The App Store Connect API now offers greater flexibility to automate and customize workflows for your app. With these new capabilities, you can:
Build and maintain your App Store product page by uploading and managing assets like screenshots, app previews, app description, and more.
Create new versions of your app, set up pre-orders, manage phased releases for version updates, and submit your app to App Review.
Monitor app performance indicators by downloading power and performance metrics and diagnostics logs.
Manage additional resources associated with your developer account, such as unified software signing certificates, multiplatform App IDs, and capabilities.
Apple is expanding its Independent Repair Provider Program with additional options for customers to access repair services. The industry-leading program enables businesses of all sizes to offer repairs on iPhone using genuine Apple parts, which ensures safety and quality. Following the launch of the program in the US last fall, over 140 independent repair companies have joined with over 700 new US locations now available to customers, and businesses in Europe and Canada can now sign up.
“We are thrilled to expand our independent repair program to more locations across the US and to businesses across Europe and Canada,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “When a customer needs a repair, we want them to have a range of options that not only suits their needs but also guarantees safety and quality so their iPhone can be used for as long as possible.”
New US Locations for iPhone Repair
Since the launch of the Independent Repair Provider Program last fall, there are now over 700 Independent Repair Provider locations across the US providing out-of-warranty service for iPhone. The over 140 new repair businesses participating in the program vary in size and include uBreakiFix, with locations across the US.
All of the businesses in the program have access to free training from Apple and the same genuine parts, tools, repair manuals, and diagnostics as Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and Apple Store locations. To verify that a company participates in the program, visit support.apple.com/repair/verify-repair-provider.
Independent Repair Provider Program Opens to Businesses in Europe and Canada
Following a successful US launch, independent repair shops in 32 countries across Europe as well as Canada can now apply for Apple’s Independent Repair Provider Program. There is no cost to join, and the training is free for new businesses.
Businesses need to have an Apple-certified technician who can perform the repairs to qualify for the program. For information on new participating countries and to join, visit support.apple.com/irp-program.
Apple’s Expanding Repair Services
Apple has also continued to offer more repair options for customers through its growing global network of over 5,000 AASPs that help millions of people with both in- and out-of-warranty service for all Apple products. Last year, the company announced a major expansion of this network by adding every Best Buy store in the US, tripling the number of US AASP locations compared to three years ago. To find a location, visit support.apple.com/repair.
Across its repair options and partners, Apple is working to ensure health and safety as well as access to repair services during COVID-19. This has included offering additional options for mail-in repair for customers and supporting its existing network of providers servicing customers in ways that meet health and safety guidelines.
An eye-catching icon or splash of color can focus attention and help people locate the right information inside your app. Consider designing those assets in the Display P3 color space: They’ll look richer and more vibrant on any device with a wide color gamut display.
You can find wide color gamut Retina displays on most Macs, as well as iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. They bring more true-to-life colors and deep hues to the screen, not only making for excellent image and video viewing but also heightening people’s everyday app experience.
Use Display P3 assets in your app to amplify important elements of your interface: the colors of a VU meter in an audio app, for instance, or the redline in a rev counter inside your racing game.
If you display photography or video in your app, you should consider using Display P3 to help images stay true to the camera’s original capture. Shopping apps can help people choose the right item by showcasing the true color of a certain dress or pair of pants. You can also use Display P3 for your app icon to highlight colors and smooth out gradients.
Interested in exploring Display P3 for your assets? To get started, you’ll need to get your tools ready to work in that color space. We’ll show you how to design in Display P3 using two popular Mac apps: Adobe Photoshop and Sketch.
Note: Does your display support Display P3?
Your hardware tools are just as important as your software tools: Ensure that the device you use to create assets supports the Display P3 color space so that you can preview your designs accurately. That includes all iMacs with Retina displays, 2016 and later MacBook Pro, LG’s UltraFine 4K or 5K Display, and the Pro Display XDR.
Set up a new Display P3 canvas
Here’s how to configure your canvas to support Display P3.
