Best New Apps of October 2022

While there are already a host a great third-party apps taking advantage of the new Live Activity feature that arrived in iOS 16.1 for the iPhone, the new app Shelf takes the feature in an interesting new direction.

If you’re not aware, a Live Activity can display live information at a glance on your lock screen. And anyone with an iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max can see information on the Dynamic Island.

But with Shelf, you can make the Live Activity more personal. You can pin photos, text, and quick action to your lock screen, Dynamic Island, and even home screen.

You can download Shelf now on the App Store for free.

There is also a subscription option available. You can unlock Shelf Pro for $1.49 per month or $9.99 yearly.

Shelf Pro subscribers can unlock the ability to create unlimited shelves, premium themes, photo filters, and quickly launch between multiple shelves. Additional features planned in the future include weather, checklists, and timers.

Now Playing Plus does a great solving a problem for Apple Watch users.

Anyone with an Apple Watch knows the power of the wide variety of different watch faces and complications.

If you don’t know what a complication is, they are a great way to add a bit of information from an app to the easily viewable watch face. For example, you can add the weather to a specific face so you won’t have to open the app on your watch.

Another way to use complications is provide one-touch access to apps you use often. One of those in the Now Playing complication. Selecting that will automatically bring up that information on your watch so you can start, stop, or change what you’re listening to on your Apple Watch, iPhone, HomePod mini, or even Apple TV.

aces, like the great Wayfinder face exclusively on the Apple Watch Ultra.

But Now Playing Plus solves that big problem. It gives you a circular and corner complication to quickly access your audio controls.

Now Playing Plus is a free download on the App Store now. It’s only for the Apple Watch.

LockPod is a great way to bring your music to a lock screen.

Compatible with both Apple Music and Spotify, you’ll select a service first when downloading the app. Then it’s time to start creating a widget.

With Apple Music, you can add a widget name and then choose a playlist, station, or album all in the app. Then select whether the widget should be circular or rectangular.

Adding songs and more from Spotify takes a few more steps requiring that you grab the Spotify URL for an album or playlist. But there’s a quick tutorial that shows you how.

All of your created widgets can be seen in the My Widgets section of the app.

LockPod is a free download and available for any iPhone running iOS 16. You can create a single widget with the free version.

To unlock all of the app’s features, you’ll need to upgrade to the LockPod Pro tier. You can select a pay-what-you want option of $1.99, $2.99, or $3.99 to do that. It’s a one-time purchase and not a subscription.

After doing that, you can create unlimited widgets, add custom images to widgets, and place your own custom set to widgets that is displayed on the rectangular shaped widget on your lock screen.

Duolingo wants to help make math more accessible—no matter your age. The new Duolingo Math app features options for both elementary math for younger learners and brain training for adults to strengthen mental math skills and other more advanced topics.

In the elementary course, students will tackle a number of concepts like multiplication, division, fractions, area/perimeter, place value, geometry, measurement, and decimals.

The adult Brain Training course tackles some of the similar concepts but with larger numbers and increased difficulty. The concepts are also geared toward use in everyday life, for example converting between ounces and pounds.

To help better understand the concepts, the exercises are engineered for the content presented. And instead of just viewing the content, the app allows users to actually do that math.

Another great feature is that you don’t need to worry about spending hours on the app. Each lesson is quick and perfect to try when you just have a few minutes to spare.

The app is a free download and for the iPhone and iPad.

Apple Watch users can now take advantage of the great note taking app on the wearable device with Tot Mini.

On the Apple Watch, you can view all of the text from the app entered on other devices. For a quick note, the app also supports dictation or Scribble keyboard to quickly enter information to will be available to see on other devices later.

You can download Tot Mini on the App Store now for $1.99.

While you can use the Apple Watch version by itself, it’s best to use as part of the overall suite of apps.

The Pixel Pals are breaking out. Originally part of Apollo for Reddit, the fun creatures are now an independent app. You can use a Live Activity to place the cute pets on your lock screen and Dynamic Island. They are also available to view as widgets on your home screen and lock screen.

The app is free to download. An optional subscription will unlock more pals.