Apple posted its annual App Store Rewind, highlighting its picks for the best apps and games of the year, and at the top of the list for 2011 is the photo-sharing app Instagram. It’s been quite a wild ride for Instagram.
The iPhone app of the year is a wildly popular photo-sharing application with great design and features. Just yesterday we reported it has over 15 million users and is heading to Android soon, so expect it to continue to have momentum going into 2012.
The runners-up for best iPhone app of the year are VidRhythm, a fun app for creating your own music videos, and Band of the Day, a useful tool for discovering new music artists.
Apple didn’t leave out games either, as Tiny Tower was picked as the iPhone game of the year. It’s a strategic game for building businesses and economic empires that Apple cleverly describes as an “addictive app [that] taps our inner Donald Trump.” Runners-up in the games section are Tiny Wings (a personal favorite of mine) and Touchgrind BMX.
The iPad apps got their own set of winners in the App Store Rewind 2011. Apple’s iPad app of the year is Snapseed, which is a very capable photo-editing app. Runners-up are djay and Jamie’s Recipes; the former is appropriately named for its ability to mix and match songs with detail and the latter is a beautifully designed recipe app. As for iPad games, Dead Space claims victory for 2011 and this came as a bit of a surprise to me since I expected Apple to pick Infinity Blade, which isn’t even a runner-up. Contre Jour HD and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP are the runners-up here.
Congratulations to all the developers included in Apple’s top choices this year. You can browse through more highlighted apps broken down by category as well as the best music, movies, TV shows, books, and podcasts in iTunes.