OUR FAVORITES
25 Apps for 2025
1. Make your videos more cinematic
With exclusive film-inspired filters, this 2024 App Store Award winner transforms everyday footage into masterpieces.
2. Listen to great books
With best-selling audiobooks, exclusive podcasts, and Audible Originals you won’t find anywhere else, this app has one of the biggest spoken-word libraries anywhere.
3. Unleash your inner designer
This design app makes it easy for anyone to craft elegant flyers, engaging social media stories, compelling school presentations, and entire brand systems for a small business.
4. Meet a special someone
Bumble helps you make connections in a way that puts women’s experiences first—and it’s filled with fun features designed to make dating more delightful.
5. Explore the great outdoors
Whether you’re planning a day hike nearby or a backpacking trip in the wilderness, this comprehensive, crowdsourced trail guide (with over 400,000 entries!) helps you discover the best path.
6. Exercise your cognitive skills
The games in this beautifully designed brain-training app can help give your mental agility, vocabulary, and comprehension skills a serious boost.
7. Elevate your pics
With this powerful photo editor’s AI tools, elevate a “pretty good” portrait into something truly picturesque—all while keeping your artistic perspective intact.
8. Doze off to custom soundscapes
To help you relax and focus, Endel composes endlessly comforting sounds on the fly based on where you are and what you’re doing.
9. Master air travel
Monitor your flight’s departure and arrival times, get a nudge when you should head to the airport, learn about the plane you’re on, and see exactly where you are on the runway.
10. Help your houseplants thrive
This comprehensive plant-care resource offers tips on troubleshooting common problems like wilting or brown leaves, and it reminds you about steps to take to make your indoor or outdoor garden grow.
11. Improve your emotional intelligence
This Apple Design Award finalist gives you a better understanding of your emotions and triggers that may be holding you back. Learn science-backed techniques to tackle anger, procrastination, anxiety, heartbreak, and more.
12. Cook up something delicious
Dig into over 17,000 recipes by renowned food writers, including Mark Bittman, Melissa Clark, Ruth Reichl, and Alison Roman.
13. Overcome workout resistance
SmartGym draws on a library of more than 600 exercises to design the perfect workout for your goals. It even highlights the muscle groups you should engage as you exercise.
14. Stay hydrated
Each time you record a drink in this adorable water tracker, you’ll fill a character with a different color—water, coffee, tea, juice, and smoothies all get their own hue.
15. Keep your finances in order
Copilot is a privacy-first personal finance tool that doesn’t sell customer data to cover costs. The app lets you view details across all your accounts, and it automatically categorizes transactions using machine learning (on your device, not in the cloud) to help you stick to a budget.
16. Chuckle at the weather
This App Store Award–winning weather app provides detailed, hyperlocal forecasts sprinkled with sarcasm and the occasional insult.
17. Find a gentler way to plan your day
Dividing your day into color-coded blocks with this visual planner makes even the most hectic day feel manageable.
18. Journal your way to wellness
This elegant journal and mood tracker helps you on every step of your mental-health journey. Reflect with a variety of journaling prompts to relieve stress or increase productivity, or jump into guided breathing exercises.
19. Watch the greatest films ever made
This must-have streamer for cinephiles offers an unparalleled library of critically acclaimed classic and contemporary films. Over 200 directors have collaborated with Criterion on the restoration and supplemental features for their work.
20. Smooth your travel plans
This 2024 App Store Award finalist wrangles flight itineraries and hotel reservations, simplifies the process of planning with others, tallies your travel budget, and much more.
21. Discover great writers and artists
Enjoy the work of independent authors, journalists, musicians, and thought leaders on this thriving digital publishing platform.
22. Find focus
An elegant Home Screen widget makes this one of our favorite timers for leveraging the Pomodoro Technique, a much-lauded time-management method that has you alternate 25 minutes of focused work with a five-minute break.
23. Find inspiration
Part mood board, part discerning creative community, Cosmos is our new favorite way to catalog (and discover) whatever it is that inspires us.
24. Level up your lexicon
Each Word of the Day in LookUp is accompanied by a colorful illustration. It’s a surprisingly effective way to remember the definitions of new (and often esoteric) words.
25. Help reduce food waste
Want delicious food from restaurants, markets, and cafés for a fraction of the regular price? This app makes it easy to buy food that would otherwise go unsold.