The App Awards

Last night was the Appy awards in London and it sounds like it was a great success. The winners were fairly predictable – Angry Birds was always going to be a big winner, and it ended up with best game and app of the year – but it’s great that the creativity of app makers is getting recognised.

I heard on the news this morning that the industry is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and over a million apps are downloaded each day. The only surprising thing is that there hasn’t been a major awards ceremony in the past.

I voted for my favourite apps – along with 30,000 other people – and I chose Angry Birds to be the winner too. Not because I think it’s the best game in the app store but because it’s brought app games into the media spotlight for the first time.

Other winners were also predictable. I’m not sure people want the awards to be clogged up with apps like Facebook with the backing of huge companies – surely it’s about innovation rather than just giving access to an already popular website that should be rewarded – but there’s no denying it’s a well designed app. Other winners included spotify and google maps, which were also created with the monetary input of huge corporations.

It’ll be interesting to see which apps make it in to the short list next year. I’m sure there will be plenty of apps coming out over the next 12 months that could have a huge impact.