8
Must-Download Apps For Your New iPhone Or Android
Just unwrapped a new
smartphone? Here's a little help navigating the ocean of apps that await you.
If you just unwrapped a new smartphone or are thinking of using
that envelope of holiday cash to run out and buy one and you're eager to fill
it up with new ways to distract yourself, then read on. Amid all the other
year-end retrospectives, future predictions, and service-y listicles pumped out
by every media outlet on the planet at this time of year, this story might be
for you.
There are literally millions of
apps. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android each offer more than 2 million apps in
their respective download stores. Each app store has its own top charts and
recommendations, where you’ll find the usual suspects—Facebook, Netflix,
Spotify, Snapchat, YouTube, and other well-known social networks, media
services, transportation tools, and games. But there are plenty of other
excellent apps out there, from the obscure to the hard-to-pronounce, whose
names might not be on the tip of your tongue when you fire up your new gadget.
Last year, we published a
list of seven lesser-known, but very worthwhile apps. We suggested (and still highly recommend) Dark
Sky for weather, Stitcher for podcasts, Giphy Cam for making fun animations,
and Afterlight for photo editing, among others. The traffic on that post was
totally bonkers, suggesting that guides like this one are exactly the type of
thing you’re looking for right now. So here’s another one. This time, we’ve
rounded up eight more especially useful, fun, or otherwise download-worthy apps
that we’ve come across this year.
(iOS and Android)
In the smartphone era, just
about every moment of our lives has been thoroughly documented, but most of the
images we share slide invisibly into the past under a deluge of new posts on
Instagram or Facebook. Or in the case of Snapchat, they literally disappear
forever. 1 Second Everyday approaches things differently. The app is designed
to do exactly what its name suggests: Capture one second of video every day—or
as many days as you happen to remember to use it. The end result is a
rapid-fire burst of brief moments that, as they add up, offer a high-level, but
insightful glimpse of what your day-to-day life looks like. It may be light on
context, but the series of clips tells a story that’s otherwise hard to capture
in meticulously filtered and deliberately curated photos and videos posted
elsewhere one at a time—and then immediately forgotten. With 1 Second Everyday,
you can export the composite video and share it on your social networks of
choice or just keep it to yourself as a sort of personal video diary. If
nothing else, it’s a useful internal reminder that a given year is more than
the major life milestones, vacation pics, and cringeworthy news headlines that
may come most readily to mind; Life is actually composed of many many types of
moments; It’s just a question of which ones we capture and remember.
(iOS and Android)
The last time I wanted to flee the East Coast for the warmth of
California, I used an app called Hopper to help me figure out the best time to
fly. Within minutes, my flight was booked. While there are countless
flight-watching and travel apps out there, few offer a combination of
simplicity and data-powered predictive prowess quite this effective. The
color-coded calendar layout of its search results give you a clear, at-a-glance
view of what days, weeks, and months are the cheapest time to fly. If a given
flight is statistically likely to get cheaper (or more expensive) in the
future, Hopper will tell you, spelling out the odds of various potential price fluctuations
and when they’re likely to happen.
You can also keep track of
searches and opt in to get notifications when deals pop up or when Hopper finds
another locale you might be interested in traveling to, based on your previous
searches. For instance, perhaps your search for a flight to Miami yielded
pricey results, but if an insane deal on a flight to Ft. Lauderdale or Orlando
pops up, you’ll get a push notification right away. So whether you’re planning
business travel around specific dates or just trying to scratch that wanderlust
itch on a whim, Hopper is one of the easiest ways to plot the most ideal
possible trip.
(iOS only)
The podcasting renaissance is still barreling forward, but it has
a long way to go: Only 20% of Americans say they have listened to a podcast.
60db hopes to make digital audio consumption feel more like radio (a
century-old medium that’s still going strong) but also inject it with the more
personalized, digestible flavor of modern digital media services. The result,
notably built by veterans of NPR and Netflix, is something that feels like
radio, but with sort of the algorithmic smarts and new content initiatives that
have changed the way we now define and consume "TV."
60db allows you to
subscribe to most of the standard, publicly available podcasts you can think
of, but its primary focus is on shorter-form audio stories that cater to more
specific interests than a general interest podcast can. These "quick
hits," often produced by 60db’s staff in concert with established media
brands, offer 10 minutes or less of audio storytelling about an ever-expanding
array of topics. And as we’ve come to expect from services like Pandora and
Netflix, 60db learns as you listen—the more you use it, the smarter it gets.
There’s an ever-growing selection of noteworthy podcasting and radio apps, like
NPR One, Stitcher, and RadioPublic (another new offering from public radio
vets), but 60db goes out of its way to be especially effortless and
addictive.