Create a new Display P3 canvas in Photoshop
Open Adobe Photoshop on your Mac.
Click on the Create new button from the main interface. (You can also create new documents at any time by going to the toolbar and selecting File > New.)
Choose the dimensions and any other information you wish to customize for your canvas.
Under Color Mode, change your color depth from 8 to 16 bit.
Below Color Profile, select Display P3.
Select Create to begin designing in Display P3.
You can avoid manually creating a canvas for every new asset by saving your settings as a preset. Name your preset at the top of the screen, press the Save button, then press Save Preset.
Create a new Display P3 canvas in Sketch
Open Sketch on your Mac.
Create a new file.
Go to File > Change Color Profile (or use the keyboard command Shift-Command-K).
Select Display P3 as your Color Profile.
Choose Assign.
Use Sketch’s Color Profile settings to use Display P3 on your canvas.
Convert an existing sRGB image into P3
If you receive image assets from someone else, ensure those assets are converted to Display P3 directly from the RAW file, and not from sRGB, as some color information will be lost in the conversion.
If you must import an existing image in Photoshop, use Convert to Profile to preserve your design as much as possible. If you use Assign To Profile, that will take your existing colors and stretch them into the new color space, changing your design along the way.
In Sketch, after you’ve received your file, go to File > Change Color Profile to edit your Color Profile. Then select Convert.
Export your work in Display P3
Once you’re done creating your asset, you can preserve the Display P3 color space in any file you export.
How to export your work in Photoshop
Note: While there are multiple ways of creating assets from the work you do in Photoshop, like Generator or Export As, only using Save As will maintain your Display P3 color space and 16-bit color depth settings.
Navigate to the toolbar and select File > Save As… (or type Shift-Command-S).
Choose where you’d like to save your asset.
If needed, name your asset.
Under Format, select PNG.
Below Color, make sure the Embed Color Profile: Display P3 setting is checked.
Save your file.
Export your P3 assets in Photoshop using the Embed Color Profile option in the Save As screen.
How to export your work in Sketch
Sketch preserves your color profile upon export, allowing you to save your P3 work in the same manner as other assets.
In Sketch, go to the File menu.
Select the export option you need: Export or Export Current Selection.
The Apple Design Awards celebrate innovation, ingenuity, design excellence, and outstanding technical achievement. A WWDC tradition, the ADAs highlight those who take thoughtful and creative approaches to their apps and games, giving people new ways to work, play, or imagine things that were never before possible.
“We’ve been awarding great design for more than two decades now, and each year’s winners set new standards for others to emulate,” said John Geleynse, Senior Director of Evangelism and longtime host of the Apple Design Awards.
This year’s winners are no different: Their apps are beautiful, intuitive, captivating and delightful. They spring from a deep understanding of and empathy for the people they’re intended to serve. They are unique, exhaustively refined, and crafted with care and attention to detail.
2020 Apple Design Awards
The Apple Design Awards recognize excellence in design and innovation for apps and games across all of Apple’s platforms. Meet the 2020 winners.
The winners of the 2020 Apple Design Awards
Join us as we surprise the 2020 winners of the Apple Design Awards. The Apple Design Awards recognize excellence in design and innovation for apps and games across all of Apple’s platforms.
“Winning apps require a lot of work,” said Geleynse, “And we want to honor the effort, dedication, creativity, and new ideas that lead to innovative solutions like these.”
This year, the honor continues beyond an Apple Design Award and FaceTime celebration: Starting this Friday and each week thereafter, the Developer app will feature exclusive interviews with each winner about their creative process and how they brought their bold and distinctive ideas to life.
Take a quick look at this year’s Apple Design Award winners, along with a few choice highlights from our upcoming interviews.
Majd Taby, Darkroom
“We’ve tried to abstract away all the complexity of photo editing — no import, no export, hiding away the complexity unless you ask for it… the app is much more powerful and complex than the design… that’s just part of the ongoing design challenge of trying to make something that’s usable and powerful at the same time.”
