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The Apple iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are out and if you’ve already bought one of the new iPhones, one question pops up immediately: what are the most essential free iPhone apps that you can download to make the best of it?
After years of try and fail, we’ve come with a list of essential iPhone apps that we keep on coming back to every time we put our SIM card in an iPhone.
Time and time again, we keep on coming back to these apps
Unlike Android, the Apple ecosystem has a much better represented tier of premium, paid applications. We’ve left these as a topic of a separate discussion, instead focusing on the essential free iPhone apps spread across various categories. You can find the list right below, and we’re also looking forward to your suggestions and favorites in the comments section.
Outlook: Email on steroids
Outlook for iPhone is nothing else but slightly redesigned Acompli, a former iOS and Android mobile email app, as Microsoft acquired its eponymous developer roughly two months ago. We have no gripes with this – after all, Acompli was among the better email clients available, so it’s natural that Outlook Preview follows suit. The app allows you to easily switch between email and the built-in calendar feature, swipe to quickly delete, archive, and schedule messages, as well as send large files that you haven’t downloaded on your device. The app is, normally, free to use and is available on both phones and tablets.
Cal: a gorgeous user-friendly calendar
Cal: Calendar by Any.Do, or simply Any.do Cal, arrived in its final version in December, at the very end of 2013. Since then, we’ve seen no other calendar app match Any.do Cal’s killer visuals – slick looks with different background image for everyday, extremely fluid animations, but most importantly, a very straightforward and quick, one-tap calendar experience where you can add an event without having to go through countless menus.
Of course, Any.do Cal syncs with all major calendar services: Google Calendar, Exchange, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, iCloud and more, but it also adds voice controls, smart maps, makes it easy to add more people to an event and notify them about it, and even allows you to congratulate people for their birthdays on Facebook straight from the app.
Yahoo Weather: a slick way to get your weather forecast
After living with many weather apps, we found ourselves coming back to the brilliantly designed Yahoo Weather. It is a clean and clutter-free app, with no annoying ads. It starts you off with a full-screen image from your area, illustrating the weather conditions at the moment. Swipe down, and it reveals the weather forecast for the next few days, as well as essential details like humidity, visibility, and the UV index. Scroll further down, for even more settings: a cloud map, wind and barometer readings, chances of precipitation, and moon phases. Swiping left and right switches between cities, and overall, the experience is very clean and modern-looking.
Google Maps: fast and reliable
Apple Maps has improved tremendously in the past few years and from the sad state it was during the launch, it has become much more reliable, but there are still way too many blind spots for the service to top the detailed and very reliable Google Maps. Google’s Maps app features a modern intuitive design, landmarks and very accurate urban directions, but most importantly it is the reliable maps that make it a better choice.
HERE: offline maps and voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation
Evernote: notes everywhere
Evernote has built a name for itself: a cloud-synced notes apps that is simple on the surface, but that also comes with lots of very advanced features, Evernote is the app to get if you want the richest note-taking experience.
SwiftKey: swipe away
One of the most popular keyboards on Android, SwiftKey has brought its excellent auto-correction, fast swipe-based typing engine, and plenty of colorful themes to iOS with the iOS 8 update.
Signal: NSA-proof messaging and calls
Signal is a messaging app that allows you to have private conversations via both text messaging and voice calls. It is free, supports group calls and texts, and allows you to share media. Best of all, it’s open source, so you can rest assured that all encryption is done in a proper manner and the ever-longer hands of the government won’t reach your private life. The server also never has access to any of your communication and never stores any data.
Carousel: a time machine of a photo manager with cloud support
Carousel, an app in the Dropbox’s family of applications, breezes through your entire photo collection without waiting for thumbnails to load. It also lets you share, like, and comment photos in your personal gallery, in addition to automatically organizing them by time, date, location, and other properties. Since we can’t have a Dropbox app without cloud storage functionality, Carousel will automatically back up your photos to your Dropbox account. You can run it alongside iCloud or other backup services, of course.