(iOS and Android)
The scientific case for
mindful meditation is beyond well established. And between our growing
addiction to apps and screens and the anxiety of an endlessly chaotic news
cycle, you could argue that our brains could use a rest now more than ever.
Many experts advocate minimizing screen time altogether, but for those moments
when you can’t manage to untether yourself from your phone, you might as well
have digital tools to help restore your sanity. Headspace is a popular one. The
app uses a combination of cutesy design, programmable reminders, and the
soothing British accent of a guy named Andy to lure you away from your mindless
digital distractions and into a focused, more calming state. Headspace is (fair
warning) a paid subscription service that offers guided, audio-based meditation
exercises for a variety of circumstances, but it does offer enough free
sessions to give you a proper feel for how the service works and whether or not
it’s worth paying $13 per month (or $8 if you’re willing to pay a lump sum for
a whole year of access). There are, of course, several meditation-focused apps
out there, such as Meditation Studio and Sattva. If you happen to own an Apple
Watch, Apple’s own Breathe app is worth checking out as well.
(iOS and Android)
Even if you’re not much of
a gamer, you may find it hard to stop playing this one. PinOut is an
'80s-themed retro-style pinball game for iOS and Android. Indeed, the more
susceptible you are to nostalgia for the 1980s (or otherwise appreciative you
may be of neon design and synth-heavy music), the longer you’ll be glued to it.
Its retro-electronic soundtrack sounds like it was ripped right from the intro
to Netflix’s mega-hit Stranger Things and its pulsating,
neon-laced game layout feel like Tron exploded in pinball
form.
(iOS and Android)
There are easily hundreds
of different ways to read news on your phone—whether it’s from your friends on
Twitter and Facebook or through more news-specific apps, from aggregators like
Google News, Clipboard, Feedly, and Reddit to publishers like BuzzFeed, New
York Times, or the BBC. But almost never do these apps break out of the
traditional, headline-based paradigm of news consumption. Quartz,
the business-oriented news media brand launched by The Atlantic four
years ago, had a different idea. The app it launched in early 2016 eschews the
familiar format of news in favor of a conversational interface. Instead of
reading news stories, you chat with them. The app’s pre-composed, often
emoji-laden replies ("tell me more" or "next?") allow for a
name-your-adventure style of navigating the latest and most important world
events. In an age of clickbait headlines and uncertainty over which news
articles are even real, what could be more refreshing than talking
about the news with what feels like a very well-informed friend—even if it is
just a soulless bot?
(iOS and Android)
If you want to keep track
of our strange new reality, but aren’t in the mood to chat with a newsbot,
Nuzzel is another virtual newsstand with a modern spin. The social news app
shows you the articles most shared by your Twitter friends right now (by default,
within the last hour—but you can filter it by 24 hours or travel back in time
to previous days). What Nuzzel may lack in originality (Flipboard has offered
Twitter-powered news since 2010) it makes up for with smart design and
flexibility. The app lets you step outside your Twitter bubble and see news
shared by friends of friends and browse even more broadly in its Discover tab.
It also helpfully suggests news stories you may have missed. Nuzzel definitely
caters to news junkies first, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve people
prone to more casual headline scanning. In fact, it’s not even just for Twitter
users anymore. Last year, the news app redesigned its service to open it up to
everyone. This way, we can watch civilization unravel at the seams the way we
do everything else: by silently staring into our phones together.
(iOS and Android)
Listening to music is one
of the most obvious and common uses for our phones and accordingly, apps like
Pandora and Spotify always get high rankings in the app stores. But unless
you’re a bona fide, crate-digging music snob, chances are you’re missing out on
some of the newest and best music that’s being created. That’s because before
budding artists get signed to a label or pay to self-distribute their music to
major subscription services, they take matters into their own hands first on
services like Bandcamp and SoundCloud. And more so than most music
services, Bandcamp is able to rightfully make a rare
claim: It actually helps independent and smaller label artists get paid. The
service’s primary focus is on selling physical albums, downloads, and other
merchandise like T-shirts. But even though it’s not a streaming service in the
traditional sense, Bandcamp lets you listen to music, follow artists, and
increasingly discover new music. Simply keeping an eye on the app’s "best
selling" and genre-specific tabs is guaranteed to unearth something new
and delightful. By all means, check out SoundCloud and subscribe to a streaming
service too—Apple Music has amazing playlists and Spotify’s data-driven music
discovery features are both innovative and addictive. But don’t think for a
minute that your music library collection is complete until you download the
Bandcamp app.
JOHN PAUL TITLOW
https://www.fastcompany.com/3066530/8-must-download-apps-for-your-new-iphone-or-android
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