyboard shortcut.
Speaking of which, Bloom allows users to define keyboard shortcuts for virtually every aspect of the app. It also supports AppleScript, so automating your workflows is relatively simple, even though the app doesn’t support Shortcuts directly.
Probably the most unique feature of Bloom is the Portal, a mini window that supports most of the app’s core features and can be pinned on top of other windows. The approach is flexible enough to allow the Portal to serve as an alternative to a shelf utility app or simply as a way to conserve screen space when you need to access files in a folder repeatedly while working in another app.
Search is different in Bloom than in the Finder, too, and a little hard to get used to at first. However, if you invest time in learning how it works, it pays dividends. Using a global keyboard shortcut, you can quickly jump to any folder by typing its name. It works like ‘Go to Folder’ in the Finder, but from anywhere. Plus, it also handles keyword searches for files. Unlike the Finder, which defaults to searching your Mac’s entire drive, typing ⌘+F automatically searches the folder you’re viewing, too. Best of all, both search methods are extremely fast.
Other notable features include:
There’s even more to Bloom than that, which is why I haven’t reviewed the app on MacStories before now. It’s so deep that I still feel like I’m discovering new ways to use it, and all the while, the developer continues to add new features. But that depth and dynamism are precisely why Bloom is our Mac App of the Year. It’s easy to use, but built with the power user in mind, rewarding the curious with thoughtful and unique ways to manage your files.
Learn more about Bloom:
John: Sindre Sorhus has a lot of apps on the App Store for all of Apple’s platforms, and I use many of them. Some are simple utilities that do one thing well, like Week Number putting the week number in your Mac’s menu bar. Supercharge is a menu bar app, too, but it’s different because it collects a wide variety of utilities under one icon.
The kinds of tools and tweaks you’ll find in Supercharge are often available other ways but are buried deep in System Settings or require a trip to the Terminal. With Supercharge, not only can you access all these tools in one central location, but you can also set keyboard shortcuts for each, and the app comes with an extensive collection of Shortcuts actions.
Supercharge includes ways to:
Besides the actions available in the menu bar, there are many more tweaks available in Supercharge’s settings that alter the Dock and how windows, apps, the menu bar, the Finder, and Mission Control work. Plus, the app installs a long list of services that add actions that can be taken on folders and files with a right-click, including ‘AirDrop’, ‘Copy Path’, ‘Move to…’, ‘Copy to…’, ‘Toggle Hidden Files’, and more. Supercharge also includes a built-in utility to debug keyboard shortcut conflicts, which I greatly appreciate because new apps I install are forever colliding with other apps and shortcuts I’ve created.
Ultimately, though, Supercharge’s utility isn’t any one of its features; it’s the collection itself that brings disparate functionality together under one easily accessible roof. It’s also the kind of app where it pays off to scroll through its actions and various tweaks now and then. There are so many that they’re hard to absorb in one sitting. Instead, by revisiting the app periodically, you’ll discover new things to add to your toolbox as your workflows evolve.
Learn more about Supercharge:
Devon: MacStories readers will no doubt recognize Romain Lefebvre’s media tracker Sequel from past editions of the MacStories Selects Awards. The app took home Best App Update in 2023 and was a runner up for both Best New Feature and the Readers’ Choice Award last year. This year, the app has won Best Design, and if you’ve been paying attention to its development this fall, you already know why.
Sequel has been through a lot of changes over its lifespan, but one thing it’s always been great at is applying the latest available technologies to the challenge of media tracking in a way that benefits users. We saw this last year with Magic Lookup’s practical application of AI, and it’s happened again this year with Sequel’s implementation of Liquid Glass. Lefebvre has not only applied Liquid Glass in a way that complements Sequel’s distinctive look while keeping it in step with Apple’s latest design standards, but he’s also taken it as an opportunity to rethink the app’s navigation on iPhone and deliver a much-requested feature: universal search.
As Federico pointed out in his review of iOS 26, Sequel on the iPhone is taking advantage of the fact that Liquid Glass makes tab bars for apps with simple navigation much more attractive than before. The app’s two navigation tabs, Saved and Collections, house the majority of its functionality and make it really simple to switch between the two. I’ve certainly found myself taking advantage of the Collections feature more often now that it’s readily available from anywhere in the app.
Also now available from anywhere is search, the app’s third navigation button residing in the bottom-right corner of the iPhone UI. In Liquid Glass fashion, the button expands upon being pressed into a search bar that allows you to look for content across media types. Not only is the search feature more easy to access with this design, but it’s also more complete, incorporating search from within the user’s libraries and from Sequel’s databases in one set of results – capabilities that used to be found in separate parts of the app.
