Apps get publicity. Not all apps are created equal, however. Sure there are the big name apps that everyone has heard of like Angry Birds and Instagram, but what about the less publicized apps? What about the hidden gems? In this article we bring you our top 12 favorite under-the-radar apps for the iPhone. These will help you make your phone even more useful, fun and entertaining. Many of these have been available for a while now, but there are some very recent additions that are worth checking out.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Iphone 12 Pro Max 2021
Best iPhone app of the month: Pixelmator Photo
Screenshots showing Pixelmator Photo on iPhone
(Image credit: Pixelmator Team)
$7.99/£6.99/AU$12.99
Pixelmator Photo wowed on its 2019 iPad debut. It let you improve photos with a single tap, by way of a machine learning system trained on millions of pro-grade pics. And if you wanted more control, you could endlessly fiddle with a selection of sliders and filters.
The iPhone incarnation of Pixelmator loses none of the functionality of its iPad sibling. Impressively, it remains usable too. Sure, it’s comparatively cramped, due to the iPhone’s smaller display. But it wisely provides fast access to important controls, and lets you hide away what you don’t need.
It might sound hyperbolic to say you should only avoid buying this app if you don’t want your photos to look better, but that’s the truth. There’s nothing else like it on iPhone, whether you want lighting-fast one-tap fixes or to dig deeper into fine-tuning your snaps.
Best iPhone photo editing and camera apps
These are our favorite iPhone apps for editing snaps, capturing photos and video and applying the filters that actually make things look good.
Halide Mark II – Pro Camera
(Image credit: Lux Optics Incorporated)
Halide Mark II – Pro Camera
Free trial + IAP
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Halide Mark II – Pro Camera isn’t mucking around. It has serious pricing – $11.99/£11.99/AU$19.49 per year or $39.99/£38.99/AU$62.99 ‘forever’ – but then it’s a serious camera, designed to get the most out of your iPhone.
The app’s layout doesn’t bombard newcomers with options, yet puts powerful functions within easy reach, with gestures mimicking actions you’d make with real-world cameras. Manual focus puts you in control, while peaking and similar tools ensure you never take a duff shot.
Best of all, the app can optionally smartly marry Apple’s processing with the needs of pro photographers, making the RAW format accessible and immediate. In short, Halide is a better camera app for your iPhone’s camera.
Inkwork
(Image credit: Code Organa)
Inkwork
$2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49
Inkwork is an app designed to instantly transform a photo into a sketch-based work of art. And, yes, we’ve seen this all before – but few filter apps catch the eye in quite the same way as Inkwork.
The interface is sleek and polished. You can quickly switch background and ink colors, and the size of the strokes, thereby making your virtual sketch more detailed or abstract, but really it’s the filters themselves you’ll spend most time fiddling with.
There are loads of them – perhaps a few too many, because the choice can initially be a bit overwhelming – but for anyone who likes black and white art, there’s everything here from scratchy pen hatching to stylized comic-book fare. Selections happen instantly and without needing the internet, cementing the app’s place in our list.
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RTRO
(Image credit: Moment Inc.)
RTRO
Free + IAP
RTRO is a vintage camera app from the folks behind Pro Camera. But whereas that app’s a serious sort, attempting to transform your iPhone into a DSLR, RTRO is a mite more playful.
That doesn’t mean the app isn’t stylish, though; RTRO has a minimalist retro vibe that sits nicely alongside its various vintage looks that you apply to your movies. These range from distressed VHS fuzz to subtle color shifts and film grain. Every filter has notes from its creator, outlining what they were aiming for.
Shooting is simple, and you can capture up to 60 seconds of video across multiple shots, before sharing your miniature masterpiece with your social network of choice. Neatly, although there is a subscription charge, you can alternatively opt to buy one-off looks at a couple of bucks a pop.
Apollo
(Image credit: Indice Ltd)
Apollo
$2.99/£2.99/AU$4.99
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Apollo enables you to apply new light sources to Portrait Mode photos. This kind of photo records depth information, and can be shot on any relatively recent iPhone (iPhone 7 Plus/8 Plus/any ‘X’ iPhone). In Apple’s Photos app, you can add studio-style lighting, but Apollo takes things further.
The interface is usable, and offers scope for creativity. It’s simple to add multiple lights, and then for each one define distance, color, brightness, spread, and mask effects for simulating effects such as shadows being cast from light coming through a window blind.
Apollo perhaps isn’t an iPhone app if you want an instant fix. It demands you delve into the details, and fine-tune your settings. Also, it doesn’t always create a realistic result. But when it works, this is a little slice of magic, enabling you to apply complex lighting to a photo after the fact.
TouchRetouch
(Image credit: Adva-Soft)
TouchRetouch
$1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99
TouchRetouch can rid photos of unwanted elements. Such tools are commonplace – even in free apps like Snapseed – but TouchRetouch being dedicated to the task affords it focus; more importantly, the tools you get are really good.
