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The best apps for your new iPhone

The best apps for your new iPhone

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You got a new iPhone, huh? Good luck with the headphone situation. It's really not so bad once you get used to it. Thankfully, no matter how Apple changes the hardware, the iPhone still has beautiful, useful apps, many of which are available on no other platform. I picked a few of my favorites. It's going to be great, trust me. Dongles are a small price to pay for this sweet ecosystem.

We've rounded up our favorite and most-used apps and utilities for the technology we use every day. Check out our other picks for Android phones, PCs, and Macs. We've also listed our favorite games for iOS and Android from this year.

NOISE

Roli launched this weird modular "Block" music hardware this year, but it's all powered by your iOS device... and the app is free! Thanks to 3D Touch, you can do everything you'd do on the blocks hardware for 0% of the price. Congrats, you're musical now.

Reddit

I spend a lot of time on Reddit, and the recently released official iPhone app is just excellent. It's small, fast, and in my opinion preferable to the desktop web experience.

Netflix

I know, you were probably going to download this without my prompting. But were you aware Netflix now has offline playback? Because that changes the whole game. You just pull up whatever you want to watch, tap a bunch of episodes for download, and enjoy them at your leisure. Not everything is available for offline. But Terrace House is. I guess I'm saying you should watch Terrace House.

Khan Academy

Wanna be more smart about math and science and stuff? Khan Academy has been learning me good for years, but recently the iPhone app has gotten a lot better. You can watch lessons and even take quizzes offline. And there is so much to learn, all for free.

H__r

This one is hard to describe. Basically, imagine the soundscape from a scene in a movie where somebody is concussed, or in a dream sequence, or maybe in heaven. Now imagine that happens in real-time. H__r doesn't just play a soundscape, it turns the sounds around you into that soundscape, and it's the best.

Simplenote

simplenote iphone notebook

There are at least one million ways to take notes on an iPhone. You'll probably want to pick whichever one blends the best with the other tools you like to use. Dropbox? Outlook? iCloud? Evernote? There are apps for all of those. I like to use Simplenote. It syncs everything I write to the cloud as I write it (to Simplenote's own servers), and I've found it to be stable, trustworthy, and non-note-destroying over the many years I've used it.

Audible

I love audiobooks. Audible gets me audiobooks. It's a little annoying on iOS (and completely Apple's fault) that you have to do all your book shopping in the web browser, then pop back to the Audible app to download the book. But it's fine, whatever. Books! I have lots of them.

comiXology

My exposure to comics is limited, but I've been reading a few classics lately and comiXology is the best way I've found to do it. Unfortunately, buying comics (in your web browser, just like Audible) is an expensive habit. But on an iPhone screen, comiXology's method of zooming and panning on comic panels is indispensable.

Motion Stills

Google Motion Stills

I'm not really a photo taking kind of person, but everyone I know raves about Motion Still so I thought I'd include it here in case you are a photo taking kind of person. Apple's default Live Photos are confusing and kind of useless (you typically need to press hard on a photo to see it animate), but Google's Motion Stills app takes those Live Photos and turns them into cool, easy to share GIFs.