Preferably lesser known but game-changing apps that are able to be bought one-time and put all others to shame.
To help clarify your thinking, which apps have produced such an outrageous level of value (regardless of one-time cost) to the extent you believe it should be #1 in its category, not necessarily #1 app ever.
We’ll do a seperate thread for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, etc but let’s stick to iOS for this one. Thanks Lemmings!
All these comments recommending paid subscription software… weird world. Not that this is not a healthy model for the Devs, but how can you trust them?
Pythonista. Great Python editor, REPL, and platform-specific libraries.
Editorial. Same author, Markdown editor which can be scripted in Python. I routinely write al new features for it, like dice rollers, list renumbering, etc.
Documents by Readdle. PDF & epub reading, file management, bunch of optional features.
iCabMobile. Browser with a ton of ad-blocking, filters, good file management, I routinely use it as a private browser.
YNAB - it’s subscription based but is the best budgeting app I’ve found. Keeps me honest with my money, and when I was married was amazing for keeping us synced on our shared spending budgets.
Also check out MoneyStats, its like a one-time payment complete forecasting app like Kualto/Dollarbird but way better. No subscription and it syncs using your iCloud but you can also manually export all the data.
My wife and I have subscribed for years now because it literally never fails to sync and is easy to use. We have a ton of lists including grocery, hardware, trips, camping, and so on. It’s also our meal planner and recipe library.
As someone who watches a fairly wide variety of tv shows, “next episode” has been the most useful app on my phone for me. It helps so much for knowing what to subscribe to and when. Only sub when my favorite shows come out and catch up on the rest then. I’ve also discovered some new shows through their upcoming and trending lists (which is more of just a bonus and not why I got the app to begin with). It’s probably the only app I would give my full recommendation for anyway.
I have seen some Australian and British shows listed, but I can’t tell you if they have a lot of them (I kind of doubt it). I only know that it’s very on top of US shows at least.
As a student of life I have to mention Anki. At its core it’s a flashcard app out of the box but it’s almost infinitely more powerful than that if you dig deep.
I paid 35 CAD for it in 2019 and I’ve used it every single day since. The amount of knowledge I’ve committed to memory is truly priceless, and I’ve even gifted this app to several friends.
NB: AnkiMobile, not the free knockoff AnkiApp. It’s open-source and actually free for computers and android devices, and iOS/iPadOS app purchases are the only way the developer makes money.
So I’m using a FOSS spaced repetition app alternative to Anki called Memoet. Self hosted and it does everything I want. Might I recommend using chat gpt to help make cards? You can easily generate tables that can be copy pasted into a csv which (I’m assuming anki) can be imported as cards
Blackbox - It got some hype when it released but if anyone still hasn’t tried it, it is highly recommended. You will need to learn everything your iPhone can do and think outside the box to solve these puzzles.
The app uses AI to identify the species of plants, animals, insects and fungi. In video mode you scan around something you want to ID as the AI narrows it down to the species. Then you can take a pic. The app keeps track of each unique species you’ve found (along with your photo of it). There’s also badges and achievements for identifying different numbers of species, if you want to gamify your nature sightseeing.
It’s basically real life Pokémon. Oh and it’s completely free.
Iirc the only main downside to all these apps is that you get a single answer, when it’s usually more complex than that.
Seek/iNaturalist are great. I prefer the report style of iNaturalist and how it gives me a list of options, which I can use to try and narrow it down.
E.g. if I take a pic of a flower that looks like a dandelion, it could be a common dandelion, or hawkweed, or burnweed… and of those there are a dozen sub species. Knowing which one is native is really important.
Just wanted to give a shout-out to QuickScan as its better than Abbyy FineReader/Scanner, private, and technically free although I support it by tipping
Glazba. It's a music player that allows for playing files in various formats, including FLAC. Song files can be uploaded to the phone through the app via web browser over Wi-Fi, or it can play music files stored on any of several cloud-storage services. Considering that I've ripped my entire 1000+ CD collection to FLAC, and considering that my collection contains a number of albums not available through streaming services, this app has been quite useful.
If you’ve set up a Plex library, PlexAmp can also play FLAC files but it can also stream them so they don’t actually have to be downloaded to the phone. It does have that option, though, if you want to play them offline.
VoiceDream and SpeechCentral are amazing text to speech apps that turn your documents (PDF, txt, ePub, Mobi, AZW3 into audiobooks that let you read by highlighting and adjusting the speed etc.
I don’t know if VoiceDream can still be bought on iOS but I know SpeechCentral is almost as good and it can be bought one-time.
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