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Home / Features / The 24 best apps for your new Apple iPad Pro

The 24 best apps for your new Apple iPad Pro

Stuff’s pick of the top painting, drawing, office and productivity apps for Apple’s top-of-the-range iPad

best apps for iPad Pro intro graphic

So you’ve bought a beautiful Apple iPad Pro and are sitting there with its fancy keyboard and Pencil stylus. Now what? Get these apps — that’s what!

From action-packed games that look gorgeous on the big, pin-sharp screen, to creative design apps and word processors, there’s something here for everyone.

Procreate (£4.49)

Procreate (£4.49)

This illustration app works brilliantly with Pencil, responding to changes in pressure and tilt. Mostly, though, we love Procreate because it has enough features and brushes to be flexible, provides quick and easy access to them all, and then gets out of your way when you’re creating a masterpiece.

Download Procreate

Concepts (£free + IAP)

Concepts (£free + IAP)

For people more into design than illustration, Concepts provides a COPIC Marker palette, an infinite canvas, multi-touch shape guides, stroke adjustments, snap-to-sketching capabilities, and more. It’s fast and responsive, and the £5.99 Pro pack adds a precision toolkit, plentiful export options, and loads of power regarding layers and text.

Download Concepts

RelatedApple iPad Pro review

Paper (£free)

Paper (£free)

We’ve long been fans of Paper, which started life as the iPad equivalent of Moleskine notebooks. But 2015’s revamp transformed Paper into a combination sketching app and note-taker, enabling you to add precision shapes, text, and photos.

The Moleskines are gone (sorry, hipsters!), but what replaced them is better: walls of virtual sticky notes, which can be browsed, rearranged and exported as presentations or to PDF.

Download Paper

Pixelmator (£3.99)

Pixelmator (£3.99)

Essentially an iPad take on the OS X app, which itself is a kind of Photoshop lite, Pixelmator revels in the acres available on the Pro’s display. Pencil support seems less pronounced than in sketching apps, but pressure sensitivity remains present and correct when using pens and brushes. And for photo editing, it remains top-notch.

Download Pixelmator

Graphic (£6.99)

Graphic (£6.99)

More or less Illustrator for iPad, Graphic’s the app to buy for designing a logo, floor plan, or some other piece of precision vector art. It’s a bit fiddlier than desktop fare and could do with some keyboard shortcuts, but it should go a long way towards scratching a mobile illustrator’s itch when on the road, armed with an iPad Pro.

Download Graphic

Assembly (£free + IAP)

Assembly (£free + IAP)

A cross between a design tool and a futuristic take on fuzzy felt pieces, Assembly has you fashion vector art from a library of pre-defined shapes. Drag them to the canvas, and then resize, recolour, and link at will. Additional shape sets are available via IAP, and an ‘Inspirations’ view shows what’s possible with the app (more than you’d think).

Download Assembly

Korg Gadget (£22.99)

Korg Gadget (£22.99)

An astonishingly capable music-creation app, Korg Gadget loves power – which the iPad Pro has in spades. This enables you to run loads of synths simultaneously without the app choking, and enrich your chart worrying efforts with all kinds of effects. From tapping out notes on the piano roll to fiddling around with synth presets, Gadget excels; and if you’ve the bigger iPad Pro, you get even more room to work when composing and arranging songs.

Download Korg Gadget

Pinnacle Studio Pro (£9.99)

Pinnacle Studio Pro (£9.99)

We nearly plumped for iMovie, which is a perfectly decent video editor for iPad Pro. But Corel’s app feels a more fittingly ‘pro’ product for Apple’s giant tablet. The interface will be familiar to anyone who’s used desktop editors, and it will occasionally throw you that all this is happening on a tablet.

Download Pinnacle Studio Pro

Coda (£18.99)

Coda (£18.99)

Drag-and-drop web design isn’t yet on iPad, but hand-coders are well catered for by Panic’s Coda. Even on iPhone, this is a capable editor, but on iPad Pro, it’s transformative. Run it in Split View, with Safari alongside, and you’re sorted. (Panic’s Transmit is also worth grabbing, if you need an excellent file-transfer app.)

Download Coda

Notability (£7.99)

Notability (£7.99)

There are so many note-taking apps, something must be really special to stand out. Notability makes our list because it’s so flexible. You can import PDFs and web pages, type, draw and annotate, and even add audio recordings. The app’s smart, too: play a recording and notes animate in appropriately; and the scissor tool cleverly recognises whole objects when you’re manipulating them.

Download Notability

iA Writer (£3.99)

iA Writer (£3.99)

Prop your iPad Pro in a stand, fire up iA Writer, and tap away on a mechanical keyboard, and the result feels like using a typewriter of the future. When you’re in the zone, the app gets out of your way, with its no-nonsense streamlined interface. But also: swipe from the right and you can render a Markdown preview; and from the left, you’ll see all your files sitting in iCloud.

Download iA Writer

Scrivener (£14.99)

Scrivener (£14.99)

While iA Writer’s great for smashing out the odd bit of text, Scrivener is where it’s at for long-form writing. Like the desktop version, the iPad release provides all kinds of tools for honing your next Hollywood blockbuster or bestselling novel, including an internal split view to show research while typing, and a digital corkboard for organising chapters. It is, however, resolutely rich text; if you’re more of a Markdown fiend, try the equally impressive Ulysses (£18.99) instead.

