Compatible with both iPhone and iPad, we’ve categorized these iOS apps, offering paid and free options in each category to ensure you quickly and effortlessly find your ideal app. Our selection goes beyond typical Apple apps and mainstream choices like Chrome or WhatsApp, focusing on unique and essential apps for your device.
The best AI chatbot app: Nova
Embrace AI with Nova, the ChatGPT-powered chat app for your iPhone or iPad. Nova, an innovative AI chatbot, stands out with its unique development, using the same technologies as ChatGPT and PaLM 2.
Experience rapid, precise, human-like responses thanks to its advanced AI. Nova’s highlights include unlimited GPT-4 usage without daily quotas, support for over 140 languages, and a memory feature for full chat histories.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best AI chatbot app: Genie
Genie, an AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT and GPT-4, offers a human-like approach with a strong moral compass. It filters out inappropriate or controversial topics, making it safe for younger users. Genie combines advanced AI with positive values for a reliable and responsible chat experience.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The best AI art generator app: WOMBO Dream
Artists won’t be replaced by AI, but AI art generators like WOMBO Dream are advancing rapidly. Popular on the Apple App Store, WOMBO Dream offers a variety of styles and the ability to use images as prompt bases.
It stands out for understanding prompts well and processing quickly, capable of rendering up to four photos at once. While it sometimes faces minor issues with text-based image editing, it remains a robust and efficient tool for AI-generated art.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best AI art generator app: Gencraft
Gencraft creates realistic, colorful images, needing basic prompting skills for optimal use. Choose a style, and it renders up to 2 images at once, with more upon request. The free version includes 10 prompts, with subscription options for more. You can also train models for personalized results.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: None / Account: Required
The best finance app: Goodbudget Budget Planner
What’s great about Goodbudget? For starters, it allows for budget sharing with others in the same household or group, ensuring that everyone is included in the financial planning. This feature promotes transparency and accountability, as seeing how much others are spending can encourage everyone to be more responsible with their expenses.
Additionally, all data is securely stored in the cloud, enabling easy access to the household budget from various devices, regardless of your location.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best utility app: YNAB
Many people face challenges in managing their finances due to various habits, and YNAB (You Need A Budget) is a helpful tool for those looking to improve their spending decisions. It offers features like expense tracking and goal setting, which can assist you in navigating your financial journey, even with modest monthly savings. Every step towards saving, no matter how small, is a step towards financial stability.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The best utility app: 1Blockr
1Blockr swiftly blocks annoying pop-up ads, enhancing your online productivity by reducing data usage and ad interruptions. It boosts iOS’s security by protecting against privacy-invasive trackers and ads. Optimized for Safari, it’s battery-efficient. The free version suffices for most, with paid upgrades for extra power.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best utility app: IFTTT
IFTTT revolutionizes iPhone use by automating business and home tasks with workflows. Choose from over 100,000 preset automations or create your own. It enables tasks like one-click social media posting and smart home control, limited only by your creativity.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: None / Account: Required
The best camera application: ProCamera
ProCamera is the leading app for taking great photos and videos on iPhone. The app, now in its 12th year of service, has always managed to receive rave reviews from users and photo experts. It is possible to save presets with your choices of exposure, white balance, and focus. You can also use options such as mirroring and orientation lock. The choice of file formats also varies with RAW, HEIC, or JPEG.
- Price: $19.99 / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Not required
The alternative to the best photo app: Obscura 3
Oscura 3 is an application that allows you to take photos in various formats such as RAW, HEIC, JPEG, or Live Photo. It is possible to take photos with native modes on the smartphone including macro, portrait, panorama, night, or while using the zoom function. The app offers a multitude of settings as found on a real camera, allowing you to make the best possible photo on your smartphone. You will be able to act on elements like white balance, ISO, saturation, and others.
- Price: $4.99 / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: None / Account: Not required
The best photo editing application: Picsart
PicsArt is the go-to app this year for selfie enthusiasts and photo archiving, offering a rich array of imaging tools. Unique to PicsArt is its built-in social community, a hub for tips and tricks. It provides comprehensive editing options like overlays, layers, clone stamps, and more. While the interface may initially feel cluttered compared to others, it’s highly effective.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best photo editing app: Facetune
Facetune, now a secondary recommendation, specializes in face-enhancing photo editing. It provides tools to smooth skin, reshape jaws, whiten teeth, and enhance hair, along with adjusting saturation, brightness, and contrast. It also supports video editing with a real-time “magic” function for on-the-fly modifications.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Not required
The best productivity app: Notion
Notion is the Swiss army knife of productivity applications. It is an application that centralizes all the main tools you may need to work efficiently. It allows you to take notes, work on shared documents with your colleagues, manage your agenda, and even your projects with kanban boards.
The interface is basic and intuitive, which allows you to quickly get your bearings. You will be able to simplify yourself thanks to the many templates offered and rely on the large community of users if you need help.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best productivity app: Any.do
Any.do is a task and project management application. It allows you to get organized by creating task lists and reminders. You will have a daily planner that will help you sort your different tasks by status. It is possible to assign tasks to other users with tags or checklists.