Blemishes on faces can be removed with a tap. Larger objects can be painted out, whereupon the app fills in the gaps. Alternatively, you can clone from one part of the image to another. There’s also a line remover, which smartly makes short work of power lines and the like that otherwise carve their way across your pic.
Obviously, automation of this kind has some shortcomings – TouchRetouch can’t match desktop apps where you partake in painstaking, time-consuming, pro-level retouching. But for the average iPhone owner wanting to remove annoying things from pics, it’s well worth the small outlay.
Darkroom
(Image credit: TechRadar)
Darkroom
Free + various IAP
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Darkroom is yet another photo editor for iPhone, but just a few minutes in, you’ll likely decide it should be forever welded to your home screen.
The app is efficient, usable and sleek. Immediately, it invites you to delve into your on-device images. There’s no mucking around. Cropping tools and adjustments sliders bring out the best from what you shoot. Splash out on some IAP and you gain access to pro-oriented curves and color tools.
Edits are non-destructive, and you can save your work directly to your Camera Roll (in a manner that can later be reversed), or export copies. The process feels effortless
throughout, but pause for a moment and you realize how powerful Darkroom is. Only to be avoided, then, if you for some reason don’t want your photos to look better!
Camera+
Camera+
$2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49
Camera+ is a combined camera and editor. Despite the wealth of available options, the interface is initially quite minimal, with a modes strip across the top of the screen, a zoom slider, and the shutter. But tap the + button and you reveal further modes, including a timer, a stabilizer and smile detection.
Similarly, tap the viewfinder area and Camera+ enters a ‘pro’ mode, with manual controls, and scene options for shooting under specific lighting conditions. The interface is finicky compared to Obscura 2, but Camera+ is undoubtedly powerful.
Post-shooting, you can edit with adjustment tools, filters, and frames in the Lightbox. This all comes across as impressively friendly and straightforward, and although the range of tools doesn’t compare to Snapseed’s, it’s enough to keep you within the one app for the most part.
Oilist
Oilist
$2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49
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Oilist is a generational art app. You feed it something from Photos, choose a style, and it gets to work, continually repainting your image. It’s like someone’s trapped a tiny van Gogh in your iPhone.
In fact, it’s like a slew of artists are stuck in your device, because Oilist has a massive range of styles to choose from, taking in everything from classic oil painters through to modern art. Although the app can be left alone in a dock, you can capture stills for posterity, or fiddle with settings (including brush strokes, mood, ‘chaos’ and gravity) to redirect the virtual artist.
Whether you interact or just sit back and watch, Oilist is mesmerizing – kind of like a painterly lava lamp, only what you see is based on one of your own cherished photographs.
Snapseed
Snapseed
Free
Snapseed is a free photo editor with a feature set that rivals the very best premium apps. It’s geared towards users of any level, from those who fancy applying quick filters to anyone who wants to dig deep into adjustments and powerful editing tools.
The range of options is dazzling, and the interface is smartly conceived. You can crop, make adjustments, and edit curves, all with a few swipes and taps. Often, vertical drags select parameters, and horizontal drags define an effect’s strength – tactile and intuitive. Even better, edits are non-destructive, and can be removed or changed at any point by accessing them in the edits stack.
As a final sign off, the app enables you to save any combination of adjustments as a custom preset, which you can then apply to any image in the future with a single tap. Superb stuff.
Obscura 2
Obscura 2
$4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99
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Obscura 2 is the best manual camera app for iPhone. It achieves this not with a slew of features, but by providing an interaction model that’s so brilliantly conceived that you simply won’t want to use another iPhone camera.
Echoing manual cameras of old, everything is based around a contextual wheel that sits above the shutter. Initially, you use it to select a tool. When setting focus or exposure, the wheel enables you to make fine adjustments with your thumb. You get a real feel of precision control, with optional haptic feedback confirming your choices.
The app makes the odd concession to modern photography trends with a range of filters, but mostly Obscura 2 wants you to think a little more about what you’re snapping, all while breathing in its minimal yet approachable and deeply pleasing design.
Retrospecs
Retrospecs
Free + $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99
Retrospecs is a camera app that wants you to see the world as if it was being rendered by ancient computing and gaming hardware. Load a photo – or take one using the app – and you can select from a wide range of systems, such as the Game Boy, Commodore 64, and original Mac.
But this isn’t just a single-tap filter app for aficionados of pixel art. You can adjust dither, image corruption, and virtual CRT distortion. You get animation effects and video support. And should you get fed up with the included emulated systems, you can even make your own.
So whether you believe all your photos should look like an eight-bit video game or want to add a crazy glitch sequence to your next YouTube video, Retrospecs fits the bill perfectly.
Mextures
Mextures
$1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99
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Modern iPhones have some seriously impressive camera hardware, and are capable of taking clean, vibrant shots. So it’s perhaps no surprise that iPhone users are often hell-bent on slathering said images in filters and messing them up.
Mextures is a decidedly extreme example, providing a theoretically unlimited number of layers to play with, each of which can have some kind of effect applied. These include grit, grain, light leaks, gradients, and more.
