10 iPhone Apps Worth Buying
Free mobile apps are great, but sometimes the features within an app are worth an additional cost. Here are 10 paid iPhone apps to add to your collection.
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Apple is coming out with a few new iOS devices this year. The company unveiled its new iPhone SE and updated iPad Pro during a recent keynote event, and it's expected to launch the iPhone 7 later this year.
Pricing for the iPhone SE starts at $400, which is fairly cheap for Apple, but still steep compared with less expensive smartphones from other companies. Cupertino is attempting to position the phone towards new iPhone owners and people who prefer smaller devices.
If you're thinking about picking up the new iPhone SE, you aren't alone. Apple's newest iPhone, which has a compact four-inch footprint, has been getting positive reviews thanks to its powerful processor and strong battery life.
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The 64GB model of the iPhone SE costs $500. With $100 separating the 16GB and 64GB models, some shoppers may opt to splurge for the extra space to store photos, videos and apps. Apple's App Store grows by the day with new apps for entertainment, productivity, health, and wealth.
Oftentimes when people browse the App Store, they're looking for free tools. With so many unpaid apps available, it's easy to understand how some shoppers may avoid the "paid" section.
That said, you get what you pay for, and mobile apps are no exception.
Oftentimes paid mobile apps are worth their cost because of the additional features they provide. The 10 apps highlighted here are not free, but could make strong additions to your app collection -- whether or not you have a new iPhone.
Are there any iPhone apps you have found are worth the cost? We'd like to keep adding to this list, so please add suggestions in the comments.
(All images are screenshots from Apple's App Store)
If you're someone who lives and breathes the smartphone calendar, the iCal Widget is worth the $1.99 it costs to download. The app pulls your daily and weekly schedules from the iPhone calendar and puts them on your Notification Center widget screen. That way you don't have to open the calendar app to access your schedule. You can simply access the Notification Center to see what's coming up for the next hour or the upcoming five to seven days.
There are plenty of financial apps designed to keep meticulous track of exactly where your money goes. It makes sense: In an effort to be financially savvy, many people want to allocate budgets to food, clothes, rent, etc.
However, sometimes you don't need a financial app to give you complex charts and graphs detailing every step of your spending patterns. This is where Pennies comes in. The app provides a simple and intuitive way to keep track of how much money you spend each month and how much is left. You can use it to set up one or multiple budgets, depending on how detailed you want to be.
When you make a purchase, you simply enter the numbers -- no tags or categories required. In the app's notification center, you can view your daily budgets, which are automatically set up in your local currency but can be changed. Pennies costs $4.99.
There are several exercise apps you can download for free, but paid fitness apps often provide more variety in their workouts. The 7 Minute Workout Challenge, available for $2.99, offers 12 intense but effective workouts that can be done in seven-minute sessions. Each session consists of a series of exercises that are performed for 30 seconds each with 10-second intervals.
The perfectly timed, bite-size workouts are easy to cram into a busy schedule, making this app a handy tool for professionals who frequently travel or need to squeeze fitness into hectic workdays.
The Contacts app built into iOS is handy for storing names and email addresses, but it leaves much to be desired. If you're looking for a more comprehensive app for your contacts, you might want to check out Interact. The third-party offering lets you create and delete groups from your iOS device, manage multiple contacts at the same time, or send group messages or email from any app with attachments from Google, iCloud, and other services.
Through a nifty feature called Scratchpad, Interact users can create and update contact information by selecting text on Web pages, in email signatures, and within other apps. Natural language parsing determines names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, and other data in plain text, then automatically organizes them into the correct contact fields. Interact simplifies the typically multi-step process of leaving apps to access Contacts and update important information. Interact costs $4.99.
Maybe you prefer meditation, not exercise, to de-stress. Pause is an app inspired by mindfulness practice and Tai Chi. Users are supposed to slowly move their fingertip across the screen, a motion the creators promise will trigger a "rest and digest" response that helps release stress and regain focus. Audiovisual feedback is intended to keep you focused and in the moment. It seems simple, but the creators promise the app's design is supported by EEG studies. Pause costs $1.99.
The iPhone comes with a built-in Weather app, but those looking for a more detailed and accurate weather app can download Dark Sky. The app is designed to provide a forecast for your specific location, not the largest nearby city. It gives updates right down to the minute. It will tell you how far away the nearest precipitation is and let you track storms.
You can use Dark Sky to enable push notifications so you can receive alerts when it starts to rain, or create custom notifications for specific temperature or wind conditions. It's also visually appealing, with beautiful maps to show the weather for your location. The app costs $3.99.
If you enjoy journaling but want to keep a digital record of your entries, check out Day One, a well-designed and comprehensive journal app. It's easy to record content and add extra information like tags, weather, geographical information, or music you're listening to as you write. When you want to go back to a certain day or event, Day One lets you search entries using keywords. It also comes with a pass code lock and compatible Mac and iPad apps. The app costs $4.99.
Scanbot is a mobile scanner app for documents, QR codes, and barcodes. There are both free and paid versions of Scanbot. With the free app you can scan PDFs or JPGs, integrate with cloud, scan QR codes, create multi-page documents, and use automatic optimization for scanned content.
The free version is handy, but Scanbot Pro offers a few more useful features that make it worth the $7.99 upgrade. Scanbot Pro provides access to text recognition, so you can extract the text within scans for copy and search, in addition to smart file naming, PDF password protection, more cloud connection with WebDAV and FTP, pass code protection with TouchID, and the option to add pages to existing scans.
Unread is a simple and easy-to-navigate RSS news reader for iOS. The app provides a visually appealing way to stay updated about your favorite authors and topics. You can keep subscriptions up-to-date in the background, double-tap an article summary to mark it as read or unread, view big previews of article images, and select a default browser.
The app is available to download for free, but the unpaid version lets you read up to 50 articles, then three per day once those are used up. You can pay a one-time $4.99 fee for unlimited reading and access to seven additional themes.
Workflow, available for $2.99, is an automation app for creating workflows for your iPhone. You can drag and drop over 200 actions, including those for Photos, Safari, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, iCloud, Health, Calendar, Contacts, Music, and Reminders. It can be used, for example, to access all images on a Web page, send a message that includes your last screenshots, or create a home screen icon for calling a specific person.
The workflows you create can be launched from inside the app, from within other apps using Workflow's Action Extension, or from the Today Widget. You may also opt to export a workflow as its own app on your home screen.
Workflow, available for $2.99, is an automation app for creating workflows for your iPhone. You can drag and drop over 200 actions, including those for Photos, Safari, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, iCloud, Health, Calendar, Contacts, Music, and Reminders. It can be used, for example, to access all images on a Web page, send a message that includes your last screenshots, or create a home screen icon for calling a specific person.
The workflows you create can be launched from inside the app, from within other apps using Workflow's Action Extension, or from the Today Widget. You may also opt to export a workflow as its own app on your home screen.
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