Snapseed: photo editor extraordinaire
Snapseed stands out with its extremely intuitive and touch-friendly interface, allowing you to tweak every aspect of an image with a precision and ease that no other mobile image editor can offer. It’s easier to point out the things it cannot do, rather than what it can: there’s no way to zoom in on an image when you do your edits (which can be inconvenient on the small screen of the iPhone), it cannot selective blur parts of an image, and it has not been updated to match the new flat looks that Apple introduced with iOS 7. Regardless of those minute shortcomings, it remains the most feature-rich editor out there and it’s completely free, unspoiled by any kind of in-app purchases or other bloat.
VSCO Cam: filters done right
VSCO Cam is an by the Visual Supply Company, a firm known for developing some of the best film-emulation filters for Adobe Lightroom, and it’s no surprise that this expertise has resulted in a collection of some amazing filters that you can get in VSCO Cam. The beauty of VSCO’s filters (or presets rather) is in the subtle measure of the artistic effects that will help you get a sense of the right amount of touch-ups needed for a photo, and also help you avoid overediting your images. The full preset pack costs $5.99, and while you have some free presets, the app starts to truly shine when you unlock the potential of all the presets. VSCO Cam also allows you to edit the strength of each filter, as well as edit all aspects of an image non-destructively. Apart from its filters and effects, VSCO Cam also comes with a ‘journal’ with ideas for shooting, and the apps gets the job done as a camera replacement with separated exposure and focus controls, as well as tilt level.
500px: discover beautiful photographs
If you are seeking for a place to share your photos, find inspiration in others images, and participate in a photo forum that would improve your photography, 500px is one of our favorite places to visit. With a modern app with great visual style, this app allows you to get a quick look at new inspirational photography.
Oyster: ‘Spotify’ for reading
Just like Spotify, Oyster is an all-you-can-eat service for books requiring a simple $10 monthly subscription. It comeswith over a million books, a rich recommendation engine that would suggest new titles and authors to check out, and a neat social feature that lets you connect with other people with similar reading interests. The service promises to add new books every week, plus it has New York Times best-sellers and a special selection of Oprah-approved titles.
Spotify: music streaming
Spotify needs little introduction. The $10 music subscription service allows you to listen to more than 20 million songs unlimited and ad-free, a model that comes to replace the current buy-an-album one. You also have Spotify free which requires no paid subscription, but introduces ads and limitations.
Instapaper: read it later with no distractions
Instapaper is a read-it-later client with no complications and a simple, fluid interface. Unlike the more complicated Pocket with its tagging options, Instapaper allows you to focus on reading rather than managing lists, and this simplicity makes it stand out.
Overcast: best podcasting app for iPhone
Overcast is a free podcasting app with a beautiful interface and a smooth performance that has passed the test of time. The list of features includes features such as Smart Speed, Voice Boost, and Smarter Playlists (not that some of the features are locked in this free version, but not so much as to hamper the overall experience).
Yahoo News Digest: all the important news curated for you
The new Yahoo under Marissa Mayer is an interesting concoction of a technology and a media company, and the Yahoo News Digest application is a brilliant illustration of the direction where Yahoo is going. The app is sleek and with thoughtful curation by human editors it presents with a morning and evening digets of the most important news from across the globe. We love the idea of having around 10 news pieces for every digest: you can quickly scroll between the leading topics, and get a sense of completion that news junkies, who otherwise tend to spend much more time digging for news, will appreciate.
Feedly: stay up-to-date with your RSS feed
If you are someone who reads news as a job or a serious hobby, there is no better way to stay abreast of all that’s going on than a full-blown news reader. After the pitiful demise of Google Reader, Feedly has emerged as the number one alternative with regular updates, slick interface, and even a premium tier offering even more functionality.
Hopper: flight tickets one-stop-shop
Save up to 40% on your next flight. Hopper analyzes billions of flight prices daily to predict how prices will change, and tells you when to buy your tickets. Hopper constantly monitors prices to find great deals, and notifies you the instant you should buy. It’s like having a super-fast, all-knowing travel agent in your pocket.
