20 incredible app UI designs for the iPhone

Five years have passed since Steve Jobs stood on a stage in Mountain View and said, "One last thing...", and those five years have been fast and furious. Over half a million apps have now been uploaded to Apple's App Store, not to mention the huge numbers of Android and Windows Phone apps that have been made available - but design-wise few of them can truly be considered beautiful.

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The last year, however, has seen some mobile applications pop up with amazing-looking user interfaces that offer fantastic user experience. To encourage this trend, some friends and I have created a community, Meerli, to enable exceptional mobile designers to connect and share their work. Here are 20 designs we've found that we think can inspire you and bring mobile design into a new era.

Words: Holger Sindbaek

01. Istid

Istid by Danish designer Karsten Moskjaer Kofod tells you where the nearest ice cream shop is and lets you rate it. And it's beautifully realised: just how gorgeous is this online form?

02. I Love Moscow

This stunning-looking travel guide to Russian's capital for your iPhone was created by Muscovite designer Arill. Like any good travel app, it's  attractive, enticing, and easy to use.

03. Blackbook - Contacts List

When a major international design agency produces an in-house app, expect something special. Wieden + Kennedy made this app for their own employees and it really is stylish; shame it's not available to the wider public. The app was designed by Leigh Hibell.

04. HQ 2.0

HQ 2.0 is a soon-to-be released project/task management app that's beautifully made. It's the handiwork of Assembly Co, a three-fella design collective from Vancouver; we love the mix of the dark background with monochromatic colours.

05. Weat

Weather apps for the iPhone are a dime a dozen, so you have to do something special to stand out in the App Store. Created by Turkish designer Atilla Özcan, Weat's design achieves just that with clever use of a retro graphic style, monochromatic colors and fine lines. Yum.

06. Clear

If you haven't downloaded Clear already, then do so immediately! Created by Dan Counsell, product designer and founder at Realmac Software, it's the to-do list you wish that you'd always had. The app strips everything right back to basics with an interface that’s based around colour-coded strips and instinctive, iPhone-native gestures.

07.Wthr

Wthr, created by David Elgena, describes itself as, "a simpler, more beautiful weather app", and as you can see the description is not without merit. If you don't have a weather app on your iPhone yet, this is definitely one you should consider.

08. Prismatic

Smart personal newsfeed app Prismatic might not hit you at first sight as the most innovative and amazing app. But when you get it into your hands and start playing with it, you'll be astonished by how well thought-through the user interface is. It's soon to be released, so keep a sharp eye out for it.

09. Camera Genius

Camera Genius is an astonishingly beautiful photo app. Designed by Eugene Cheporov, art director at Artua Studio, it makes great use of skeuomorphism to improve the experience.

10. Air Dictate

As the name implies, Air Dictate uses Siri's speech-to-text functionality to enable to dictate text to your Mac via your iPhone. Designed by Asa Miller, its graphical interface helps make quite a sophisticated task seem like a piece of cake.

NEXT: Moodswings, Chaincal, Overlapps and more!