Apple announces best apps of 2012

Apple has announced its best iPhone and iPad apps of 2012, with gaming and media app developers largely enjoying more success than their business and productivity counterparts.
The announcement saw developer FiftyThree pick up the iPad app of the year award for its highly-acclaimed Paper drawing application.

Although the majority of the winners focused on gaming, Apple’s selections did hint at today's world being a 'post-PC' era, with digital signature app DocuSign Ink, word processor iA Writer and Adobe Photoshop all winning in the ‘post-PC creation’ iPad category.

British newspapers The Telegraph, The Sunday Times and The Economist and others were celebrated for having the best iPad apps on Apple's Newsstand, while read-it-later service Readability got an honourable mention in the ‘Hidden Gems’ iPad category.

Apple’s own Pages was the highest grossing iPad app of the year, although the now Google-owned productivity suite Quickoffice also featured high up on this list, while Apple noted Microsoft's Skype as the best free iPad application.

The full list of the winners can be seen on iTunes here.

Apple is currently said to have over 700,000 iOS apps on iTunes, with 250,000 of these being developed natively for the iPad.