You’re Making Life Harder On Yourself By Not Having These 50 Apps On Your Phone

1. Tailor. It stitches screenshots of texts or social media posts to create one full image. I use it to capture texting conversations all the time.

2. Quality time. It passive aggressively rubs in your face how much you use your phone. Open the screen and it shows how many times you’ve activated the screen. Wanna see that email notification? Gotta roll past the real time timer saying how long you’ve spent on your phone. Plus you can lock out all or individual apps for up to 24 hours without locking you out of essential apps.

3. Tunity. You can basically scan any TV (restaurants, bars) and hear the audio through your phone if the TV volume is too low or far away for example. It’s pretty wild!

4. CardDiary, it’s a journal app. You upload one picture every single day of the most interesting thing you did that day. After a while it’s really nice and nostalgic when looking back at it.

5. TooGoodToGo

Don’t know if it’s a thing in America but in the UK I use it on a daily basis. Restaurants/cafes/hotels join up and sell “magic boxes.” They’re always at least half the price of their regular food but usually less, and you just turn up at a specified time and get a randomly selected box of food that’s going to go to waste.

Some places let you pick your own, others you just get what you’re given, but it’s saved me a lot of money.

6. CamScanner. Got a homework assignment or drawing you want to post or share? This app will take a picture then make it look like it was scanned, so lines can be darkened and everything easier too see and read. It really beats the hell out of bad lighting and blurryness. All without a scanner.

7. Anylist. Basically an app my wife and I use primarily for shopping. Helps us plan meals and save money and when you share a list, you can each add to the same list.

8. Sleep Cycle. It tracks your sleep quality and the alarm clock wakes you up in a period you set when it determines it will be easy for you to wake up. Works like a charm, makes mornings easy.

9. A Soft Murmur. I’ve never heard anybody talk about it before but it’s fantastic. It plays the sounds of rain, thunder, wind and waves, and has sliding bars beside each for you to choose the exact prominence of each of these sounds (slide it to the very left to not play a particular one.)

I turn it on and have it in the background while I read and while I sleep and I love it.

It’s a free app but there’s also more sounds available to purchase like fire, birds, crickets, white noise, coffee shop and singing bowl

10. Virtual Hope Box. Mental health app. It’s designed specifically for PTSD, but honestly it’s great for any variety of anxiety or depression. It’s also completely free without ads.

11. Radio Garden, so many radio stations around the world available at your fingertips. Love it!!!

12. Loop – Habit Tracker! I use it to control I do my Spanish lessons on Duolingo each day, that I workout every other day, that I take my pills, that I remember to see everything as an opportunity. It’s a great simple app, and the dark mode is beautiful.

And it’s free with no ads!!

13. Skyscanner app. If you are planning on traveling please download this. Have used it many times, found a ticket to Ireland from the USA round trip for $350. That plus AirBnb and you have some seriously cheap trips, my parents literally couldn’t believe it.

14. Alarmy. Have trouble getting up in the morning? Download this, and your phone will scream until you get out of bed and go take a picture of your microwave.

15. Forest! It’s a game that lets you plant a little tree or bush for 5-120 minutes and doesn’t let you click out of the app until the timer is over. This let’s you be more productive while not having the temptation of your phone. If you do exit out of the app, it kills all the trees you have planted and leaves behind a shriveled bush

16. Daylio. It’s a free, simple daily mood tracking app. I got it on new years to track my mood and activities and it has helped me tremendously. It’s simple and fun enough to use that it doesn’t feel like a chore or stress me out, and I can look back and see what made me feel good so I could turn bad days around. I’ve always wanted to be a person that kept a journal so I could remember and separate days in my mind (mental illness is a bitch); and this is the only thing I’ve ever stuck with daily. Today I’m on a 142 day streak!

17. My Fitness Pal (when utilized properly) is really good too for helping lose weight and keeping track of what you’re eating, how much water you’re drinking, exercise you’re getting etc.

18. Flo is my go to for keeping track of my periods.

19. Gas Buddy, tells you all the prices of gas around you and you can go to the cheapest station.

20. Notification History Log.

The number of times I’ve swiped a notification away by mistake… This little app allows me to go back and take a look at what I’ve missed.

Also allows you to look back at WhatsApp messages that someone sent but later decided to delete. Some cracking drunk texts have been rediscovered using this method.

21. Night Sky helps you find constellations and planets in the real night sky using your phone’s location and gyroscope.

22. Transit is an app that gives real-time data on busses and other public transportation services (including GPS locations of the vehicles!). I used it in Canada in a few cities in my province, it might work elsewhere.

23. Should I Answer. It’s free, and can auto block spam callers if you’ve been called by them before. It also has reviews from the called, saying what the number is (call center, debt collection, car dealer etc…)

24. iNaturalist. You can take pictures of living things and it can suggest what species it might be.

25. Google’s Arts and Culture, it’s also a website.

Basically Google unbeknownst to most people teamed up with art galleries and museums worldwide to take extremely high def pictures of thousands of pieces. There are paintings, sculptures, posters, historical artifacts, photographs, etc.You can explore if by movement, historical events, specific colour, artist, whatever. There are ever changing curated online exhibits, virtual tours of museums, extensive articles. They’re also working on lots of fun experimental toys, trying to play with where art and technology mix.

A must for any artist or history fan.

26. Idagio. The best app for listening to classical music ever. It lets you search by composer, performer or name, and it has recommendations.

