BEST
APPS
of the
YEAR
2021

History Comes Alive

An immersive educational experience featuring natural history icon David Attenborough, you can select one of three fossils from the museum and watch it come back to life no matter where you are with AR. You can also find out more about their habitats, food chains, and how they meet their ultimate fate.

A Great Note-Taking Experience

On the iPad, the app offers full Apple Pencil support and also features a natural handwriting experience. Thanks to a custom-built in engine, your strokes are captured and converted into high-resolution vector ink. Just double-tap on the Apple Pencil to use an eraser mode.

Say Goodbye to AMP

From Christian Selig, the developer of the popular third-party Reddit client Apollo, the extension is designed to make AMP pages a thing of the past. The new extension automatically redirects an AMP link to the normal site. There’s nothing else you need to do after turning on the extension.

A Digital Wonderland for Kids

Designed for kids 2-6, the app is created as a digital playroom filled with educational toys that spark open-ended play with experimentation and exploration. There is something for every type of child. They can select toys like a drawing pad or other fun interactive areas like a town or a section filled with gadgets with buttons that can be pushed and manipulated. All of the areas feature great sound effects and brightly colorful environments. To move between the environments, kids just need to push a large icon on the top left side of the screen.

Save Anything to Read Later

My Reads allows you to save articles, stories, blogs, podcasts, and more to read later. You can save links from most apps or even copy a link directly into the app. You’ll assign tags to keep the links organized. The app will automatically sync across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac version.

Customize the Home App

HomePaper for HomeKit brings a whole new level of ways to make the Home app your own. Using the app, you can start by selecting an image from your Photo Library or snap a picture with the app. That image can then be combined with a number of preset gradients or you can even create your own.

Make HomeKit Control Easy

HomeRun 2 for HomeKit brings a much easier and convenient control options using home screen widgets and Apple Watch complications. One of the best features of the app is the ability to create customizable grids to quickly access your favorite actions.

Conversion in Seconds

Just open up the app and type the number you want to convert. You’ll then see all of the conversions that you’ve selected as favorites. It’s that easy. There are more than 175 units and 170 currencies to select from.

Make Easay Writing a Bit Easier

A big help is that Essayist will automatically format everything for you while writing. When creating a new east, it will set up the title section/page, margins, font, line spacing, alignment, page headers/footers, and more. References, in-text citations, figures, tables, and more will also be formatted.

Detailed Weather

You can see an hour-by-hour forecast for any location in the United States for the next seven days. Along with a temperature, you can also see humidity, precipitation chance, and even extreme warnings like storms and hurricanes. The app has no ads, no tracking, or no third-party analytics. All data is stored locally on your device. An optional background app refresh will learn your habits to make better use of a data plan.

Create Your own iMessage Stickers

The fun app allows you to create your own stickers that can be sent via iMessage. You can easily create a sticker with your finger or whip out an Apple Pencil and draw on an iPad. The app supports the iPhone and iPad drawing tools including the rulers, pens, pencils, and more.

Say Goodbye to Google Maps

When doing Google searches for a location or address, Google returns links that open, no surprise, in Google Maps. But with the extension, those links will automatically open in Apple Maps. There’s no need to do anything or cut and paste addresses.

Your Modern Recipe Manager

Anyone who likes to cook should take a taste of the app Mela. From Silvio RIzzi, the developer behind the popular RSS app Reeder, Mela is a recipe manager and more. One of the best features is the in-app browser that allows you to quickly save any recipe you find. If a recipe is detected on the current page, it will appear in the app’s native recipe viewer.

A Dark Turn

The Safari extension Noir automatically brings a dark mode to every site you visit. It creates the custom dark style for each site visited based on the colors on the page. The extension works automatically.

Explore Mars With AR

With Mission to Mars AR, you can virtually explore the Red Planet. You can meet the rovers and even drive them wherever you are. There is much more about Mars including images, quizzes, and more.

Real-Time Captions and Translation to FaceTime Calls

Navi helps make FaceTime calling accessible to users with hearing impairments and other disabilities. Using the app is easy. You’ll first start a FaceTime call and then open Navi. Select Enable Subtitles. Finally, invite the other people on the call to Navi. They’ll need to accept the invitation. And the app can do more than just real-time subtitles. It can translate subtitles in 20 languages.

Fusing Together Bookmarks and To-Dos

We probably all have a lot of bookmarked links saved on our iPhone. But it’s sometimes hard to remember why we wanted to save the link in the first place. DoMarks wants to solve that problem. With the app, you can turn a URL or link into a to-do item. For each bookmark, you can categorize with an action like a video to watch, podcast to listen to, or an article you need to read. For further organization, you can even add tags.

A Beautiful Music Player

The beautiful music player features a spinning vinyl record with an arm that animates in and out when playing and pausing. Just like a traditional record, the arm will make its way to the center of the vinyl and aligns with the current playback time.

Anyone Can Create

The app takes technology from a wide variety of Adobe products like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro and allows users to create with no learning curve. One of the standout features of the app are Quick Actions. With that you can accomplish tasks like remove the background from an image, trim a video, or create a GIF with just a click.

A Cross-Platform Clipboard Manager

The app can automatically recognize different content types, like links, text, emoji, PDF, and more. They will be grouped in the app for easy access. With iCloud sync, all of your data will be synced across devices in real-time.