At WWDC, Apple has unveiled a new dedicated gaming app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV boxes. Apple Games app will act as a hub for all your gaming needs as it combines Apple Arcade, App Store recommendations and your App Store game library. It will also help you network with friends.
Over the years, Apple has made drastic improvements on the hardware front, ensuring AAA gaming titles can be played on Apple devices.
The Games app’s Home tab allows gamers to quickly access new events and updates for the mobile games they frequently play.
The new app will also help Apple Arcade get more attention. At the moment, it is lost as a tab on the App Store. Now it will be left, right and centre among gamers. This curated gaming subscription service launched in September 2019, and allows subscribers to download and play hundreds of games.
The Games app will also work as a social hub, making it easy to find out what friends are playing. The Play Together tab keeps track of your friends’ playtime and lets you join or invite them to a game.
The company is also adding a Game Overlay feature to iPads and Macs, which allows players access to Game Centre features, friends lists, and gaming settings without leaving a game. The company added Game Mode to Macs with macOS Sonoma in 2023, which optimises your Mac for better gaming performance.
Apple is continuously bringing AAA games to its platforms, including Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding and Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Another update: iPadOS 26 is getting a version of the Mac’s Preview app to view and annotate images and files. The Preview app is an image viewer. Used on a Mac, Preview is lightweight but it has some great features: You can extract a single page from a PDF or reorder pages in a long document.
There’s more news on the app front. Apple’s Journal app has so far been available on only the iPhone. With iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, it will become cross-platform. For the iPad, Apple says about the app: “Jot down your thoughts, illustrate, and create entries in your own handwriting using Apple Pencil whenever inspiration strikes. Multiple journals let you keep entries for different aspects of your life separate, images can be added inline with text for a more flexible layout, and a beautiful map view shows entries based on their location.”
