I would love to know what other people consider essential apps. What are some cool apps that not many people are using? 
Sofa and Up Ahead are my two favourites. Neither of them fulfill an essential “function” and they both have subscriptions but they bring a ton of joy to my life.
Here are the apps I used that I’m not seeing.
- FoodNoms for calorie counting
- Waking Up for guided meditation
- Finch for gamified general mental health
- Future for asynchronous virtual training
- Tripsy for travel tracking
- Organic Maps for offline mapping
- Transit for navigating most US cities via public transit
- Fastmail for personal email (Apple Mail for work email)
- 1Password for password management
- Elaho for browsing Gemini
- Tidal for music
- Vellum for cool backgrounds
- SwiftScan for scanning documents
- iPlum for a cheap business phone number
- Kagi Search to set the Kagi search engine as the default in Safari
- Parcel for package tracking
- Mona for Mastodon
And I’ll second some others.
- Overcast
- Bookplayer
- Reeder
- AnyList
- Sleep Cycle
- Signal
- Obsidian
- Vinegar
- Noir
Bitwarden for password management.
Anki for learning anything that can be made into a flashcard.
Infuse for connecting to my Plex server or for watching local content I loaded myself.
Sleep Cycle for tracking my sleep and being my alarm clock.
Trakt for tracking movies and TV shows.
MyAniList for tracking specifically anime and manga.
AppRaven for setting up price/updates/release alerts for apps in the App Store.
Sentinel 2FA Authenticator is my 2FA choice since it syncs with iCloud and I’m well into the Apple ecosystem.
AdGuard for adblocking and DNS filtering.
DeepL is my my choice of translator app.
GoodNotes 5 for taking notes on my iPad.
Overcast for listening to podcasts. I also use it to listen to audiobooks so that I have the same features for speeding up and removing quiet portions, but this requires uploading mp3 files through a web portal and requires the subscription to have more space available.
Paprika 3 for managing cooking recipes.
TechniCalc for my calculator.
Zotero is my reference manager since I’m in academia.
StopTheMadness is such a powerful safari extension.
Besides the big ones:
- Octal - App for Hacker News
- Poe - Quora’s implementation of ChatGPT
- Artifact - News app that lets you mark headlines as clickbait and then uses AI to rewrite them with helpful info
- LunaSea - Interface for my home instances of Sonarr and Radars
- Strong - Weightlifting app
- Diarium - Low-cost and straightforward journal app
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you pay so much just to block a bunch of ads. You could achieve the same for free with a Raspberry Pi in your home and PiHole.
In the end it doesn’t matter, the result is the same
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Apologies, indeed, I didn’t go through all the apps, just quickly skimmed them.
6€ is a reasonable price to pay in that case 🙌
- Photosync - Handles transfers of photos and videos from the phone to any platform you can think of with ease, can automatically convert HEIC and HEVC files to jpg and mp4, can rename in multiple formats or make your own (I name mine as YYMMDD-HHMMSS). Probably my favorite app ever. A total media swiss army knife.
- Goodreader - For reading any kind of document or consuming media files. Supports using extra AES file encryption on top of regular Apple encryption.
- Layout - Good for making small photo layouts for posting to social media
- Tailor - Stitches screenshots together into a single large photo
- Censor (App store link is down, probably because they haven’t updated their privacy policy yet). Allows you to obscure faces or any other information you want to redact from photos.
- Signal, because it’s an awesome and secure messaging app for people without iPhones.
Those are my most commonly used apps that aren’t “big names”.
Photosync is phenomenal. I use it to sync my photos to my self hosted photo gallery nightly.
It’s the only thing I trust with getting photos of my kids from my phone to my server for storage and backup. It’s very reliable and easy to configure for any backup target you can think of.
