Apple's summer news is about to give way to fall releases. Now those who wish have one last opportunity to speak up on the WWDC results, before it is forgotten under the influx of fresh impressions. We will take this opportunity to talk about the final event of the conference, which is usually less heated than the first announcements - the Apple Design Awards. When you watch the nominations and the selection of winners from year to year, a variety of patterns involuntarily begin to appear. We have long wanted to generalize and check these patterns by objective methods. After the June batch of winners, we finally took on this project and today would like to share the first results.
This article is a small collection of statistical calculations that we made for ourselves in an attempt to comprehend the tastes and priorities of Apple when distributing awards. When collecting material, we limited ourselves to the lists of winners for the last ten years (from 2011 to 2020); winners from the student league were not taken into account. The number of awarded varies from year to year, averaging about a dozen - accordingly, the sample included about a hundred applications.
In our research, we were initially aimed at wide coverage, including chronological. It was interesting for us to see what patterns are visible at large numbers and whether there will be any noticeable shifts from the beginning of the decade to the end. Such mass character makes in-depth research difficult. As a first approximation, our averaged portrait is a schematic sketch based on a few of the most basic parameters.
For the initial stage of comparative analysis, we chose those characteristics that, on the one hand, give a general idea of the product (for what purposes and devices it is adapted, how affordable, whether it meets people's expectations), and on the other hand, can be obtained even for the oldest applications that have undergone many perturbations over the years. The final list is as follows:
- platform;
- type of monetization;
- custom rating;
- category and subcategory.
Information on these items has been collected for each award-winning application. In some cases (first of all, when the product was irretrievably removed from everywhere), individual items could not be restored. However, the margin of error is less than ten percent even for the most problematic parameters (valuation, types of monetization) and hardly distorts the overall picture. When the preparatory work was completed, the results were calculated, summarized and presented in the form of graphs, which you will see below. Let's go in the order given by the list.
Platform
If we talk about historical changes, they are perhaps the most evident in this section. Over the twenty-odd years of the existence of Apple Awards, the committee has repeatedly adjusted the list and structure of nominations, and one of the significant changes occurred just in the last decade. Starting in 2013, the company stopped trying to balance the platforms in the selection of winners, begun several years earlier. From that moment on, the positions of Mac products began to fall clearly and steadily. Perhaps we can say that this state of affairs has only worsened over the years: 75% of applications for macOS received their awards before 2016, and only one quarter - in the last five years.
It is noteworthy that the iPad platform in such conditions of free competition, on the contrary, feels quite comfortable. Of course, this is primarily due to the fact that the iOS + iPad bundle is, in principle, popular with developers - this combination is presented in every second application. However, if you look at the balance of forces in "single-platform" products, then the iPad is on top too: applications strictly for tablets come across in the list one and a half times more often than those designed only for phones. It may be that the iPad is optimized for some of the product categories that Apple is especially fond of. But more on that later. On the timeline, the platform holds up fairly flat, alternating between more successful years and less successful ones.
A few words should be said about two platforms that do not act as the main ones at all, but flicker among the secondary ones - Apple TV and Apple Watch. They are presented approximately equally - in 10-15% of products; in the first case, these are games (Action, Adventure, RPG), in the second, applications from the Productivity and Health & Fitness categories. A tangible rise in popularity for both has been observed since 2017.
Monetization type
For this position, Apple does not show a pronounced preference, different types are represented fairly evenly. Free and shareware (offering additional functionality in the form of in-app purchases) make up slightly less than half of the total number, while paid products make up slightly more. Most of the paid applications can be classified as available to the general public - in the US location, they cost less than five dollars. Only one fifth of the entire sample costs users more than this amount. The highest prices (twenty dollars and more) are found in a few applications designed for professionals: developers, designers, musicians. The most expensive platform is predictably macOS.
Under the heading "Other" there are scattered cases of the Paid + IAP scheme, as well as monetization through the fresh Apple Arcade game service.
User rating
This position looked promising in terms of scandals and revelations, but did not live up to expectations. Perhaps Apple is really somewhere too carried away by external gloss and technological innovations, but their quality control is obviously put on conscience. Most applications pass the user rating test more than successfully: more than half of the laureates pass the four and a half stars threshold, nine out of ten pass the four star threshold.