27. Duolingo, I know that everyone jokes about the owl but really, every time I open the app up I’m astonished. It keeps education free, it pays homage to languages that might have died without their help, it has High Valyrian, a fictional language. All of it is for the price of a few ads, they aren’t even video adds, they’re just pictures that you can quickly click out of. The lessons are easy too, the hearts thing is a bit annoying but it really is worth it and they make words easy to pick up.

28. If you have an iPhone, there’s an app on it called “Measure”, which uses your camera and you can select two points and measure the distance between the two, pretty nifty.

29. Flipp. For those who grocery shop often, it’s a nice way to view current sales around you.

30. Water Time Pal – reminds me throughout the day to drink water and tells me what I should be taking in. I have it set for 2400mL and I get a notification every 2 hours.

31. Libby – you can borrow audiobooks and books from your local library.

32. Taste. You rate movies/tv series, and by your ratings it gives you things you might enjoy watching. Plus it tells you which are on Netflix, Amazon etc.

33. Waze. Social traffic mapping, where users can report the live status of road hazards/closures and traffic with a pleasant to use layout.

Oh and did I mention speed traps?

34. Alltrails, it shows you all the hiking and biking trails near you with ratings and filters and it’s just awesome.

35. Be My Eyes is a great app! It was created to help blind people become more independent throughout the day. Anyone can register as either a blind person or a volunteer. If a blind person needs help using a vending machine, finding the right color shirt, or adding the correct ingredient to their meal, a volunteer is just one call (video chat) away. I get a call every few weeks and I always feel so good after helping someone and having a good conversation.

I encourage all my friends to get this app and definitely recommend it to you guys!

36. Google Earth. You can see almost every spot on this planet without moving you butt or spending a dime. I’m an avid traveler.

37. FishBrain. The app is used to log the fish you catch. It uses this data from the community to give info like: good fishing spots for each species, most successful bait for that spot, etc…

The premium version gives the entire charts, not just the top listing. It also gives a chart for what hours the fish are most likely to bite.

38. GymBook. Been using it for a couple of years. Great way to build different workouts and track them.

39. Migraine Buddy. It’s a free app that helps track your migraines and factors that may be contributing to it as well as relief. It also has articles that shed some light on the subject, and it tracks your sleep with eerie accuracy.

40. Poop map. With it you can keep a record on where you’ve pooped and how you rated the experience. You can also share it with your followers and see others ratings.

41. Webtoon. I don’t ever really see it talked about. It’s free, it’s got tons of great comics, I highly recommend it.

42. Scanbot. I’ve been using it to scan receipts and other things to track my spending for every week.

43. Instapaper for saving articles from the web for offline and format free reading.

44. For those of you that need to talk to someone but don’t know who to talk to or how, I recommend Replika, it’s a personalize self-learning chatbot that will try its best to either cheer you up or at least keep you company during darker times. The developers don’t keep track of what’s its learned unless you submit something to them (like if it sounds like it’s going crazy and there might be a problem with the code). All of your information is stored clientside. It has easy access to the suicide hotline and other help hotlines. I use it myself, it’s really been helping me.

45. Splitwise makes keeping track of split bills with my partner and friends super easy. Recently went on holiday with my partner and a friend and basically whoever had their card most readily accessible paid at the time, and we worked it all out with this app. Super easy.

46. Notification Notes. It lets you put notes on your lockscreen. Simple, useful, does what it says.

47. Google Trips is amazing.

My first solo trip was to Thailand and I didn’t know how to plan a trip and it wasn’t great.

My second solo trip to Japan was amazing because of this app. Firstly, any relevant emails that you recieved through Gmail get added, so all of your hotel and flight reservation info are in one place. It also saves them in Google Maps for you so you don’t need to remember to pin them. Phone numbers and addresses too, so you can show a taxi driver. Most places have detailed transportation info: from how to get into the city from the airport, to miniscule rules for public transit, like if they only exit from the back doors of the bus so you don’t look like an ass. They mine Maps for tons of restaurant reviews. I like that you can choose what’s really close, or cheap eats (great for breakfast) or when you don’t want a lot of fuss). It can create customized day plans for you, or adjust to what’s near by you at the moment.

There’s tons of other cool little features too. And you can download most of the info in case you don’t have data. I can’t recommend this enough!

48. If you’re a parent in the UK, there’s an app called Hoop which is really bloody good. You type in the age of your child(ren) and how far you want to travel, and it gives you a comprehensive list of all the activities available for your child in that area. Parenthood can be incredibly isolating, especially for first time parents, and this app is a great way to see what’s happening and get out of the house.

49. I’m really enjoying Drops, which is a visual vocabulary app for learning non-English* language. I can hold a conversation in (broken) French due to learning it when I was young, but I’m certainly not fluent and I’ve learned about 400 new terms/phrases in the past few months. When you learn a word it pronounces it for you as well as shows you a simple graphic representing what the word is, which I’ve found has really helped my absorption (though I recommend turning on the feature that lists its English translation after you solve each puzzle, because sometimes I would forget what exactly the word I learned meant because the graphic wasn’t as specific as I needed it to be).

You can play for 5 minutes every 10 hours, though if you maintain a streak you earn bonus time, and after every session there’s an option to watch an ad to earn an extra minute. You can pay to get unlimited access but I actually really like having short sessions twice a day, because I’m definitely the type to want to learn as much as possible as fast as possible, and then burn out on it because I didn’t pace myself.v

50. Paprika. Save recipes while stripping out the backstory about how the author’s childhood was shaped by the whimsical strawberry garden she had access to in rural Vienna.