Apple’s Top Apps Include Balatro and One Truly Endearing Game

Apple’s top apps for 2024 aren’t all the ones you expect. Some probably haven’t made a blip on your app store downloads this year. Some are musician and photographer-specific apps. Apple invited us to a demo space to check out all these various apps. I couldn’t be any more bored by AFK Journey, a game you play by not playing it, but I admit I was surprised by the depth of introspection from some of 2024’s top iPhone apps. There are many you can skip, but some truly deserve your attention.

Many of Apple’s favorites are big on AI, such as the music-making app Moises, a music-making app that lets you separate instruments from vocals. Then there’s Adobe Lightroom, which is now stuffed with all the company’s Firefly AI software suite. Then there are the apps you could have seen, depending on your hobbies. One of Apple’s promoted applications is the dedicated F1 TV app for tracking this year’s long, long season.

If you haven’t played it yet, Balatro+ is about creating poker hands and trying to beat a score to progress to the next level. The twist is in the card packs you unzip to reveal Jokers that provide multipliers for certain hand types. You can further modify your deck to increase the likelihood of getting certain cards or suits. The solo developer, who goes by LocalThunk, hasn’t made many public appearances. A rep for the game’s publisher, Playstack, told Gizmodo that the developer has been overwhelmed by the game’s success. Ironically, his title is now one of the most-played games of the year on phones and beyond.

Apple has been pounding the drum about Mac gaming throughout 2023 and 2024. The tech giant that has ignored Mac gaming for decades now promotes several of the most recent Resident Evil games and big releases like Frostpunk 2 from the Mac app store. And despite all that, the Mac game of the year was an indie game called Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Color me surprised. That little game is so full of off-kilter British absurdism I initially didn’t understand what I was looking at. But it’s a game worth playing. The indie studio Coal Supper based their small, simple adventure game on their hometown of Barnsley, Yorkshire, in Northern England. The fictional “Barnsworth” is full of characters meandering through their daily lives, even if they’re lethargic and somewhat decrepit. Your main character, a little yellow balding salesman, explores the town in its fading unglory.

Yes, the images are zany, but the developers told me that underneath it all, it’s a story about the impact of the loss of industry on their hometown and how that changes a city and its people. It’s routinely hilarious, but it’s also a subtle declaration about Northern England, the eccentricities of people in small towns, and the underlying melancholy of living in a place forgotten by the rest of the world.

It’s a more meaningful title than the iPad game of the year, Squad Busters, a light, MOBA-style game that takes characters from Clash of Clans and other Supercell mobile titles. Apple also introduced a new category for its Apple Vision Pro and promoted apps like What If…? An Immersive Story and THRASHER: Arcade Odyssey are both fair distractions if you own Apple’s $3,500 headset, but they’re not exactly the kinds of apps that will have you run down to your nearest Apple store to drop $3,500 on the Cupertino company’s “spatial computer.”

The NYTGames app is an obvious choice for Apple if you judge purely by user metrics. It’s normally one of the most popular gaming apps and has a stranglehold on word-based puzzlers. The workers finished their election-week strike last month. For 2025, the news-turned-games company told us its stats and leaderboard tabs. It’s also planning to add more math-based puzzles to the current slate and enhance its other stats and leaderboard tabs, giving you more incentive to beat your friends in getting Spelling Bee Pangrams first.

But I inevitably attune to simplicity. In that way, Oko–one of Apple’s other “cultural impact” winners–is simple and better because of it for the low-vision community. It uses layers of Apple Maps and a phone’s camera to help people with vision issues navigate cities, specifically crosswalks. It identifies when a crosswalk signal is on and lets the user know when it’s safe to move. Apps like Daily Art, which reveal daily historical art pieces and their context, don’t grab the downloads of some of the more popular apps, but are definitely worth a look.