Eran Hilleli, Looom
“The design thought of Looom is the flow first — experience first… Trying to make drawn animation exist in some tool that was almost like a Gameboy… something you can kick back and relax, which is not something that, usually, animation is about.”
István Csanády, Shapr3D
“I think that great interaction design is… always a lot of blood, sweat, and tears… There are no shortcuts because this is something that you can’t really figure out. You just have to observe how your users actually want to interact your with design or with your software… we did hundreds of prototypes, interaction prototypes — you can step-by-step get to the right solution… it took us four and a half years to get to this level of polish.”
David William Hern, StaffPad
“The core tenet of the app is really: How is this helping me write music? How is this making my day nicer and better and hopefully making me write better music? If it can help me do that, and at least if I finish a project and I don’t feel exhausted at the end of it, then I think that every idea has been worth it. But there’s always more to do. It’s never done.”
Simon Flesser, Sayonara Wild Hearts
“This is a game that is very much about the music, right?… It started very differently, with a much more sinister tone. But then as we were playing our prototype, randomly, this really energetic, pop song came on in the background… And it sort of just clicked. I literally said, ‘This is it.’”
Jenova Chen, Sky: Children of the Light
“With very small changes in the design, you can change how [the player] behaves, how they treat each other in your game. I think it’s your responsibility to think about: How are these players going to interact with your app, with your game, you know, on a daily basis? Is that healthy for them? Is that going to make them be thankful… rather than having resentment of the experience?”
Philipp Stollenmayer, Song of Bloom
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the game is trying to tell you. Some images are so abstract that you have to make up your own interpretation. To help the game communicate on every available channel, it was important to give it another sense… from the haptic vibrations, it helps you to understand if this is an active scene or a calm one — you get a really nice sense for the mood.”
Sam Rosenthal, Where Cards Fall
“A lot of the game feels very melancholic but at the same time — it’s a hopeful game. So the app icon is our main character in the winter — which is the present day — looking up… It is not somebody that is lost in the past but somebody that maybe has learned from what happened, has reflected and is looking towards what could be next.”
Read more about the Apple Design Award winners on Apple Newsroom and the App Store.
Apple today named eight app and game developers receiving an Apple Design Award, each one selected for being thoughtful and creative. Apple Design Award winners bring distinctive new ideas to life and demonstrate deep masteryof Apple technology. The apps spring up from developers large and small, in every part of the world, and provide users with new ways of working, creating, and playing.
“Every year, app and game developers demonstrate exceptional craftsmanship and we’re honoring the best of the best,” said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “Receiving an Apple Design Award is a special and laudable accomplishment. Past honorees have made some of the most noteworthy apps and games of all time. Through their vision, determination, and exacting standards, the winning developers inspire not only their peers in the Apple developer community, but all of us at Apple, too.”
Apple Design Award Winners: Apps
Darkroom, from Bergen Co., is a powerful photo and video editor whose interface is as beautiful as it is easy to use. It delivers great performance with super-intuitive controls and a layout that both casual and pro photographers can truly appreciate. With Apple technologies including photo and camera APIs, Home Screen quick actions, contextual menus, and haptics, Darkroom is a shining example of a high-end mobile editing tool.
Earlier this year, students from all around the world put their passion, ingenuity, and determination to work crafting Swift playground projects for the WWDC20 Swift Student Challenge. Students from 60 different countries and regions brought their talents to the table, using the challenge’s three-minute limit to stretch their imaginations and explore Apple’s frameworks and technologies. The resulting 350 Swift Student Challenge winners have created AR experiences, projects powered by machine learning, educational material, virtual musical instruments, 8-bit games, and so much more.
Swipe to unlock
In 2019, after having studied just one month at the Apple Developer Academy in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Henrique Conte submitted his first Swift playground project. While he didn’t win a WWDC Scholarship that year, the experience drove him to continue exploring and refining his code.
“This year I felt that, after reading and studying about so many different Apple frameworks, I should try to accomplish the WWDC19 main phrase: ‘Write code. Blow minds,’” he told us. And he did. His winning submission, a three-minute game designed for MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, excels in both its technical acuity and creativity.
