These 88 Essential iPhone Apps make your life fun, productive, and easy!

Suffice your needs before your wants. That's the way.


Did you get a new iPhone for yourself? Maybe you got one as a gift?

Either way, if you’ve got one, let me tell you it won’t be easy finding the right apps initially. And it’s all App Store’s fault.

With time, the App Store insatiably grew its strength with the sole intent of making a user’s life easy with their iPhone (and also to cash in huge loads of Dollars for Apple and app developers). This vastness, however, might be good for Apple but is an inexorable nightmare for people searching for good apps. Thankfully, for you, we’ve enlisted 88 essential iPhone apps to help you save a huge amount of your time.

But first…

What is the significance of an essential app?

The App Store is a huge place from where you can get an app or two. Although, its vastness sort of implies that not all apps are supposed to end up on your iPhone. Having said that, only two types of apps exist.

First, the one that you want. Second, the one that you need.

The app you may want would have all the functions and qualities you crave for. Albeit, the app that you need, may or may not have the functions and qualities you crave for but will assist you in completing a task.

Essential apps form the epitome of an ideal smartphone.

But what if I said, you can mix what you need with what you want? That’s right! We’ve got some of the best apps in almost every category listed for you down below. The upside, however, is that you have a choice of 10 essential apps in every category. So feel free to choose from the apps that you like most and your need will be automatically taken care of. All of them are super-important apps, per se.

Social

Being virtually social is a lifestyle in 2019. Despite the banality of this concept, people prefer to interact among themselves through social media apps rather than using traditional means to get along. If there’s one trend that’s always trending on social media, it’s social media.

Above all, smartphones are the primary portals for social interactions these days, which, in our case, is the iPhone. And these are the best essential social apps you can download on an iPhone.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is the quintessential social app. It is one of the very first apps that downright revolutionized the way people interact with each other. Having a rigid and secure messaging system along with support for voice and video calling, it is a must-have app for your iPhone.

Instagram

Instagram

Owned by Facebook, Instagram is the most popular image sharing platform. You can share images, videos, story updates, and interact with each other. In addition, you can also conduct direct message exchanges. The app may be a bit complex for first-time users but it doesn’t take much time to get a hang. Basically, if you don’t have Instagram these days, you’re “socially” awkward.

Also, if you want to improve your Instagram game, you may definitely want these iPhone camera accessories.

Twitter

Twitter is, has, and always will be a proponent of microblogging. You can share 240-character messages called “Tweets” that can be liked and retweeted. Most celebrities, politicians, and important personalities personally handle their Twitter accounts making it the most original social sharing platform ever. Having access to Twitter on an iPhone, as a result, is a cherry on the cheesecake as you can easily tweet your thoughts no matter where you are.

Facebook

Facebook

Having a vast user base, Facebook is genuinely the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of a social platform. Despite its intermittent security breaches, data scams, and its well-known ability of distracting people and keeping them clipped to itself; Facebook still needs to have a spot on your iPhone. Why? Because there’s an old saying. You can find your mom, your granny, your granny’s old lover, his gardener; almost everyone on Facebook.

Messenger

Messenger

A byproduct of Facebook, it is a versatile but heavy messaging app that you can use to connect with others. It has many cool features as an app that lives on your iPhone such as video calling, emoji games, easter eggs, etc. If you are a perpetual Facebook user, you may need this app.

Reddit

Reddit

Reddit is entirely a community-based website where you can find people who like to discuss and share about certain topics on communities dubbed “Subreddits.” It is a really fun, helpful, informational, and heavily moderated platform. You cannot get the complete Reddit web experience on a smartphone, but apps prevail that succeed in providing a close experience. Many third-party apps exist, as a result, but none offer a closer-to-web experience than Reddit’s own mobile app for the iPhone.

Snapchat

Snapchat

Originally a unique photo sharing service that got ripped later by Facebook, Snapchat still may be an alluring proposition for teens. It enables you to share photo and video stories that disappear after 24 hours. Aside from that, Snapchat also offers several filters and AR-backed face masks that take advantage of Apple’s ARKit in iOS 12 to provide spectacular designs that perfectly align to your face. Frankly speaking, virtual face masks are the only reason I still have Snapchat on my iPhone. You should try it too.

Tumblr

Tumblr

Tumblr is yet another micro blogging and social sharing platform where people accumulate to post content to a short-form blog. It is not as pompous as Twitter but has its own charm. In addition, Tumblr has a spectacularly designed app for the iPhone that lets you handle almost every aspect of the platform associated with you.