Download Scrivener

LiquidText (£free)

LiquidText (£free)

Swing a cat on the App Store and you’ll crack its head on a half-dozen PDF annotation apps, but none are quite like LiquidText. Its approach is intuitive and brilliant, having you drag excerpts to a sidebar, which can be grouped and have additional notes attached. Tap one to see it in context; then export the lot in various formats.

Download LiquidText

MindNode (£7.99)

MindNode (£7.99)

Getting your thoughts down in a coherent manner shouldn’t be the preserve of biros and envelopes. Instead, use MindNode to brainstorm, creating connections between topics. It’s another app that works better with more space, and the iPad Pro’s perfect for letting ideas grow, styling your mind-maps with plenty of icons and imagery.

Download MindNode

Soulver (£2.99)

Soulver (£2.99)

This calculator is part spreadsheet, part scrap of paper. Instead of a grid, you get a blank sheet, but the app intelligently tots up what you jot down. New lines can be added at any point, and currencies converted; Soulver keeps track of everything, updating your totals accordingly.

Download Soulver

Fantastical 2 for iPad (£7.99)

Fantastical 2 for iPad (£7.99)

In all honesty, the default iPad layout for Fantastical feels a bit odd, with a massive month calendar taking up loads of room. But in Split View, you get a scrollable list of appointments, mini-calendars, and a week view, all in a tiny amount of space. This is far better than Apple’s Calendar app — and that’s before you discover Fantastical’s natural-language input smarts.

Download Fantastical 2 for iPad

Tweetbot 4 for Twitter (£7.99)

Tweetbot 4 for Twitter (£7.99)

If you’re a social media fiend, Tweetbot’s the Twitter client to grab. Swap out the main feed for a list, track your stats, have the app run in Split View, and then pretend this is more productive than not having a Twitter client constantly in your face, tempting you with interesting links.

Download Tweetbot 4 for Twitter

Slack (£free)

Slack (£free)

Like Twitter, Slack has become ingrained in many people’s working lives. The app works very nicely in full-screen on iPad Pro, but will happily lurk in Split View, while you use the majority of your display to get on with some actual work. Or watch YouTube videos as ‘research’. Either’s fine with us.

Download Slack

1Password (£free)

1Password (£free)

iCloud Keychain’s fine, but 1Password’s better. The app keeps your information secure, but also allows you to edit it. You can store more than passwords, too — 1Password houses notes, credit card details, and identities (for forums and online shopping), and can create new, complex passwords on your behalf. Touch ID support makes it a no-brainer on the Pro.

Download 1Password

Sky Guide (£2.29)

Sky Guide (£2.29)

In moments of downtime, Sky Guide gives you a chance to contemplate your place in the universe, and the majesty of the heavens. Swipe about to explore the stars, tap to get more info, or use the time-travel function to go all ‘sci-fi swirly sky’, until you accidentally hypnotise yourself and fall off of your chair.

Download Sky Guide

djay Pro (£14.99)

djay Pro (£14.99)

Want to unleash your inner DJ, but feel other apps aren’t cutting it? Then check out djay Pro. As its name suggests, this is the daddy of DJ apps, built specifically for iPad. You get desktop-class performance with high-def waveforms, four decks, and video mixing with 4K support. And while Apple’s larger iPad Pro isn’t quite vinyl size, it gives you more than enough space to spin virtual decks and twiddle djay Pro’s many buttons and faders.

Download djay Pro

Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved (£7.99)

Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved (£7.99)

If you think ‘die, alien scum’ rather than ‘astronomy’ on hearing the words ‘outer space’, perhaps twin-stick blaster Geometry Wars is more your thing. Already dazzling and thrilling on the iPad, the Pro gets a unique two-player co-op mode. Take that, people with other iPads who thought the Pro’s screen was stupidly big!

Download Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved

Chunky Comic Reader (£free or £2.99)

Chunky Comic Reader (£free or £2.99)

You’d have to be fairly mad to buy an iPad Pro solely for reading comics, but if you’ve already got one, then why not? After all, the screen is superb, and the larger model in particular is the perfect size. Chunky is our pick of iPad comic apps because it’s easy to use, efficient, has loads of settings, and with a one-off IAP will happily grab your digital comics from local network drives.

Download Chunky Comic Reader

Pigment (£free + IAP)

Pigment (£free + IAP)

Should all of the excitement regarding these new apps get a bit much for you, have a proper relax with Pigment. It’s a digital version of those adult colouring books that are all the rage.

Most of these apps are rubbish on iPad, but Pigment’s developers have properly thought things through: you can zoom without quality loss, colour with different brush types (rather than tapping to auto-fill spaces, like a nefarious colouring cheat), and get some value out of your Apple Pencil if you bought one, then later realised with a start that you’re not in fact an artist.

Download Pigment

Profile image of Craig Grannell Craig Grannell Contributor

About

I’m a regular contributor to Stuff magazine and Stuff.tv, covering apps, games, Apple kit, Android, Lego, retro gaming and other interesting oddities. I also pen opinion pieces when the editor lets me, getting all serious about accessibility and predicting when sentient AI smart cookware will take over the world, in a terrifying mix of Bake Off and Terminator.

Areas of expertise

Mobile apps and games, Macs, iOS and tvOS devices, Android, retro games, crowdfunding, design, how to fight off an enraged smart saucepan with a massive stick.

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