Feather’s seamless 2D-to-3D workflow keeps winning over artists everywhere.
The 2025 Apple Design Awards winners are finally here, and one standout pick comes as no surprise: the viral 3D drawing app that’s been wowing creators online. Feather, the iPad app from South Korean studio Sketchsoft, has dominated social media feeds with its almost spellbinding ability to transform flat 2D sketches into fully realized 3D art—and now it’s got the industry recognition to match.
It’s far from the only standout, though. This year’s honorees include the visually stunning video game Neva and Play, a game-changing UI prototyping tool. Together, they highlight not just developers’ creative and technical prowess, but also how Apple’s hardware—from top-tier drawing iPads to cutting-edge Vision Pro—unlocks new creative possibilities .
2025 Apple Design Awards: Standout Creative Apps
This year’s awards celebrated 12 exceptional apps and games across six categories, with one app and one game taking home honors in each: Delight and Fun, Innovation, Interaction, Inclusivity, Social Impact, and Visuals and Graphics.
Feather: Draw in 3D claimed the top spot for Visuals and Graphics in the app category—and for good reason. Now fully functional offline, the tool lets artists work in 3D space using familiar pressure-sensitive brushes, leveraging Apple Pencil’s precise capabilities to build detailed 3D models. Creators can move freely through the spatial canvas, sketching from any angle, and export their work in standard 3D formats for use in other projects .
Over in the Innovation category, Rabbit 3 Times’ Play took home the app award. Designed for SwiftUI frameworks, it lets designers build interactive experience prototypes with intuitive navigation and seamless syncing between Mac and iPhone—perfect for real-time team collaboration. For Interaction, Taobao earned recognition for its Apple Vision integration, which uses lifelike 3D models to revolutionize the shopping experience.
2025 Apple Design Awards: Gaming Highlights
On the gaming side, Neva’s win in the Social Impact category feels particularly well-deserved. Nomada Studio’s elegant side-scrolling platformer (published by Devolver Digital for Mac)—a standout on our 2024 best indie games list—follows Alba, a young woman journeying through a darkness-corrupted world with her wolf companion, Neva, across four changing seasons. Apple calls it a “timely, quiet reflection on care, connection, and the cost of environmental loss,” woven together with powerful themes of friendship and leadership.
Other gaming winners include Black Salt Games’ DREDGE, which won for Interaction. This unique blend of slow-burn horror, exploration, and adventure puts players at the helm of a fishing boat navigating eerie island waters across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. For Visuals and Graphics, Infold Games’ Infinity Nikki took the prize; Apple praised the cozy open-world adventure for its “enchanted realm of color, detail, and rendering,” plus its magical outfits, whimsical creatures, and surprising moments.
Apple’s growing focus on gaming is hard to miss—likely a nod to the massive revenue potential of its ecosystem. Rumors have swirled about a new Apple gaming app set to debut at WWDC, and the company’s engineers have already released a VisionOS plug-in for Godot Engine . For indie developers, this is a big deal: Godot is one of the top game development platforms, and the plug-in could make it easier than ever to create VR and XR games for Apple’s ecosystem. Add in Apple’s recent acquisition of indie studio RAC7 , and it’s clear the tech giant is gearing up to compete in the gaming space like never before.
