Start 2026 off right with some of our favourite new and updated apps of the past year.

Some titles may not be available to download in your region or on all devices.

Edit images with ease with Acorn

A long-time indie favourite for image and vector editing, Acorn has always been affordable and especially easy to use, but it’s grown to include pro-level features such as AI-powered masking, support for lookup tables and much more. We especially love specialised tools like perspective repair, screenshots that capture every item on the screen as a separate layer and Data Merge, which lets you automatIcally create personalised images such as name badges or invitations.

Flip your script with Highland Pro

Writing a screenplay? What better app to use than one created by a screenwriter: Highland Pro, the brainchild of writer John August, lets you focus on writing by doing the busy work for you. Type a character’s name in uppercase; subsequent text is formatted as dialogue. Use common industry abbreviations like “cut to,” “int,” and “ext,” and the app makes them sections with headers. As you write, Highland Pro auto-completes character and location names and automatically indents sections to match industry-standard formatting.

Perfect your photos with Adobe Lightroom

This 2024 App Store Award winner helps you edit, organize and share photos and video in record time. Generative-AI-powered features work magic on eradicating photobombers, light reflections and low-light noise alike, while AI-based masking lets you make pro-level edits in minutes. The new Compare view shows the original version of a photo next to the working copy, so you can see differences while you’re editing.

Be creative with Canva

With thousands of templates and powerful design tools, Canva lets anyone customize beautiful party invites, social media stories, presentations, résumés and more. With its new AI-powered image- and project-generation feature, you can simply type “invitation for a baby shower” and the app will create a starting point you can build on. Canva also now integrates with the powerful unified Affinity design app.

Wrangle RAW images with Nitro Photo

Leveraging the RAW engine built into macOS, Nitro Photo gives you precise control over how RAW image data is converted into the pixels you see. It also lets you perform edits more effectively made on RAW data than a developed image, like reducing moiré patterns. Batch processing and lens-specific corrections make quick work of fine-tuning your photos.

Draw anything with Linearity Curve

The powerful vector-design app Linearity Curve is perfect for creating a logo, drawing a graphic novel, sketching interface mock-ups and much more. Newcomers will love its clean, easy-to-use layout (and online tutorials that ease you in); pros get features they rely on, like support for layers and text on paths, symbol libraries and powerful export options. The app’s Apple Intelligence–powered features let you generate colour palettes from natural-language prompts and translate all the text elements in your design without affecting layout.

Crunch your numbers with Microsoft Excel

A powerful data-analysis tool for nearly as long as Mac has been around, Microsoft Excel added Copilot integration this year, so making sense of your numbers is easier than ever — for example, you can ask questions about a table or create complex formulas by simply describing what you need to do. And KeyTips, now available on Mac, let you access just about every control in the ribbon without taking your fingers off the keyboard.

Format your academic papers with Essayist

By automatically formatting bibliographies, inline citations and footnotes and cover pages, Essayist helps students, academics and researchers focus on the big ideas. The app’s reference manager stores every source you’ve referenced across multiple documents. In macOS Tahoe, you can add new sources using Spotlight actions or Shortcuts — or simply drag in a PDF or paste a YouTube URL to have the app extract the key info.

Take better notes with Goodnotes

Mark up PDFs, seamlessly convert handwritten notes you took on iPad into searchable text on Mac and accomplish even more with Goodnotes. With the help of AI, the app can transcribe an audio recording of a meeting, summarize notes and solve math equations, while the new whiteboard lets multiple people brainstorm together.

Brainstorm with MindNode

With the intuitive mind-mapping tool MindNode, visualize your ideas by placing concepts, files, notes and actions on an infinite canvas and creating relationships among them. New collaboration features let you work with others in real time and Apple Intelligence integration makes it easy to summarize documents as well as generate ideas and images based on your document’s contents.

Transcribe audio with Whisper Transcription

Whisper Transcription quickly and accurately transcribes audio from the microphone on your Mac, existing files or any app in real time (great for capturing a video conference, podcast or internet talk radio show). The app handles roughly 100 languages and automatically recognizes and labels different speakers.

Review PDFs together with LiquidText

Much more than a PDF reader, LiquidText displays every document next to an infinite, collaborative workspace. Use it to capture comments, annotations and excerpts that you can organize by dragging and dropping or link items together by simply drawing a line.