Because each layer can be fine-tuned in terms of opacity and blend mode, you can get anything from subtle film textures to seriously eye-popping grunge effects.
Hit upon something particularly amazing and you can share your ‘formulas’ with other people. Or if you’re in need of a quick fix, you can grab something that’s already online to overhaul your snaps.
Hipstamatic
Hipstamatic
$2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49
There are two sides to Hipstamatic. In its ‘native’ form, the app apes old-school point-and-click cameras. You get a tiny viewport inside a virtual plastic camera body, and can swap out lenses, film, and flashes, along with messing about with multiple exposures and manual shutters. It’s pleasingly tactile and twangs your nostalgia gland, but feels a bit cramped.
If you’d rather use your entire iPhone display to show what you’re snapping, you can switch to a ‘pro’ camera mode. That’s closer in nature to Apple’s own Camera, but with Hipstamatic’s huge range of rather lovely filters bolted on – a great mash-up of old and new.
And if you’re wedded to Apple’s camera, Hipstamatic’s still worth a download, given that you can load a photo, slather it in filters, add loads of effects and bask in your creative genius.
Best apps for iphone 12 pro max free
- Drafts
best free iphone apps: Drafts
(Image credit: Agile Tortoise)
Agile Tortoise makes a mean note taking and quick-fire writing app with the aptly named Drafts. We think so highly of it, we called Drafts out for special notice in our 2021 Tom’s Guide Awards for mobile apps.
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Fire Drafts up, and the app throws you a quick blank page with keyboard at the ready. New entries and notes get placed into an Inbox for later tagging and sorting. Alternatively, you can use any of the dozens of useful quick actions and app integrations to turn your jotted-down text notes into documents, tweets, social media notes, emails or messages, while Inboxed notes can be tagged for sorting, flagged for importance, or archived.
The text editor itself is highly customizable, allowing you to tweak everything from spacing, line heights, margins, and more. A premium subscription lets you add and edit quick actions; it also adds themes and icons while introducing workspaces and other handy productivity features, though many users will be just fine with this free iPhone app.
Download Drafts for iOS
- Overcast
best free iphone apps: overcast
(Image credit: Overcast Radio)
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Marco Ament’s Overcast is the best podcast app on iOS, offering a great combination of clean design and powerful audio and podcast management features. The fact that you can download the app for free makes it an easy choice for any list of the best free iPhone apps.
Overcast deftly handles episode playbacks and downloads, sends notifications of new episodes, and can play offline or through streaming if you need to save some space; plus it has some nice audio features. Voice Boost normalizes the sound levels of speech, automatically raising quiet voices and lowering loud ones. Smart Speed automatically cuts away at gaps and silence in the podcast, speeding up play without distorting audio.
Download Overcast for iOS
- Google Photos
best free iphone apps: Google photos
(Image credit: Google)
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Apple and Google may be rivals, but that’s not going to stop Google’s mobile photo app from ranking among the best free iPhone apps. Even with Apple offering cloud photo storage as part of its iCloud services, Google Photos is also another great option worth considering for your iPhone, even after Google put an end to unlimited storage with its Photos app.
These days, you can store 15GB of data for free on Google Photos. Google’s app also offers a smart album assistant and basic photo editing tools.
In addition, Google Photos features a smart search tool for finding familiar objects, places and event photos — features so good that Apple has taken a similar approach in subsequent updates of the Photo app built into iOS.
Download Google Photos for iOS
- Microsoft Office
best free ios apps: Microsoft Office
(Image credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft has consolidated its Office suite of productivity tools into a single app that combines Word, Excel, Powerpoint into a single download. With Microsoft Office, your mobile productivity basics for documents, spreadsheets and presentations are now covered.
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Office users can create and edit thier files on the go, with handy templates, and quickly sync files with a Microsoft OneDrive account or other cloud storage providers. The new all-in-one version of Office also has Microsoft’s Lens technology built-in, allowing you to turn photographs into editable Word or Excel documents, scan PDFs, and automatically enhance photos of notes and whiteboards for easy reading.
The app is free to use, with a Microsoft account needed for cloud uploads. Of course, if you have an Office 365 subscription, the Office app unlocks even more functionality across the entire productivity suite.
Download Microsoft Office for iOS
- Otter Voice Notes
best free iphone apps: otter voice notes
(Image credit: AISense)
Otter Voice Notes is a smart transcription app that can automatically transcribe your work nearly in real-time, complete with punctuation, speaker ID, and searchable playback of your recordings, using only your iPhone’s internal mic or a bluetooth device. Users can edit transcripts to fix any errors, exporting transcripts to text or to other apps; you also have the option of sharing transcripts with a group or through public, view-only links.
Otter Voice Notes’ free plan doesn’t even hobble the experience, offering users 600 minutes of transcribed audio every month, making it a worthwhile addition to our list of best free iPhone apps. A $9.99-per-month subscription ups that to 6,000 minutes. It’s a great productivity aid for classes, meetings, brainstorming sessions and impromptu interviews.
Conclusion
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