According to CNET, Apple named the 17 winners of its 2025 App Store Awards on Thursday, December 5th, with AI tools dominating the major categories. The overall App of the Year is Tiimo, an AI visual planner for people with ADHD and neurodivergence, while Detail won iPad App of the Year for AI video editing and Essayist won Mac App of the Year for formatting academic papers. The AI app sector is huge, estimated to have generated $4.5 billion in 2024 with nearly 700 million users in just the first half of 2025, and it’s projected to hit a staggering $150 billion in revenue by 2030. The awards come from a selection process that started with finalists announced in November, and CEO Tim Cook praised the winners for their creativity and meaningful impact.
AI Isn’t Just Chatbots Anymore
Here’s the thing: this year’s winners aren’t about flashy AI image generators or another ChatGPT wrapper. They’re about applied, assistive intelligence for specific, often tedious, problems. Tiimo helps organize a neurodivergent brain. Essayist tackles the soul-crushing grind of citation formatting. Detail removes the boring parts of video editing. This is a massive signal. The AI gold rush is moving from “look what it can do” to “here’s how it makes your daily life actually easier.” It’s productivity and accessibility, not just parlor tricks. And that’s a much more sustainable, and frankly useful, direction for the whole industry.
The Winners and the Bigger Picture
Let’s talk about Tiimo for a second. Winning App of the Year isn’t just a nice story. It’s a powerful statement that the market for tools designed for neurodivergent users isn’t a niche—it’s a major, underserved frontier. The app started as a research project, which is a classic Silicon Valley origin story, but its pivot to a real business came from a co-founder’s personal diagnosis. That authenticity matters. Meanwhile, Detail and Essayist are going after established, often expensive, professional software markets (video editing, reference managers) by automating the worst parts. Their success will put pressure on the big incumbents. Can Adobe afford to ignore AI that automates “silence removal, zoom cuts, titles, captions, music and more” in a simple iPad app? Probably not.
The AI App Boom Is Just Starting
Those numbers from The Business of Apps are wild. $4.5 billion in 2024, heading to $150 billion by 2030? That’s not just growth; that’s an explosion. But look closer. Half of that 2024 revenue came from one app: ChatGPT. What Apple is highlighting with these awards is the next wave—the thousands of specialized apps that will eat into that other half and then some. The infrastructure is there now. Developers are figuring out how to integrate AI models into tools that solve real, granular problems. The competition is going to get fierce, and honestly, a lot of these apps will feel like utilities. We won’t even think of them as “AI apps” soon. They’ll just be the apps we use.
What This Means for Developers
So, if you’re building an app today, the message from Cupertino is pretty clear. Broad, general-purpose AI tools have their champions. The real opportunity, and the path to an App Store Award, seems to be in vertical, deeply focused applications. Solve one annoying thing incredibly well with AI. Help a specific group of people. Automate a professional pain point. Apple’s full awards announcement shows they value this across categories, from games to cultural impact. The era of the AI-powered utility app is here. And the bar for what we consider a “helpful” app has just been raised way, way up.