WeChat

WeChat

You might not need this app if you already have WhatsApp downloaded. In its present condition, WeChat is a major hit only in China due to its robust integration with everything else in the country. So, if there are any Chinese readers reading this; WeChat is for you. Although you can download the app outside China, you won’t find peers to interact with through the app if you don’t live in the country.

Tinder

Tinder

No introduction needed. Tinder is the go-to app for finding a date online. Its convenient card-based design allows you to swipe left or right to decline or accept a date. If the date matches you as well, a messaging portal opens up where you can chat and go on further. The card based design, however, has notably bagged a ton of references in movies and mainstream media. It’s time for you to try it out now.


Productivity

Lethargy has no stance in this fast-paced, utterly competitive world. To get a leg up, you need to be productive. But owning smartphones has advantages that function exactly opposite to being productive. Thankfully, all you have to do is download an app. Well, you can also habituate yourself into being productive by reading this iPhone guide. But for now, let’s just stick to this.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat

If you struggle with PDFs on your iPhone, Acrobat might help. It lets you annotate PDF files, view them, interact with them, share them; do possibly whatever you can with a PDF. Adobe also offers you its cloud where you can store PDF files and sync them across all your devices.

Trello

Trello

Trello is a heavily underrated notes app. You can easily create notes, put them in boards, collaborate with your peers, share them, and comment on them. It’s more inclined toward management. Hence, most companies prefer Trello as its primary management software. Aside from its regular core features, you can also install add-ons to power up the management process. Learning the intricacies of Trello, however, takes some time. But once you know it all, it’s a major productivity engine. Apart from using the app as a management powerhouse, you can also mend it for personal uses.

Day One Journal

Day One Journal

Many great personalities have spoken about journaling as a way to reflect upon yourself and subsequently improve with time. Day One Journal makes it extensively easy to do that. With just a tap and a few more, you can maintain a daily journal without worrying about someone accidentally, rather purposely reading it. The app is blissfully designed to inspire you to type your thoughts and also sends notifications to remind you of the same.

Google Keep

Google Keep

If you seek a simple yet elegantly functional notes app for your iPhone, Google’s Keep is the de facto choice. It offers most features a notes app should have such as checklists, color tags, drawing support, collaboration functions, etc. The cherry on top, however, is the instant syncing that happens through a Google account- which is the account you use the most. Besides, it also has a vivid color scheme which makes your notes look intuitive. Keep is so simple you won’t need guidance at all. At the same time, it’s utterly powerful in terms of potential.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar

An underrated app in the dominating world of calendars, Google’s Calendar app could be the best app you might ever download. It supports natural language input, lets you set time zones which is unusual in a calendar app, lets you set events as per demand, and most importantly has a stunning design. Calendar apps are fairly personal in that they are used in different ways by people. No fixed way to use a calendar app exists. For that matter, having everything handy becomes an important distinction, just as in Google’s Calendar.

Grammarly

Grammar

Grammarly helps you fix grammatical mistakes from the text you type, on the web. On mobile, it does the same but exists in the form of a keyboard. Not many customization features are offered on the keyboard, but Grammarly makes up for it with almost accurate text corrections.

HabitMinder

Habit Minder

Bringing yourself into a habit of something is quite a daunting task. Albeit, HabitMinder makes it easy to track and manage your habits. It reminds you of habits that you had entered into the app to track through intermittent notifications. You can further snooze the task or mark it as completed. Nevertheless, you will need to make it a habit to check on HabitMinder if you’re de facto progressing.

Pocket

Pocket

Pocket enables you to save time by saving online articles for later offline reading. It syncs through an account so that you can read articles offline irrespective of the device you’re using. The primary reason, however, that pocket is distinguishable from other similar apps is its unique support for media like photos and videos. Nothing is left out in a web page when you save it using Pocket.

CamScanner

CamScanner

Nothing like CamScanner prevails in the realm of smartphone document scanners. It features almost any function you can think of when it comes to scanning. You can scan a document then automagically apply one of the app’s in-built filters and the document won’t feel like it’s scanned from a smartphone camera. Besides, you can also use the OCR technology to scan words and create a virtual, editable document. Many apps charge a fee for much of the stuff that CamScanner offers for free.

Outlook Email

Outlook

Email apps also fall into the category of productivity enhancement apps especially since emails are a major aspect of our professional and sometimes, personal lives. Taking that into consideration, Outlook email solves all productivity issues by bringing many goodies to the table. It magically sorts the emails based on their importance, then displays them in two different tabs. The contents of emails are also taken up by Outlook and matched with the calendar that’s already baked in. This gives you more control over your schedule. Most probably because an email decides your day.

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