Apple’s Top 25 Favorite iOS Apps Of The Year 2015

1) Periscope

Apple’s favorite app of the year.
The idea of broadcasting live video from your phone isn’t a new one, but all the early entries flopped pretty hard. Twitter has seemingly figured out the formula with Periscope, though; just about any time news of a major event goes down, someone will have a Periscope stream up from the scene.

2) Enlight

A surprisingly advanced all-in-one photo editing tool. It’s not a Photoshop replacement, but it does a whole lot more than filters.

3) Robinhood

Robinhood lets people buy stock without paying anything for each trade. So how do they make money? Currently, by accruing interest on the money sitting in user’s account.

4) Workflow

Workflow lets you build one-tap actions for things you do often (like calling your mom, ubering to work, or uploading your last photo to Dropbox) and put them in your iPhone’s widget drawer.

5) Instagram

You read TechCrunch. You know what Instagram is.

6) HBO Now

HBO’s standalone app for streaming the stuff once reserved for your cable box, AKA known as “The reason you keep in touch with your good-friend-from-grade-school’s mom because she’s letting you log in with her account”

7) Hopper

Heading out on a trip soon? Punch the details into Hopper, and it’ll keep an eye out for price drops and try to figure out the best time to buy.

8) Darkroom

Another photo editing app, but with a clever twist: you can build your own Instagram-esque filters.

9) Lark

An AI nutritionist. You talk to Lark like it’s a buddy, and it responds and advises you like a human trainer might. It’ll also use your phone’s sensors to scrap activity/workout data

10) The Everything Machine

Got a kid who likes to tinker and build?
The Everything Machine is a visual design tool that lets them build virtual gadgets with all sorts of components — light bulbs, switches, displays, and more.

11) Pacemaker

Surprise house party? Pacemaker lets you DJ from your iPad. Plug in your Spotify credentials, and you’ll be able to scratch, add effects, and slide between multiple tracks.

12) Tandem

Practice languages by chatting with native speakers. You say what language you want to practice and what you’re interested in, and Tandem connects you. You can text, video chat, or do a voice call.

13) Jet

A shopping app with a curious twist: as you add more stuff to your cart, Jet searches across retailers to find the cheapest combination of those items and passes the savings on to you.

14) Timeline

Timeline says they “put news in context”. For each story, there’s a timeline that you can scrub through to display related stories past.

15) Vee for Video

Think iMovie, but with more video effects and filters.

16) Fit Men Cook

Simple, budget-conscious recipes that can often be made in bulk for a week’s worth of meals.

17) Spark

A super-slick, customizable email app. You can read our full review here. My favorite feature: intelligent searches in plain english, so you can search for things like “emails with attachments from last month”

18) RefMe

A college student’s best friend. When you need to cite a book for a paper, just scan the barcode. Pick your citation style, and it’ll generate your citation page for you.

19) Wildcard

The news from each day broken down into 2-3 sentence chunks.

20) Paper

A super pretty organizer for stuff you’d want handy — notes, to do lists, doodles, and photos. It’s like a gorgeous little virtual pinboard.

21) Giphy Cam

As the name implies: its a photo tool for quickly making GIFs. Hit record, add a filter if you want, boom: gif.

22) PRY

Part game, part book, part movie. An interactive story that strays from the normal way we read.

23) Reuters TV

Slick, personalized video news. Only got 10 minutes to catch up on what’s going on? Punch in how much time you have, then just swipe through the stories you don’t care about.

24) ZOVA

Short, easy-to-follow workouts designed mostly for women.

25) BlueApron

One of my favorite things of the year, as well.

BlueApron takes all the fun parts of cooking and gets rid of the crappy parts. Hate shopping? BlueApron delivers pre-portioned fresh ingredients to your door. Hate digging through recipes? BlueApron picks them for you, though they give you some options.

They break down the meals in super easy to follow ways, and the meals are pretty damned tasty. It can be hit-or-miss at sometimes, but I’ve liked more meals than I disliked. Plus, it gets me to cook/try things I’d otherwise normally not consider.