Apple announces Best of 2020 apps and most downloaded apps: home workout app Wakeout! won App of the Year for iPhone, Zoom for iPad, Disney+ for Apple TV
Apple today released its highly anticipated annual list of the best apps and games of 2020. As in previous years …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's year-end App Store list is a ritual with a decade-long run — the 2015 edition crowned Periscope and HBO Now — but the 2020 picks read more plainly as a document of the pandemic year than any prior installment: a home workout app for iPhone, the videoconferencing staple for iPad, a streaming service built for locked-down living rooms for Apple TV.
That makes this edition a useful baseline for the lists that followed: the 2021 awards kept the same cross-device format, and by the 2025 cycle the winners carried AI integrations — so the 2020 list marks the moment the award functioned as an unfiltered snapshot of how people actually used their devices that year.
First-order effects
- Wakeout!, Zoom, and Disney+ each get Apple's most valuable free distribution channel — App Store featuring — at the exact moment of peak holiday-season app discovery.
- For Zoom, the iPad App of the Year nod formalizes its status as the default tablet videoconferencing tool of 2020 rather than just a viral download.
Second-order effects
- A tiny independent studio winning iPhone App of the Year alongside billion-dollar platforms gives Apple a merchandising counterweight: the list signals that featured placement is attainable for small developers, not only for services with Disney-scale marketing budgets.
- Rival fitness, conferencing, and streaming apps now compete against Apple-endorsed defaults for the same end-of-year download surge, raising the stakes of their own holiday promotions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the annual list hardens into a yearly barometer of platform behavior — the 2020 edition captured pandemic-era usage, while later editions track whatever users actually download most, making Apple's editorial picks a running index of shifting app-market demand.
The trend: Apple's year-end App Store awards have evolved from a curated design honor into an annual snapshot of mass platform behavior, with each year's winners dating the era they were chosen in.