Misses on the part of the administration are so rare that in themselves they arouse involuntary interest. Among the low-rated applications, "Cs" account for about two-thirds, "Losers" - one-third. For the most part, these are non-gaming applications. For some reason, Apple is most unlucky with applications for working with audio and video materials; they make up about half of the group. The rest are several assorted games, a photo editor and an email client.
By the way, we came across only two pure "fives" for the entire sample - in both cases the products were highly specialized, designed for a small, grateful audience.
Category and subcategory
This is probably the most meaningful item on the list - it is distinguished by the maximum variety of options and gives the most comprehensive answer to the question: "Which applications most often attract Apple's attention?" First, let's look at the first level of thematic division of applications.
If Apple abolished the idea of equality for platforms, then the proportions of gaming and non-gaming applications are strictly maintained to this day. In general, games are somewhat inferior to utilities in numbers, but the “quota” of about 40-50% of winners remains from year to year with minor fluctuations. Comparable representation of both product types clearly matters to the committee.
Now let's explore fractional subcategory for both groups, starting with non-gaming applications.
As you can see, the line-up of the non-player winners is quite diverse. The category "Other" / Other unites half a dozen subcategories, in total there are about fifteen. There is also a clear leader - Productivity, which covers almost a quarter of the list. There are, however, some reservations to be made about it. This category, to all appearances, came out on the first line not by accident: it stands out against the background of others by its extreme heterogeneity. Sorting through its composition manually, we identified several types of applications, from which the group is composed:
- note editors (the most numerous subgroup);
- applications for working with visual content - pictures, drawings, design (large subgroup);
- task managers (small subgroup);
- useful tools - calculator, calendar (small subgroup).
Two conclusions can be drawn from this. Firstly, the most interesting for the jury are products designed to work with different types of content - tools for organizing workflows that come to mind at the word Productivity recede into the background.
Secondly, the second subgroup is closely related to two subcategories that occupy the third and fourth lines of the rating - Photo & Video and Graphics & Design. Together, they are likely to outnumber non-gaming applications of any other topic.
If you add to these observations the fact that the Music category is ranked second, utilities for all kinds of creativity begin to seem like Apple's main focus. Education also holds good positions - the Education subcategory, which mixes applications for children and adults. The topic of health care is often heard in the company's speeches, however, the corresponding products occupy a very modest place in the list of awarded awards - the Health & Fitness and Medical groups together give less than 10%.
All other types of utilities come to the spotlight on a case by case basis. However, we must admit that equal (albeit not too high) chances for a minute of fame have applications of very, very different purposes: from a guide to a national park to an astronomical reference book, from a recipe book to a currency converter, from coloring pages to an online translator. Once Apple, even without false modesty, awarded its own product.
In games, an even more variegated picture is observed. Almost a quarter of genres have to be attributed to the “Other” segment, since they are all represented by literally a couple of titles. Among such mini-groups - the genres Sports, Racing, Family, RPG, Music, Cards ... Many games, on closer inspection, are at the intersection of two or more genres. Last but not least, this applies to the leading Puzzle subcategory, which often features complex, story-driven games with pronounced elements of Adventure, Horror and others.
It is difficult to try to classify games outside the framework of genre division - there are not enough obvious and at the same time objective criteria. On a sensory level, we got the impression that Apple has a soft spot for three types of products: epic games with a rich setting and story, educational titles that teach skills in a playful way, and casual games with a vibrant, memorable visual.
We have considered all the parameters from the start list, which was given at the beginning. Now is the time to deliver on the promise and describe the ideal Apple Award winner in a vacuum as he stands out from the average. So a typical runner-up candidate would be ...
- adapted for iOS and iPad
- financially available to most users - either with the free version supplemented by the IAP or with a price tag of less than five dollars
- a quality product that the audience rates very highly
- either a game (beautiful, more story-driven, requiring involvement), or an application designed for creative work with different types of content or self-education - with approximately equal probability.
This concludes our acquaintance with the statistics of Apple Design Awards for now. Of course, in the composition of the winners, you can see other, deeper patterns - audience coverage, technological stuffing, type of developer company. We hope to be able to calculate some of these parameters and add new details to the portrait in the future.