My favorite genre of apps
Indie apps are just the best. They’re usually built by people who care about the problem they’re solving. They’re also often the first to adopt the great new OS features that make our devices easier, faster, and more delightful to use.
I’d like to shout out a bunch of indie apps I use on any sort of regular basis. Instead of turning this into some kind of series, I decided to try a speedrun of the ones that have earned their keep on my devices. No particular order, but you should definitely download and buy or subscribe to all their things. Or at least some of them, please. Let me know if you’d like me to delve further into how I use any of ’em.
Disclaimer: No, I have not rigorously vetted the financials or company structure of every app on this list. Maybe one or two are quietly owned by Microsoft or some sort of… app hedge fund? Are those a thing? Whatever. To the best of my knowledge, these all seem to be from indie crews and, in some cases, individual developers.
Annotable
website
Solid utility for marking up images with arrows, shapes, redacted boxes, and more. Annotable has an editing extension that appears in Photos, which is probably 95% of the way I interact with it. iPhone, iPad
Play
website
A ‘watch it later’ app for YouTube, Vimeo, and many other services. It has lots of handy stuff like tags, a quick-access app extension, a Mac version, and an Apple TV version, which is where I actually watch stuff. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV
Tripsy
website
A personal, collaborative, and private travel app that feels more focused on vacations than other services, most of which seem business-first to me. You can add a wide variety of vacation-y activities (a concert, national park, tour, etc.) to an itinerary, view them as a rolling schedule, plot them all on a map, and collaborate on trips with other people. iPhone, iPad, Mac
Mematic
website
Nice, straightforward app for creating memes. It has a meme-specific search engine for templates, or you can use your own photos. iPhone, iPad
Ivory
website
A spiritual successor to the exceptional Tweetbot, built by the same devs. A great Mastodon app with nearly all the features I want (though I wish I could browse and interact with other public servers). iPhone, iPad, Mac
Callsheet
website
A full alternative to the IMDB, Callsheet finds info on films, TV shows, actors, and such. It also has clever features like the option to hide character names, episode titles, and even thumbnails in order to avoid spoilers. iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision
Darkroom
website
Not a camera, but a powerful way to edit and organize your photos and videos that basically sits on top of your Photos library. Delete a few shots in Darkroom, they’re gone from Photos. iPhone, iPad, Mac, iMessage
Sofa
website
A “downtime organizer” to collect and track things you want to watch, play, and read. Better than a simple notes app or bookmark tool, it automatically grabs stuff like trailers, release dates, and links to stream or buy the thing. You can even create custom categories to track whatever you want, like bike paths or recipes. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision
Drafts
website
“Where text starts.” Drafts is a fast, powerful way to get ideas out of your head and onto digital paper, then do something with them later—edit, publish, or send to another app. One of my favorite features is the Watch app can be set to launch directly into dictation mode, which is probably the primary way I use it. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch
MusicMatch
website
Find music on your preferred service. Someone shares a Shopify link to an album? MusicMatch will take you to it on Apple Music, or YouTube, or Pandora, etc. iPhone, iPad, Mac
SongShift
website
Copy and share playlists to different music services. Want to share a playlist with a friend who uses a different service? Are you switching form Spotify to YouTube, or Tidal to Apple Music? SongShift makes the dream happen. iPhone, iPad
Raindrop
website
Feature-packed bookmarking service that supports tags, folders and collections, automation, and saving a PDF copy of every link and article. It supports IFTTT too, so sky’s the limit. iPhone, iPad, and Mac via browser extension + web app
Carrot Weather
website
Beautiful, flexible, and optionally malicious weather app. It has a fake bot personality that can be as murderous or light-hearted as you choose. Its app layout and Apple Watch complications are exhaustively customizable, so you can dial in exactly the info you need, complete with multiple layouts. iPhone, iPad, Watch, Vision
GIFWrapped
website
Clever app for searching and collecting a library of GIFs. It has a Messages app for quick responses. I wish its UI was a little more useful when it comes time to grab something to paste into apps other than Messages, but it’s still good at what it does. iPhone, iPad, Mac, iMessage
Ulysses
website
Excellent Markdown writing app whether you want to journal, run a blog, write a book, or produce client work. Ulysses is quite flexible and packed with clever features. I’ve written the majority of Finer Things in Tech in it. iPhone, iPad, Mac
Keep It
website
A notes app packed with quite a few features, though my favorite is that it supports Document Providers in iOS and iPadOS. This means it can appear as a source alongside iCloud, OneDrive, and Dropbox in the Files app and anywhere you can up/download files. iPhone, iPad, Mac is a separate purchase
Things 3
website
A pinnacle of elegant, useful task and project management. Things 3 is beautiful and clever throughout. While I have my complaints—I really wish we could create headings in Areas, which are basically a place to organize projects—it splits my task needs with Apple Reminders. It’s a separate purchase for iPhone, iPad, Mac
Halide
website
A powerful camera with a simple design to control everything when taking photos—white balance, exposure, focus, etc. It has an optional, handy beginner’s email course if you’re new to taking the reigns of your photography, and a new “Process Zero” mode that can remove as much of Apple’s automatic processing as possible. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch
Tailor
website
A single-serving utility that automatically stitches together multiple screenshots of long, scrolled content. Not just for chat threads, it can stitch together webpages, articles, a long list of tasks, a ‘tall’ screen in an app, just about anything I’ve thrown at it. iPhone only, though I wish there was an iPad version
Honorable Mentions
This is the category of “I own and like these apps but do not yet use them as often as I wish I did.”
Spectre
website
From the Halide folks, Spectre is a long-exposure app for taking unique photos you can’t get any other way. It can blur a waterfall, make lights linger and dance, or on the other end of this spectrum, make a crowd disappear from a busy tourist spot. I’m taking a vacation with my wife soon, I really want to try that last idea at a couple landmarks. iPhone only
Nebula
website
A creator-owned video platform that is mostly the smart, interesting stuff from YouTube without the ads—video essays, culture analysis, podcasts, and some original series now too. I think you can find most of this stuff cross-posted to YouTube for obvious reasons. But creators also post exclusive stuff here and, as I think I heard somewhere, get a larger cut of sub revenue. iPhone, iPad, Apple TV
Streaks
website
A habit tracker I recently dusted off with a refreshingly simple UI. I’m bad at creating and keeping habits, so here goes nothing. One feature I like about it is the option of a sort of ‘anti-habit’ to track things you want to stop doing, like biting your nails. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, Vision
