Mobile applications today have become an industry of its own, with many internet companies adopting a “Mobile-first” model. Anyone with a mobile phone uses on average 5 mobile apps for different functionality. Most phones come pre-loaded with the basic apps to get you started.
The number of mobile phone users will reach 5 billion by 2019.
This means that any company irrespective of industry will have to adapt either their business model, sales channel, communications approach, or marketing strategy to include mobile applications. Often non-internet based corporates use business mobile apps for employee engagement, or even to keep an online presence.
I have used mobile apps extensively for the past decade. I started my career in Android Development, moving on to Product Management in mobile before joining consulting. I regularly download and test different mobile apps – almost 2-3 per week. From a consumer perspective, I enjoy the use of apps, particularly utility and productivity apps that make my life easier.
Here are 100 apps that I regularly use on my iPhone –
Travel
Transport
- Google Maps navigation
- CityMaps2Go for offline maps
- Skyscanner, Kayak for flight search
- Uber, Lyft, myTaxi, Ola, and other local taxi company apps at my destination like EasyGo (Germany)
- Check My Trip to manage all my personal travel plans and tickets in one place
- TripIt to organize long travel itineraries
- FlightRadar 24 for live updates on flights
- Trainline, DB Navigator,Flixbus and any other local transport app of my destination city
- Miles&More app to always have my frequent flyer number on hand while checking in, or to avail my miles
- Lufthansa, Etihad, Emirates, AirIndia and my other favorite airline apps for fast check-in and mobile boarding passes
Accommodation
- Booking.com
- Hotels.com
- Airbnb
- Specific hotel apps: I keep the apps of some hotel chains on my phone like Hilton Honors, Marriott, etc to collect points
Travel research
- Trip Advisor
- Yelp
- Lonely Planet
Social networking
Personal
- Snapchat
Professional
- Yammer
Communication
- Messenger
- Skype
- Facetime
Lifestyle and hobby
Health
- iPhone Health app
- Clue (especially recommended for women)
- Runtastic
- MyFitnessPal to monitor food
- CodeChecker to scan food and cosmetics for ingredients
Music
- Spotify
- Shazam
Shopping, incl food delivery
- Amazon
- Ebay
- UberEats
- Lieferheld
- Groupon for deals and coupons
Photography
- Adobe Photoshop Express
- Layout to create collages
- Prisma Photo Editor
- Snapseed for photo effects
Entertainment
- Netflix to also watch online and download episodes and series offline
- Youtube
- Duolingo
- Podcasts
Storage
- Google Photos
- Google Drive
- Prime Photos
- Dropbox
Utility
- Weather (iphone app)
- Weather Underground for more detailed weather forecasts
- Google Translate as a savior during my travels
- Clock for alarms and time zones
- 1Blocker to block ads in browsers
- My Currency to convert currencies and view exchange rates
- CamCard to scan business cards
Finance
- PayPal to keep track of my transactions
- Splitwise to split bills and expenses with friends/travel buddies
- Spending to keep track of budgets
- Live Expenses as a money manager
Productivity
- Google Keep for all my random notes and thoughts
- Docs to keep my documents in one place and edit them
- DocScan to convert images into PDF documents
- Calendars to connect calendars from my different accounts
- Gmail for go-to email application
- Buffer for social media management
Information
Browser
- Google Chrome
- Safari
News and information
- Google app for iPhone
- Wikipedia
- Financial Times
- BBC news
- Yahoo news
- The Guardian
Blogs
- WordPress
- Medium
Books
- Audible
- iBooks
- Kindle app for iPhone
Aggregators
- Pocket to view my saved articles and posts
Apps for gadgets
- FitBit
- GoPro
- BoseConnect
Other
- QRBot to scan QR codes and business cards
- Truecaller for phone number searches
- Find iPhone
These apps are available on the App Store, and have similar versions on Google PlayStore. As storage is always an issue for someone who likes using mobile apps, it is important to regularly clean apps of irrelevant data, as well as update them for fixes and newer versions. While using mobile apps, it is essential to be aware of personal data security and spending some time to check the settings and what kind of data does the app have access to.
So these were my top 100 apps out of a large pool of more than 2 million apps that exist today. I will come back with a later post once I discover some new cool apps out there.