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These are the 11 iPhone apps I can't live without
I love apps.
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At this moment, I have 128 total apps on my iPhone. And believe it or not, they all fit onto a single page thanks to folders that organize everything into genres and use cases.
Despite so many apps, I rarely use all of them. Like most people, I spend a majority of my time in just a handful of apps.
There are lots of great apps out there, but these are the ones I personally can't live without.
Twitter is the easily the best app for breaking and developing news, but it's also great to just follow the people you care about and see what they're interested in. And the more people you follow, the more interesting things you'll come across, like links, videos, and stories. As a journalist, but also as someone who's always interested in what important people are talking about, Twitter is a must.
Reddit has been the "front page of the internet" for over a decade. With a constantly-updating feed of user-submitted posts — including links, pictures, videos, GIFs, and so much more — and communities or "subreddits" for everything under the sun, Reddit offers something for everyone and every interest. Alien Blue was such a popular way to browser Reddit on the iPhone that Reddit actually bought the app, making it the official Reddit client. You'll never be bored on your iPhone again.
Though Apple's built-in maps are getting better all the time, Google Maps is still one of the best mapping and navigation apps out there right now. Since I use Google Maps a lot on my laptop, I can send transit, walking, or driving directions from my computer straight to my iPhone. It's also great for finding and discovering restaurants or places of interest.
When I'm not using public transit, Uber will quickly and efficiently get me to anywhere I want to go. The popular car-hailing app, to me, is much better than a cab: I don't have to wait in a line to get one, and since I can rate my driver at the end of the ride, Uber drivers tend to be friendlier and drive more safely to my destination. In the end, it costs about the same as a cab ride, but it's a much better user experience.
Solebon Solitaire was one of the first games I ever downloaded on my first iPhone — and I still have it and play it to this day. In total, I've spent 800+ hours playing over 38,000 games of Solebon's solitaire. It's a great game because you can quickly pick it up and put it down for brief periods of time — like during my commute, or while I'm waiting for someone or something. It's addictive, easy, fun, and never gets old.
Ruzzle is a fun and addictive word game that gives you two minutes to create as many possible words from a grid of 16 letters. You can challenge your friends or random people to games, which are comprised of three separate rounds where it becomes gradually easier to get higher and higher scores (due to the Scrabble-like additions of double letter scores, triple word scores, etc.). It's a good game for keeping your mind — and your vocabulary — fresh.
There are plenty of music streaming services out there right now, but Spotify is hands-down the best one. It has a vast library like many other services, but Spotify sets itself apart by offering the best ways to discover new music. It offers intuitive ways to browse different genres and artists you might like, but Spotify goes one step further and delivers you a personalized playlist of music you'll probably like every single Monday, which is one of the best music features I've ever encountered. My music library would be nothing without Spotify.
I was introduced to Venmo after my first Business Insider party around September 2014. I split a cab with several other tech reporters, but when I offered to pay with my card, everyone said they'd pay me back using Venmo. I was amazed to see how quick and easy it was to pay people and get paid from people. These days, I use it all the time to split the costs of living with my girlfriend for things like rent, our cable and electricity bills, groceries, and more.
Some days, you just don't feel like cooking. And before my girlfriend moved in with me, this was almost all the time. So for the lazy, the tired, or the non-cooking crowd, there's Seamless. Available in most states and major cities in the US, Seamless lets you order food from nearby restaurants and delivers it straight to your door. It's incredibly convenient for those times where nothing in your kitchen looks appealing.
Lots of thoughts and ideas go through my head every day. But on the rare occasion where it's actually a good idea, either for a Tech Insider story or a gift idea or something else entirely, I just need a blank sheet of paper to write something down on. Thankfully, Apple's Notes app is pretty good at doing just that. It opens quickly and offers lots of ways to jot down your ideas — in the latest version, you can even draw directly in the Notes app like you can with Evernote, which is fun for doodling or illustrating your ideas.
Apple's Notes app comes built-in with every iPhone.
Slack has transformed the way I work. At Tech Insider, we use Slack to share story ideas, communicate with each other, and coordinate our coverage, among other things. But Slack is great because it works seamlessly across my devices, and it looks and works great on the iPhone — it's super intuitive and it has all the same features as the desktop version. So if you work at all with groups of people on a regular basis, you should be using Slack for that.
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