Within the playground, players have to help Eleanor, a young developer, escape from a cave. The twist: The “cave” level is entirely located within the Touch Bar. “I chose to use unusual frameworks to show that it is possible to do amazing things with them,” Conte said. “I feel that [the Touch Bar] has so much potential yet to be discovered, and I wanted to demonstrate some of its capabilities.”
Though he had never previously developed for macOS, Conte immediately took to the challenge. Like learning any new development concept, he ran into a few initial obstacles — “when I received the message “No such module ‘UIKit’ [after trying to add it to my project] I noticed things would get interesting,” he joked — but he quickly picked up the fundamentals of Mac programming, using AppKit and SpriteKit to build a fully-interactive experience, including taps, slides, keyboard integrations, and multi-screen storytelling. He also paid close attention to the design, something that has become increasingly important to him.
“I am definitely not a designer,” says Conte, “But in the past few years I noticed how essential it is to follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and to provide a great experience. There is no point in creating a perfect code if people will have trouble using your application!”
You can find more of Conte’s work on the App Store: In the last year, he’s created four apps, including one to help children with autism communicate. He’s currently at work on his next project, which he’s building for both iOS and macOS, that addresses the problem of food waste. And — he’s happy to report — the macOS version will incorporate the Touch Bar.
The world turned upside-down
Louise Pieri, 21, fell in love with computer science at a young age in her native Lyons, France. She’s since gone on to study at École 42, the programming school founded by French businessman Xavier Niel. Pieri’s winning project, Meep, drew inspiration from an article she read in a scientific journal about the possibility of parallel universes, as well as her own personal journey as a transgender woman.
“Meep is a game with two levels: the first is a level where everything is reversed and upside-down and the second is where everything is normal,” says Pieri. “The story is about a little blue transgender monster who wants to reach the final level and turn pink… it’s a beautiful metaphor for what happens in the life of a trans person.”
Louise Pieri’s winning submission, “Meep”
Though Pieri had never previously used SpriteKit or AVKit, she knew she wanted to build a game for her Swift playground submission. She spent two days brainstorming ideas before landing on the concept for Meep and diving into the frameworks and interface. Initially, she’d hoped to show both of Meep’s universes on-screen at once before deciding on a multi-level experience, including an entire level upside-down.
In addition to designing and coding the game, Pieri also created her own 2D artwork for each level in Adobe Illustrator and a story for the game — all in under two weeks.
Pieri has been tuning into WWDC20 this year from France, and is especially keen to learn more about the future of Apple platforms. “I can’t wait to get to know iOS 14,” she says. That will come in handy for her next project — bringing a version of Meep to the App Store.
A robot of one’s own
Devin Green’s love of development stemmed from a lifelong fascination with thinking machines. “I have always been in awe of artificial intelligence,” he told us. Out of that idea, the 18-year-old’s winning project — an AI bot named Stanny — was born.
“With everything that is going on in the world right now, I thought people stuck in isolation might find it beneficial to their mental health to talk to a capable AI companion,” he said. Green, who will attend Stanford this fall for computer science and engineering, took about a week to build his playground — most of that time dedicated to refining machine learning models that created Stanny’s ‘intelligence.’
“The model was trained on a data file made up of all the things you could possibly say to Stanny,” Green said. After researching how others had trained chat bots, Green created his own model in TensorFlow, then brought it to his Xcode playground through Core ML Converters.
While no stranger to experimenting with machine learning models, Green used this project to get to know more of Apple’s ML offerings. “I wanted to make it as simple as possible to go from data to usable Artificial Intelligence,” he told us. He worked with NSLinguisticsTagger to build a working model, then created a generated Core ML model to predict the person’s intent from their query and architected his playground in SwiftUI.
Green sees Swift as the future of machine learning and AI applications. “Swift is not only a really simple and easy to use language, it’s also really expansive,” he told us. “It can be built on in such a way that [it] is capable of doing just about anything.”