Of course, Sequel users on other platforms benefit from these changes, too. Universal search is available via the sidebar on iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro, where the app’s libraries and collections also reside. Buttons and menus throughout the app have been redesigned with Liquid Glass as well, and every version of Sequel features a gorgeous new media detail view with header images that morph seamlessly into blurred backgrounds as you scroll.
Put all of this together, and you’ve got a design that’s modern, fluid, and functional while still letting your content and artwork take center stage. Sequel’s design has always stood out as admirable, considered, and self-assured. Now, it’s award-worthy.
Learn more about Sequel:
Jonathan: No design can please everyone, but it’s frustrating when app developers consider design far down on their list of priorities. That’s why it’s great to see apps take big swings with bold, unique designs. This is precisely the mentality that Not Boring Software has been following for the past few years, and it continues with (Not Boring) Camera.
(Not Boring) Camera is the closest you’ll get to the feel of a real camera on a flat screen. One of its key features is a massively customizable “outer case”, which you can configure with a selection of color scheme presets or a color scheme you define yourself. Once you’ve chosen your colors, you can go ahead and start taking pictures. The app uses animations and haptics to enhance the experience even more, fooling you into thinking – if just for a moment – that you’re using a real camera.
Thankfully, the app’s appeal doesn’t end with visual customization. (Not Boring) Camera uses styles to directly manipulate your photos as you take them. You can even import your own custom LUTs for a really pro-level finish, and the developers have collaborated with photographers to create original styles for the app.
All of this custom photography is easily accessible via a chunky UI, making shooting easy. No more fiddly dials or switches; the design is both aesthetic and functional.
(Not Boring) Camera is a pro-level camera app that combines fun with a genuine love and knowledge of photography. Even if you’re not a photographer, you’ll want to keep coming back for the delight you get when using this unique app design.
Learn more about (Not Boring) Camera:
John: I enjoy the Readers’ Choice selection process every year. We start by asking the full Club MacStories membership to nominate their favorite apps of the year. Then, Plus and Premier members vote on the nominees. The fun part is seeing what apps have readers’ mindshare as the nominations and votes come in.
This year was a little different than most. Often, readers choose an app that was released in the last year or two, which makes sense; MacStories readers love to try new apps. But every so often, the stars align and a classic app that’s been around for a long time recaptures the imaginations of readers. This year, that app is Alfred by Running with Crayons, which Club MacStories readers picked for this year’s Readers’ Choice Award.
Alfred’s history stretches back to 2010 when QuickSilver, arguably the spark that started the entire launcher app category, began to fade as its development was open-sourced and slowed. In the years since, Alfred has been one of the pillars of the launcher category because it can do so much more than just launch apps. Other apps came and went, but Alfred has continued to evolve and remains a core must-have utility for a legion of Mac users.
Alfred is highly customizable.
Alfred is an excellent pick for the Readers’ Choice Award in any year, but I suspect it was Apple’s expansion of Spotlight in macOS Tahoe that recaptured Mac users’ imaginations. Spotlight’s updates in macOS Tahoe are excellent, but as with any system feature, an alternative like Alfred does so much more. Apple undoubtedly brought more people to the launcher category and reminded others of the value of third-party apps that offer even more.
What I love about the launcher category is that these apps start with the simple idea of invoking a hotkey to take actions on your Mac. But that’s where the differences start to multiply. Sure, you can search for folders and files, launch an app or shortcut, and manage your clipboard in any of them. However, with Alfred, you also get a powerful in-app automation system that can do things that are difficult or impossible to accomplish in Shortcuts. Plus, its keyboard-driven approach to productivity is more intuitive and thoughtful than most launchers I’ve tried.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Alfred can do, but what makes it special isn’t a list of features. What sets Alfred apart is that it can be whatever its users want to make of it. If all you want to do is launch apps with Alfred, you can do that, but if you want to use it to launch scripts in the Terminal or create complex workflows, you can do that, too. It’s an app that can grow with you as your own work evolves, and it comes with a built-in, active community that has created all sorts of automations you can install and start using without ever dipping into workflows yourself.
It’s easy to see why Alfred is the 2025 MacStories Selects Readers’ Choice Award winner. It’s a time-tested, feature-rich utility with a keyboard-driven approach to computing that taps into the power of the Mac and makes it more accessible to everyone.
Learn more about Alfred:
Federico: 2025 has been the year that Drafts, the excellent text editor by Greg Pierce, finally clicked for me. I know it sounds ironic given that I first reviewed Drafts all the way back in 2012 when it started as a simple scratchpad for jotting down quick ideas in plain text and sending them to a few compatible extensions. 13 years later, however, the combination of Drafts’ unrelenting evolution, Greg Pierce’s support for the app over the years, and its constant embrace of new Apple technologies have made this app one of the essential tools in my daily workflow on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
What’s different for Drafts in 2025 is its unique mix of traditional scripting techniques, native app integrations, and the assistance of AI and LLMs to create even more actions you can use in the app. For the first time in years, I realized not only that could I use Drafts as a simple notepad for jotting down random ideas and bits of text or URLs, but also that I could transform it into a powerful text editor – sort of reminiscent of Obsidian – with custom actions tailored for me, which I vibe-coded using Claude.
