📱Apple announces best apps and games of 2025

Apps, Books, and Games: the Best of 2025 on Google Play | Virtual exhibition on 200 years of railway history in the UK | Recommended by: Eva Domínguez

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Clara Nafría & Ismael Nafría
November 28, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 17 minutes

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Hello!

Welcome to a new edition of “On the Net Today”, the newsletter where every Friday we share a selection of useful and interesting resources to help you get the most out of the internet and make the best use of your browsing time.

Here are the topics we’ve prepared for today:

  • 📱Apple announces best apps and games of 2025

  • 📲 Apps, Books, and Games: the Best of 2025 on Google Play

  • 🚂 Virtual exhibition on 200 years of railway history in the UK

  • ⏭️ In brief

  • 🤔 Express Quiz

  • 💡Recommended by: Eva Domínguez

📱Apple announces best apps and games of 2025

Apple has recently announced the complete list of 45 finalists for its annual App Store Awards, which recognize the best apps and best games of 2025 across 12 different categories.

These products, according to Apple, offer "exceptional experiences that inspire users to achieve more, reimagine their daily workflows, and push creative boundaries."

These are the finalist products in the Apps and Games categories for iPhone:

iPhone App:

  • BandLab, for helping musicians record and mix tracks in community 

  • LADDER, for simplifying strength training 

  • Tiimo, for presenting pending tasks in a more relaxing way.

iPhone Game:

  • Capybara Go!, for taking players on a quirky idle adventure as a lovable critter.

  • Pokémon TCG Pocket, for making collecting and playing legendary Pokémon cards even better.

  • Thronefall, for combining thrilling defense battles with minimalist controls.

Additionally, Apple offers the list of finalists in the app and game categories for iPad, Mac, Arcade, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.

Cultural Impact

Additionally, Apple has named the finalist apps in the Cultural Impact category. These finalists "fostered greater understanding and offered users more ways to engage with their communities":

  • Art of Fauna, for capturing wildlife’s beauty in accessible puzzles.

  • A Space for the Unbound, for exploring mental health through a touching slice-of-life narrative.

  • Be My Eyes, for empowering users who are blind or have low vision.

  • Chants of Sennaar, for celebrating the power of language and connection.

  • despelote, for creatively crafting culturally grounded gameplay.

  • Focus Friend, for gamifying focus sessions into enjoyable challenges.

  • Is This Seat Taken?, for fostering empathy and inclusivity.

  • Retro, for creating a privacy-friendly social platform that keeps loved ones in the loop.

  • StoryGraph, for building an inclusive book community.

  • Venba, for spotlighting cultural cuisine with heartfelt storytelling.

  • Whoscall, for protecting users against scams.

  • Yuka, for helping users make conscious choices about what they consume.

Link:

📲 Apps, Books, and Games: the Best of 2025 on Google Play

Once again, Google has presented its selection of the best apps, best games, and best books of 2025 available on Google Play.

In addition to the complete list of winners for each category, which we show you below, Google Play has chosen the best overall app, best game, best multi-device app, and best multi-device game of this year:

Best App: Focus Friend, by Hank Green. 

This is how the Google Play jury defines it: 

"In such a noisy world, how do you find focus? This year, one app helped us all disconnect to reconnect. Focus Friend by Hank Green is a simple yet effective tool that helps you stay present. It's the essential, useful (and adorable!) app we all needed this year."

Here you can watch a video introducing the Focus Friend app:

"This year, Pokémon TCG Pocket outdid itself to deliver an authentic version of the iconic collectible card game. From opening booster packs to admiring beautifully designed cards, everything has a tactile touch. These special details bring the card game into a new era, which earned it the coveted Best Game of 2025 award."

Best Multi-Device App: Luminar: Photo Editor

"Luminar's powerful AI-powered toolkit enables everyone, from aspiring photographers to seasoned professionals, to create stunning high-quality images, no matter where they are. It's a brilliant example of what a multi-device experience should be: seamless, powerful, and designed to let your creativity flow.

Best Multi-Device Game: Disney Speedstorm

Disney Speedstorm struck us as a thrilling experience as we raced through iconic locations from Disney worlds. From its beautiful graphics to its responsive controls, everything has been optimized for a perfect gaming experience on PC, tablet, or mobile. True to its name, this racing game captivated us, earning its place as our Best Multi-Device Game of 2025.

And this is the complete list of winners:

Best apps of 2025:

Best games of 2025

The best fiction, non-fiction, and children's books are available in Google's press release.

Links:

🚂 Virtual exhibition on 200 years of railway history in the United Kingdom

To celebrate its 50th anniversary and the bicentennial of railways in the United Kingdom, the British National Railway Museum has launched a multimedia website on Google Arts & Culture, Beyond the Tracks, which allows visitors to interactively explore 200 years of railway history, browsing through nearly a thousand objects or taking 360-degree tours, among other options.

Beyond the Tracks allows, for example, taking a 360-degree visit of the Locomotion museum in Shildon, in County Durham, which houses the largest collection of historic railway vehicles in Europe, or exploring the historic  Brusselton Incline, part of the world's first public railway from 1825.

For this project, nearly a thousand pieces from the United Kingdom's national collection have been meticulously digitized. Among them is Puffing Billy, the oldest surviving locomotive in the world.

In fact, Beyond the Tracks is conceived as "an expansion of the museum experience that brings the transformative history of railways to a global audience." The digital exhibition has made use of AI to "transcribe written documents and handwritten artifacts, making these valuable historical records accessible to everyone and easy to search."

Additionally, the website allows exploration of more than a dozen "captivating stories that trace the evolution of railways and their profound social impact," such as the historic and final journey of Queen Victoria's funeral train.

The project also features two immersive galleries where users can experience virtual 3D exhibitions through their device: Art and the Railway and Railway Posters.

Links:

⏭️ In brief

  • The annual special "Books We Love" from NPR has just been published, an interactive space that allows you to discover recommendations about the best books of 2025.

  • Meanwhile, The New York Times has also just published its selection of the 100 best books of 2025. You can check it out through this free link, courtesy of "Hoy en internet" (On The Net Today):100 Notable Books of 2025

  • E-commerce company Shopify has recently launched its own weekly newsletter on the Substack platform, titled In Stock, in which it discusses trends in the world of commerce and entrepreneurship stories.

  • Metricool will hold its annual social media event "Unfiltered" on December 10, which can be followed for free online. It will feature prominent social media expert voices who will present successful case studies and "magic tricks or secret growth formulas," according to the event's description.

  • The 2026 edition of the Michelin Guide for Spain has just been published, which includes 307 restaurants with Michelin Stars in Spain and Andorra.

  • These are the winning images from the 2025 Nature inFocus international photography competition.

  • WordPress.com is celebrating its 20th anniversary. It launched on November 21, 2005, as a platform to create a blog easily. 20 Years of WordPress.com: Show Us What You’ve Built

🤔 Express Quiz

Wikipedia, considered the largest and most popular reference work on the internet, was created on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It has versions in 334 languages, each with a different number of articles. 19 of the languages have over one million articles, with English as the main one.

How many articles does the English edition of Wikipedia have?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

In the previous edition of On the Net Today, we asked you which video, out of five possible options, had the most accumulated views so far on YouTube. The correct answer was "Baby Shark Dance," which now has over 16.440 billion views.

Name: Eva Domínguez

Position: Director of Immersive Creatures 

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