Oh, the Apple App Store. It turns ten years old on Tuesday, July 10 2018. I remember being at the Moscone Center, at the WWDC keynote when it was first announced in 2008. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t mad about it.
Move along, I thought, to something more interesting. All there’ll be in this store is an international sizing guide and a Spanish-to-English phrasebook. Something like that.
It turns out I was wrong. Even from day one, there was everything from the useful to the preposterous, almost all available for free or very little money. Here’s my choice of ten of the best, including some you might have missed.
I mean, there are scores more I am keen on, and which nearly made the cut, like Monument Valley and tkts, Chirpomatic and Alto’s Odyssey. Maybe I’ll come back to those.
Not to mention the apps that shifted what the iPhone does in radical ways, like Uber and Duolingo.
But these are my favorites, right now.
In tenth place: Dark Sky
Sure, this is especially useful in a country like the UK where it rains a lot (although, and I don’t want to come across as too jingoistic, New York has higher rainfall than London). Anyway, Dark Sky gives the most intensely local forecasts you’ll find. When you launch it, it shows your precise address at the top of the screen. It’ll tell you the forecast rain in similar detail: “Light rain starting in 15 minutes and continuing for the hour” and you may trust that it will.
In ninth place: Super Mario Run
Nintendo’s plumber arrived on the iPhone with a tremendous fanfare and didn’t disappoint. A game you can play one-handed because Mario runs automatically, and you must direct his jumps, bounces and falls. It was pricier than most games but at least there were no in-app purchases. My only disappointment with it was that you had to have a network signal before you started playing, which reduced my inflight play.
In eighth place: Plane Finder
Sure, this is a niche app, but I love it. Hold the iPhone up and the camera shows the scene in front of you. Then, it’ll tell you the identity of that plane cresting the horizon, including where it’s come from and where it’s headed. An earlier example of AR than most apps have mustered, it’s not always perfectly accurate (the plane may be a little ahead of or behind the label that floats in the sky onscreen) but it’s enormous fun.
In seventh place: 1Password
Although Apple’s own password management has improved hugely, and you can after all put all the passwords in notes that you can lock with a password of their own, this is still the best password manager app around, combining great design, strong features, excellent cloud synchronisation and more. There is a monthly subscription, but it’s so good, it’s worth it.
In sixth place: Instagram
The most elegant, attractive and fulfilling of the social networks, Instagram gave us a chance to talk to our friends and show our photographic capabilities (unless you just take pictures of your lunch plate or your legs on a sun lounger). It has become one of the things I could now not manage without on my phone.
In fifth place: Monzo
This is a British banking app that is a joy to use. It doesn’t stiff you for roaming fees when you pay for stuff overseas, it even lets you withdraw a certain amount of cash abroad without charges and, as of a month or so, it works with Apple Pay, too. As you finish a transaction, it flashes up on your iPhone or Apple Watch, where it offers to file it under expenses or whatever you choose. Very satisfying.
In fourth place: PayPal
On day one of the App Store, the PayPal app was launched. A decade later, it is still very highly ranked among finance apps. Its skill was the way it reimagined how people could send and receive money. It replaced a longwinded bank transfer process with a service that allowed users to send money with just an email address or mobile number.
In third place: British Airways
Many of us have a favorite airline. BA is mine and its app is brilliant, certainly more advanced and easier to use than most other airlines. It’s easy to buy tickets with cash or BA’s own Avios air miles system, simple to check in, choose seats and much more, even down to telling you the password in the lounge. Air travel is stressful enough – this makes things just a little easier.
In second place: Headspace
There are plenty of meditation apps, some of them really as wonderful as this one but Headspace came first and continues to offer something organic, simple and wholly inviting. The comforting voice of founder Andy Puddicombe is enough to soothe the mind the moment you hear it, and the advice and assistance it gives is attractively presented, enough to keep you coming back tomorrow for more.
In first place: Citymapper
I don’t have a great sense of direction, you see, so navigation of any sort is beneficial. But in the cities where Citymapper operates, I’m fine. It’ll tell me the public transport details from trains to buses to public hire bikes with detailed accuracy, even down to which carriage I should ride the London Underground for the quickest changeover or exit. It’s witty and fun.
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