ESPN: sport scores and news
ESPN has rolled out a completely redesigned app for iPhone that features beautifully simplistic user-friendly style and allows you to easily stay informed about the latest news around your favorite sports team. Not just that, you get by-the-minute live score updates on games, as well as a news section that comes with plenty of videos. The focus of the new ESPN app are the following leagues: MLB, NFL, College Football, NBA, College Basketball, MLS, Cricket and more.
Khan Academy: life-long learning
The Khan Academy app allows you to learn almost anything for free. It is, however, the approach to master everything before allowing you to proceed further that has granted Khan Academy its success. You get access to all of the videos that have made the app popular, along with other materials including articles and exercises.
DuoLingo: language learning simplified
Duolingo has brought a little revolution to language acquisition on a mobile device. Its simple, repetitive approach works well to introduce you to a language in all its four incarnations: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Duolingo currently allows you to learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, and English. We’re looking forward to a similarly simple way to learn Asian languages!
Mint Personal Finance
Mint is our favorite expense tracking app that will help you better manage your finances, and that’s key to your wealth and sometimes even well-being. It aggregates all your personal finance accounts and investments into one place, so you can track your spending, create a budget, receive bill reminders, and save more money. You can also check your credit score for free.
Houzz: ideas for home design
Houzz is a great hub for ideas for home design and renovation with a myriad of images that will help you visualize what you want to construct or change before doing a lot of mistakes on your own first. With an excellent writeup in the form of a weekly newsletter, Houzz has become our go-to place for those times when only changing something at home can help us make sense of the chaos in our minds.
Moves: map your everyday life and workouts
Moves is a movement tracking app with a simple interface, but most importantly, it does not require you to constantly mess around with it. Just start it once, and it will track your steps, drives, cycling, and runs in the background. Plus, it will also map your daily activity on a map. The fact that the app has been acquired by Facebook testifies for the fact that you get a sleek and smooth experience.
7-minute Workout: stay healthy and fit
Finally, given that we have our phones always in our pockets, it’s worth using them for something that will actually benefit our health: for our workouts. We have a hard time recommending a full-blown gym app for phones since we believe that a gadget has no place in the gym where you workout, but for light workout the 7-Minute Workout system with the app is a great way to stay healthy and energized throughout the day.
Tinder: dating with no complications
Everyone is on Tinder these days, and that’s what makes this simple ‘hot or not’ app be a good choice for those looking for a date, and maybe something more. We’re not huge fans of the superficial approach to people that lays in the core of Tinder, but at the end of the day it’s up to you to shape your relationships with people.
Dropbox: cloud storage
Our sincere hope is to have more devices with at least 32GB of internal storage in 2015, but since that is far from being the reality nowadays (and the iPhone 6 still starts at just 16GB of storage), the need for cloud storage is dire. Luckily, there are plenty of great services that offer gigabytes of storage in a server farm far and away. Dropbox, in particular, works great across multiple platforms and it has a great, rich iPhone app, so that you can always access those important files everywhere.
iMDB: all the world’s movies
IMDb is the world’s largest movie database and as such it is an indispensable tool for movie buffs. Movie trailers, casts, reviews, and all sorts of flick paraphernalia adorn IMDb’s free movie app, more than enough to grant it a place in this list.
Yummly: explore new cuisines
Yummly is our favorite application for cooking, and while there are many others that are equally great, we highlight Yummly because of its awesome filters that allow you to discover dishes from various styles and cuisines easily.
Yelp: real reviews
If you are looking for the best place to eat out/work out/do something or see something, and you want the real perspective of users, Yelp is the place to go with its huge database of places and user reviews that is constantly growing.
Chrome: browse away
Google’s Chrome browser for the iPhone offers all the benefits of cross-platform syncing and it automatically imports all of the bookmarks and search history from desktop and all other platforms where you might be using Google’s browser.
1Password: secure logins all in one
The app creates strong passwords for every site, and remembers them. If you have trouble remembering all of the different passwords you use, 1Password will do it for you. The new version of the app is full-featured and will work on both phones and tablets. And if there is one thing that we keep learning over the years, it’s that security is the number one worry that mobile device users have. With this app, you can use ridiculously complex passwords (as generated by 1Password), and you can let the app remember them.
