Kino and Adobe Lightroom Honored Among Apple’s 2024 Apps of the Year

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15 AM, and a laptop displaying a photo editing interface with a photo of children with yellow balls.

Apple revealed the winners of its 2024 App Store Awards, celebrating and honoring 17 apps and games across a diverse range of genres throughout the Apple ecosystem. Apple picked these 17 winners from 45 finalists.

Split into “Apps” and “Games” categories, there are a couple of very familiar faces featured this year.

The superb mobile filmmaking application, Kino, is the 2024 iPhone App of the Year. This app, released in May, is created by the Lux Optics, the team behind the acclaimed photography app, Halide. Kino aims to revolutionize shooting video on iPhone with professional features and controls, including high-end tools for capturing, editing, and grading videos.

A person holds a smartphone horizontally, displaying a scenic view of a mountainous landscape with a road and a car at sunset. The phone screen shows camera controls.

Kino received a major update in July to include more control over focus and color grading and then was further significant improvement in November when Lux added 4K/120p recording and Camera Control compatibility to keep the app up to date with Apple’s technological advancements on the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max.

A smartphone screen displays a photo editing app with a picture of a canal and buildings at dusk. Various filter options are visible below the image, including Kodinek, Fadeo, Chroma Noir, Glostrup, Lektar, and Mellowed. An "Instant Grade" toggle switch and "Apply" button are on the right.

On Mac, Adobe Lightroom is the 2024 App of the Year. Citing its “transformative photo editing capabilities,” this popular and widely used all-in-one RAW photo editor has received many significant updates in recent years, including a lot of powerful new AI features. Although Lightroom Classic gets much of the attention among enthusiast photographers, “standard” Lightroom has been winning users over with a more modern interface and relatively quicker performance. The two versions have also neared feature parity, offering a robust range of powerful photo editing tools.

A stylish person in a colorful outfit stands confidently next to a large, fluffy dog in front of a vibrant wall with geometric patterns and graffiti that says "Brooklyn." The scene is lively and urban.

“It’s an honor to be recognized as the winner of Mac App of the Year. Adobe has long been at the forefront of photography, starting with powerful apps like Photoshop. As a team of photo lovers and photographers ourselves, our mission is to empower anyone to achieve amazing photos. Lightroom is not only professional and powerful, but easier to use than ever,” Adobe says.

There is one more winning app that could be familiar to photographers and filmmakers: Lumy. Named this year’s Apple Watch App of the Year, Lumy, is a simple app designed for photographers that works on iPhone, Watch, and even Apple TV. The Sun-tracking app delivers information about sunrise, sunset, blue hour, golden hour, and all relevant weather conditions straight to a photographer’s wrist. It works alongside Apple’s various Watch faces and is the perfect companion for outdoor photographers.

54 AM for the next day. Each has a circular interface with a map and "Tokyo, Japan" at the top.