This all started months ago, when I realized that modern LLMs are pretty good at writing JavaScript code and integrating with external web APIs. Drafts has long supported custom JS actions, including the ones based on a JavaScript library created by Greg Pierce himself specifically for the app.
Years ago, I did try to learn my way around JavaScript. We’re talking before AI, before LLMs, when I attempted to piece together custom actions based on JavaScript by Googling around or copying and pasting code that I didn’t even understand from StackOverflow, Reddit, and forums on the Internet. I remember that I put together some pretty useful actions back in the day, and that showed me the potential for turning Drafts into a highly customizable, powerful text editor with my own actions and custom UIs. This year, however, I realized that I could just use Claude to take that idea to the next level.
Over the past few months, I’ve created a series of actions by prompting Claude, transforming Drafts from a relatively simple utility into the native equivalent of Obsidian: an app that’s deeply integrated with iOS, Liquid Glass, Apple dictation, and native UI elements, but also one that is powered by custom actions for Notion, Todoist, Markdown processing, and all the other services that I use on a daily basis. After months of iteration, the result is something unique in the app landscape on iOS: a text editor that doesn’t sacrifice native compatibility with the latest Apple APIs in favor of customization, but instead offers a customizable text environment that is always integrated with all of the latest technologies that Apple rolls out every September.
It also helps that Drafts was, of course, updated on day one for Liquid Glass, iPadOS 26, and the new APIs in the 26 family of OSes that Apple launched a few months ago. You can find Drafts in Shortcuts, on the Home and Lock Screens with interactive widgets, and in Control Center, and you can tie Drafts to the Action button. You can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to Drafts on the iPad. You can even take advantage of a new dictation model based on the speech-to-text engine that Apple released this year.
When you combine all of these features together – the deep customization that Drafts allows and its support for new Apple frameworks – it’s clear that what Greg Pierce created is no longer just a place “where text starts”. It’s a place where text can evolve, where text can be processed, where text can be integrated with external services.
Drafts can still be, if you want, a simple notepad. And that’s where the strength of the app fundamentally lies: Drafts doesn’t force you to turn it into a complex Markdown text editor. Its modular architecture means that it can be one when you need it, but it also stays true to its roots of being “just” a notepad when you have an idea and want to make sure that you don’t lose it.
Drafts is the kind of app that can be something different for all kinds of different users. And it’s because of its shape-shifting nature that Drafts represents the vision for what an app on Apple platforms should be in 2025. In the age of AI, Drafts still is a piece of software crafted with exquisite taste and thoughtfulness, but it’s also a modular space where the boundaries of what the “app” should be become more blurry. It’s the kind of experience that adapts to your workflow instead of forcing you to rely on someone else’s “opinionated” design.
Drafts is the ultimate example of what it means to combine taste, solid design principles, and the ingenuity to accept how software is changing and how a single developer who’s been working on the same app for the past 13 years can still find new ways to innovate and explore the frontier of iOS automation.
Drafts by Greg Pierce is the MacStories Selects App of the Year for 2025 and, at long last, an app that has gained a permanent spot on my Home Screen.
Learn more about Drafts:
Jonathan: As I mentioned above when profiling it for Best Watch App, Athlytic has been flying under the radar for a few years now while steadily adding great new features. 2025 seems to have been the year it finally became a breakout hit, much to my delight. Myke Hurley on the Connected podcast has been singing its praises, and it even appeared in MKBHD’s latest “What’s on my Phone” video.
There’s good reason for this. Athlytic is a powerful health and fitness app, not just for people who hit the gym every day, but also for those who want to monitor their vital statistics without getting overwhelmed or having to learn a bunch of new jargon. Athlytic calls itself an “AI Fitness Coach”, but what it’s doing under the hood is taking the many data points your Apple Watch collects and using them to track trends and form insights into your fitness levels.
If you’re a fitness enthusiast, these insights are very powerful for planning your training and making sure you are well recovered. But if you want to simply monitor your health, Athlytic is just as useful. Sleep analysis is a particular highlight, surfacing your sleep quality, stages, duration, restorative sleep, and – crucially – sleep debt.
I could go on listing the many areas Athlytic covers, but what’s more important is how well the app collates its data, making it digestible and accessible in a well-designed Liquid Glass UI. It even explains to you in plain English what each of its category means.
There are many great fitness-tracking apps on the market, but Athlytic is head and shoulders above the others in both its breadth of information and its actionable utility.
Learn more about Athlytic:
2025-12-17 00:55:49
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 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: