Every year, Mr C and I sit down and watch the Apple Design awards. Every year we download several of the apps that we’ve missed over the months. And every single year, Mr C says: “They should do more with the design awards, a podcast, a TV show. You should blog it.”

I was confident I already had, and looking through the archives proves me right, but I can’t quite believe it was four years ago.

The fact that the design awards stream was my favourite part of the week-long conference for the second year in a row makes me wish Apple could do something more frequently. Their recent efforts to keep the app store refreshed and more content rising to the top is good, but the new and notable section only goes so far. You get to see what apps are considered exciting, but there’s no real explanation about why.

A monthly podcast or video stream, maybe even something on their 24 / 7 worldwide radio broadcast would go a long way to helping promote the great and the good from the app store, particularly those that are doing good work in design and accessibility but are otherwise being overlooked.

The good news is that in the four years since I wrote this post, Apple have managed to improve the transparency around what apps are exciting and why. The Today tab on each of the devices is a great place to discover new apps and get behind the scenes glimpses of how they are made.

I also mentioned that Apple should put this on their radio stream, but actually they’ve moved beyond that as well. They now produce TV shows as well and are rapidly heading towards their own TV streaming channel. So it’s not like they don’t have the resources and/or space to make something like this work. Just so long as it’s not like Planet of the Apps, which we will never speak of again.