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!
deleted by creator
Bruh…too soon 😭
For real. At least we have Voyager!
Memmy has more than filled the gap pour moi
Vinegar. It’s a safari extension that changes the YT player into the stock iPhone one and skips ads. Well worth the one time purchase!
Omg! I’m downloading this now. I already use YouTube via safari instead of the YouTube app.
sponsor block is a great addition to vinegar as well
Just downloaded thanks!
Just bought it too! Thanks for the recommendation! I got the bundle with baking soda, have you used that as well?
What the fuck craig
I thought Craig was just being weird, but the Fizzy Water bundle includes Vinegar and Baking Soda, a companion app that makes a similar change to (allegedly all) other sites that have custom video players.
My app glitched. Kept saying my comment failed to post
Omg! I’m downloading this now. I already use YouTube via safari instead of the YouTube app.
Just bought it too! Thanks for the recommendation! I got the bundle with baking soda, have you used that as well?
Just bought it too! Thanks for the recommendation! I got the bundle with baking soda, have you used that as well?
Yeah I’ve tried baking soda out. It’s handy but I seem to just stick to YT so use vinegar more. Absolutely brilliant apps
Just bought it too! Thanks for the recommendation! I got the bundle with baking soda, have you used that as well?
Seek by iNaturalist
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.
Whoa! This sounds rad.
Sounds great, have just downloaded. Does it outperform the recognition of iPhone photos for plants etc?
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.
Tldr yes
Paprika. It downloads saves and organizes recipes from just about any website, bypassing annoying ad floaters and, magically, paywalls. I use it constantly. It’s a one time purchase for all your devices. Does shopping lists too, if that’s your thing.
Another recipe app I recommend is Mela.
Sounds like a recipe for a genius and useful app
RecipeBox is another good one that has a recipe search function and a grocery list function that connects to your recipes and populates what you need directly from the recipe itself.
Ooh I dug through recipe apps a while back, I ended up using Pestle. It’s pricier than Paprika but I prefer the Pestle UI. Both good apps with similar feature sets, just providing another option.
Paprika - $5 Pestle - $20/yr or $40 lifetime
The built-in document scanning shortcut. It’s a Files feature. If you go to Shortcuts and search files you’ll see it. It can be put on the homepage or dock for easy access.
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
deleted by creator
Me too. It just works.
I use Scanner Pro but this is a great freebie for sure!
Wow, incredible! Thanks!
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.
Gotta use this more, I just hate having to do the grinding of whipping up an entire specialized deck.
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
I use to use Java and Hashmaps with arrays and such.
The original Angry Birds still holds up perfectly imo
I bought the original on my iPhone 4 and still have it in my purchase history, but when I download it on my iPad today it’s full if ads and limited lives….
What am I doing wrong?
Such a classic. 'Member Papi-ball or whatever?
Papi jump!!!
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.
Gotta subscribe though, don’t you?
One person needs to subscribe (I thought it was like 3 bucks a year) for all the premium sharing features.
My wife and I just use a shared checklist note in Notes. I used to use AnyList but found the UI to be not so great.
Notes just isn’t a substitute for us unfortunately. It’s not nearly as feature rich. I don’t think there’s a feature of AnyList we don’t use.
Another vote for anylist!
Kiwix: Download Wikipedia for offline reading.
Glorious, love this app. All of Wikipedia on ur phone
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.
ShowPal’s actually sick too, has all the seasons and where to actually stream it!
Do you have an app link? Searching for “episodes” shows a ton of romantic apps.
Oh I’m silly. It’s “next episode” not episodes! Sorry, I’ll have to edit my comment.
So this one then.
Look at ShowPal before you commit to that one. It looks better and the privacy deets are better.
Oh shit, the might be what I need to finally unsubscribe from the last few streaming services I pay for and fully hit the high seas.
eta: downloaded it and spent the last 30 minutes perusing and bought the app. Looks great.
Quite an august post for you then, June 🏛️
Does it work for Australian shows, or is this an American Only method? Can’t find the answer on their page, so I am guessing it is not for us.
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.
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.
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.
The one I wrote myself to automate tasks at work. It has saved me hundreds of hours of tedium and makes my job so much easier. It only cost me a few weeks of learning (I am not a developer, just a tinkerer) to get it done. It lives happily on my phone and iPad and I use it every day.
You wanna tell us more? Kinda hard to act on this :/
Edit: I might do one on Shortcuts although that might be trickier given the lack of anonymity in “sharing” them since its iCloud and tied to your Apple account :/
Oops, I’m sorry - I should have mentioned that it’s not on the App Store. It is chock full of company proprietary documents, photos and sales formulae. I wrote it just for myself.
If you could elaborate maybe on some (if any) of the novel functioning or interesting bits about it that give folks a better jumping-off point to independantly investigate, that would be coo
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.
Memmy