Stanny isn’t quite as full-featured: His joke-loving AI is limited to only 63 different intents. But Green has big plans — and he can’t wait to incorporate some of the technology announced at WWDC20. “The Natural Language framework is astounding,” he told us. “If I had any doubts about using Swift for machine learning, they quickly disappeared while watching a natural language processing application understand text with about five lines of code… projects I’ve created, like Stanny, are about to get 100x better!”
Code as design
For first-time winner Renata Pôrto, the challenge gave her a chance to confront her own self-doubts. “As a designer, I have always felt insecurity regarding my ability to code more complex ideas,” she said. After two unsuccessful Swift playground submissions in previous years, the 21-year old student from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil had once again decided to submit. But after a few days of work, she scrapped the project.
“I was not satisfied with my own decision to continue with a ‘safe’ idea,” she told us. Instead, she began considering concepts she’d wanted to learn about but hadn’t yet explored — including generative art. “One of the things I always thought was fantastic about programming is the possibility of transforming lines of code into visual and interactive experiences,” she said. Just six days later, she emerged with Polar Patterns, a Swift playground that helps people learn more about mathematical roses and generate their own visual art.
“With SpriteKit, I was able to convert the polar equation of mathematical roses into SKShapes, transforming the results from the formula into visual elements,” she said. Pôrto designed just two images herself, relying on her algorithmic code and a few UIKit elements to create the entire visual experience.
Designing an entirely programmatic art interface was a departure for Pôrto. “I am very used to prototyping before programming,” she told us. This project, however, involved creating an experience that would dynamically shift and change depending on what actions someone took within the playground, making it important for Pôrto to visualize and experiment constantly to perfect her interface.
The result brings the beauty and complexity of polar roses to a Swift playground — and landed Pôrto a winning submission. “It’s a great joy learning about development, even though I am a design student,” she told us. “Studying design helped me to practice my empathy for [people] and to know what resources to use and how to work with them to achieve better results.”
That empathy continues through her work with a local developer group, creating educational tools for new developers in her community. “I always try to pass on my design knowledge to developers, and my developer knowledge to designers,” she said. “And hopefully one day they will make products that make a difference in other people’s lives.”
Learn more about the Swift Student Challenge winners.
Now games with Game Center capabilities display a beautifully redesigned in-game dashboard on iOS, tvOS, and macOS. Users can see their achievements, leaderboards, and Game Center profiles directly in your game when you implement the new Access Point. Game Center also now supports recurring leaderboards that keep rankings current, as well as leaderboards for daily, weekly, and monthly competitions. You can set up recurring leaderboards, add achievements, and opt in to the challenges feature in App Store Connect.
New tools in Core ML enable secure, cloud-based model deployment and model encryption, Create ML offers new templates and training capabilities, and new APIs for Vision and Natural Language give your apps more power. You can also work with third-party training libraries more easily with updated model converters and accelerated training support on Mac.
ARKit 4 introduces brand-new features that make the AR experiences in your apps even more lifelike. You can now access even more precise distance information gathered by the LiDAR Scanner on iPad Pro using Depth API, place AR experiences at a specific point in the world with Location Anchors, and more.
On Monday, Apple kicked off its all-online Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, with millions of developers joining from around the world. Tuesday, we dropped 46 engineering-led sessions that covered topics from exploring WidgetKit to designing more dynamic, responsive interfaces on iPad, as well as integrating more accessibility elements into apps.
Developers are diving deep into the newest capabilities coming to macOS Big Sur, iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, and tvOS 14, and engaging with more than 1,000 Apple engineers via the all-new Developer Forums and one-on-one Developer Labs.
This week, we’re showcasing the biggest moments from WWDC20, including highlights from developer sessions, the most talked-about demos, the newest design features and capabilities across Apple platforms, and conversations with Apple executives. Check back here daily for what to Watch, Listen, Learn, and Play. And for a complete rundown of the Developer Forums, Labs, and 100+ engineering sessions, visit the the Apple Developer app.