Take notes while you record with Noted

When you take notes while recording lectures and meetings with Noted, the app adds timestamps as you type, so you can easily jump to that section of the recording later. Recent updates add Apple Intelligence–powered summarization, fast and accurate dictation and an AI assistant that can answer questions about your notes.

Automate your typing with TypeIt4Me

TypeIt4Me saves you from having to type text you use frequently — as well as rarely used technical terms you can never quite remember. Simply add the text snippet and give it an abbreviation — for example, myad for your address or tyvm for “Thank you very much.” Type the abbreviation anywhere and TypeIt4Me instantly replaces it with the full snippet. Snippets can also include placeholders that you enter in the moment, as well as keystrokes like Tab for speeding through multi-field forms.

Take control of your schedule with Fantastical

This indispensable productivity app organizes your sea of calendars, appointments and tasks. Add events, including recurring ones, as you would say them (“Date night every first Friday of the month”). Or simply forward emails containing event details to your Fantastical address to add them to your schedule. View your calendars and tasks — and join online meetings — right from the app’s systemwide menu.

Organize everything with Under My Roof

This home-inventory tool makes cataloguing all your belongings a lot easier. Add details like model number, purchase date and location in your home and drag and drop scanned receipts, manuals and photos. The app also helps you wrangle home maintenance contacts, create a report showing which product warranties are expiring soon and use your iPhone to create 3D models of rooms and their contents to view on your Mac.

Track your family history with MacFamilyTree

For over 25 years, MacFamilyTree has helped genealogy sleuths document, organize and visualize their family history. With the latest version, you can share the results of your research as a searchable website and invite family members to collaborate on a family tree together.

Create the ultimate watch list with Play

Play lets you bookmark videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and more to create a watch list or library of favourites — or add a creator’s channel to the app to see new videos as they drop. Searchable transcripts allow you to jump to any spot in a video with a click and with iCloud syncing, you can save a video on the Play app for iPhone, then fire up the app to watch on your Mac, iPad, Apple TV or Apple Vision Pro.

Find new meals with Mela

Mela elegantly organizes all your recipes — and helps you discover new ones. Search “blueberry muffin” with the app’s built-in web browser to see results from multiple cooking sites at once. (You can import a recipe with a click). Or just snap a photo of a page from a cookbook or magazine. The app’s Feeds tab uses RSS to pull in the latest posts from cooking blogs and websites. And the app can even extract recipes from video descriptions on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Maximize your shopping rewards with CardPointers

Not sure which credit card will give you the biggest reward? CardPointers looks at where you spend the most each month (say, coffee shops or gas stations) to maximize your cash back, points and airline miles for over 5,000 cards — all while keeping your transactions private. Recent updates add Apple Intelligence support, so you can ask the app (or Siri) about card benefits and offers.

Optimize your Mac with CleanMyMac

Mac running slow or low on space? CleanMyMac eradicates ancient attachments, old caches and other files that are hogging your drive — and can reduce background processes and scan for malware. Click Uninstaller to see apps you haven’t used in months — and remove them (along with their support files) if you want to. The Smart Insights feature explains what specific logs, caches and other files do, so you know what’s safe to trim.

Take focus mode to the next level with Portal

The immersive-video app Portal fills your desktop with gorgeous hi-res nature videos shot in far-flung locations like Anse Chastanet in Saint Lucia, Skógafoss in Iceland and Lake Kawaguchi in Japan — with ambient audio recorded in Spatial Audio. The new Circadian Flow mode picks videos to play that mirror the time of day in your location.

Get break reminders with LookAway

Using relaxing chimes and visuals, the smart mindfulness app LookAway reminds you to take your eyes off your screen, sit up straight and get up and move around. The app is smart enough to pause reminders during meetings and presentations and it won’t interrupt you when you’re typing, so you won’t lose that important thought.

Reflect and relax with Stoic

The journaling app Stoic encourages mindfulness using an ancient approach: the wisdom of the Stoics. The app offers straightforward writing prompts (“What’s something you did well recently?”) while encouraging you to go deeper with follow-up questions that draw on the wisdom of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and other philosophers. New AI-powered features provide context-aware prompts, writing suggestions and uplifting messages based on your reflections.

Apple Intelligence is available in beta. Some features may not be available in all regions or languages.