The app synchronizes with your calendar and offers different views such as kanban, project, or calendar view. With a paid subscription, you can benefit from a personal assistant that increases your productivity by performing certain actions for you. The application also has an ergonomic and customizable interface.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The best fitness app: Seven
Seven is the perfect app to get you back into the gym or even begin your fitness journey gradually. It’s a fitness app with a progressive program of 7-minute workouts. The free version offers 12 exercises of 30 seconds each, with a 10-second break between each exercise. Y
ou can work out anywhere and without any equipment. The application also allows you to create your own workouts according to your needs and preferences, as well as to motivate yourself by choosing virtual coaches.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best fitness app: Carrot Fit
AI-driven Carrot is transforming fitness apps with its unique approach. Unlike typical encouraging apps, Carrot uses threats, inspiration, and even ridicule to motivate users. It also employs bribes to encourage activity. Featuring intense seven-minute workouts, Carrot is perfect for long-time couch potatoes looking for a snarky digital fitness coach to help shed pounds.
- Price: $4.99/ Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The best note-taking app: Bear Pro
Bear is a note-taking app with more advanced features than your smartphone’s basic notes app, while being less complicated to pick up than Evernote. You can write documents, blog posts, to-do lists, code, or shopping lists. It is possible to dictate text with Siri and add tags to facilitate the classification of your notes.
Bear Pro also allows synchronization between your different devices via iCloud. You will also have more than a dozen themes and additional export options. Your data is encrypted, and the application is locked with a password or Touch/Face ID.
- Price: Free, but the Pro version costs $14.99 / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: None / Account: Required
The alternative to the best note-taking app: Noted
Noted is a two-in-one note-taking app that allows you to write text while making an audio recording. The entered text is time-stamped on the recording, and it is possible to mark specific passages.
The application is designed for students, professionals, and journalists. Thanks to the smart playback function, it is possible to play your recordings without pauses and silence in between so that you can focus on what is most important. You can also customize the application with several themes.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes/ Account: Not required
The best navigation/GPS app: MAPS.ME
Maps.Me is an efficient alternative to Google Maps. The main advantage of this app is that it works offline. You just have to download and save the maps on your device to use them whenever you want. The different information and maps are constantly updated by the millions of community members.
You can use the application in the car, on public transport, on foot, or by bike. You will also have travel guides for more than 100 countries and 600 cities to download. The application is very detailed and displays thousands of points of interest as well as hiking trails. Maps.Me also allows you to save trips, mark your favorite places and share a location with family and friends.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best navigation/GPS application: Citymapper
Citymapper is aimed at urban travelers who want to get information about public transportation in their city at a glance. The app allows you to monitor the metro network of your city but also works in any large city with a relatively large public transport network. Perfect for estimating travel time, the app also allows you to record your most common trips to get real-time information.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The best weather application: CARROT Weather
CARROT Weather is a weather application that presents weather data from all over the world in a rather original way. It features rain, lightning, and storm notifications, a weather map widget, and quick data source switching. The application features a kind of robot that tells you the weather, with a mood that changes depending on the weather.
You will be able to customize this feature to your liking. The app has been updated to fit the lock screen widgets and Lives Activities. CARROT Weather draws on weather data from Apple Weather, Dark Sky, AccuWeather, and Tomorrow.io.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Not required
The best reading/audiobook/podcast app: Kobo Books
Kobo Books is an app that lets you read eBooks and listen to audiobooks on your iPhone or iPad. In addition to reading eBooks, Kobo also allows you to listen to audiobooks. Simply purchase eBooks and audiobooks from Kobo.com, then sync your Kobo app to read or listen to your heart’s content.
The app offers the ability to sync all your bookmarks and pick up where you left off regardless of your device. Kobo also offers free excerpts to help you choose a book to read.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: None / Account: Required
The alternative to the best reading/audiobook/podcast app: Pocket Casts
Pocket Casts is a podcast reading app that offers a great listening experience thanks in part to its beautifully designed and user-friendly interface. It also stands out for its listening, search, and discovery tools. You will be able to synchronize the queue, cut silences, change the speed or set a sleep timer. Pocket Casts supports AirPlay, Chromecast, CarPlay, and is accessible from the Sonos app.
- Price: Free/ Advertising: No/ In-app purchases: Yes/ Account: Not required
The best alternative to iCloud for your photos: Degoo
Most iPhone users tend to use either iCloud or Google Photos to back up their photos. With Google Photos recently taking the subscription route, there was an obvious gap in the market, which seems to have been exploited by a small Swedish company known as Degoo Backup AG. Degoo is an attractive photo storage service that offers 100GB of free space to its basic users.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The best alternative to iCloud to store all your files: pCloud
There are many alternatives to iCloud but pCloud stands out the most in my opinion. The app has a simple interface, which makes things much easier. It offers full encryption of your data for transfer and storage, synchronization of your stored documents on all your devices and the storage is valid for life after a one-time payment…
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The best dating app: Bumble
Bumble is a dating app that offers the same thing as all other dating apps but with the addition of practical features such as friendship or business dating. Unlike Tinder, Bumble hands the initiative over to women when it comes to dating by forbidding men to initiate the first contact.
The chat function is successfully implemented, and it is also possible to send voice messages, play a mini-game of questions and answers to get to know each other, send photos, and launch a video call.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
The alternative to the best dating app: Happn
Happn is a dating app with a pretty interesting concept. It allows you to find people you meet by chance. If you met someone in the streets but did not have the chance to talk to them, you could find them on Happn. The application registers other users whom you met based on your location to help you find and contact them. Contact is only possible after a mutual “like” happens.
- Price: Free / Advertising: None / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required
That’s it! That was our selection of the best iOS apps to install on your iPhone in 2024. What are your favorite iOS apps? Do you have any other suggestions?
The Best iOS apps article was updated on December 2023, to add four new categories to the recommended list.
