App Store at 10: ten iPhone and iPad apps to make Android owners jealous

App Store at 10: ten iPhone and iPad apps to make Android owners jealous

Apple’s App Store has turned 10. Hurrah! To celebrate its first decade, here are 10 top-notch apps that highlight the sheer quality at the top of the iOS app heap – and that you can’t get on Android.

1. GarageBand

There’s an embarrassment of riches on iOS regarding high-quality music-making apps. Arguably, Apple’s GarageBand was the catalyst. Doing the impossible back in 2011, it shoehorned a digital audio workstation into an iPhone. Since then, it’s grown to become hugely capable. If you’re barely beyond smashing a rock against another rock when it comes to making sounds, you’ve still a fighting chance of crafting a top-ten smash here, what with all the smart instruments. But if you already trouble the charts with your grooves and perfectly tuned everythings, GarageBand is a free mobile studio in your pocket.

2. Procreate

In 2009, artist Jorge Colombo painted a New Yorker cover using iPhone app Brushes. It showed the iPhone wasn’t just for consumption. Procreate reasoned there was space for a pro-level Brushes equivalent, with the kind of tools proponents of desktop-quality software enjoyed. Moreover, though, Procreate is an app that embraces the joy of painting. Instead of giving you a panel-heavy interface, it (and iPhone cousin Procreate Pocket) has always been minimal, getting out of your way when you’re adding dabs of colour to your masterpiece.

3. Hipstamatic

In the early days, the iPhone camera was rubbish, so apps attempted to hide its lowish quality by slathering photos in effects and filters. Hipstamatic went much further, transforming your iPhone into an analogue camera. It took this in a distinctly literal direction: you switched virtual lenses and films, and got a tiny viewfinder to peer through, wondering what you’d end up with when the ‘film’ was developed. Some years later, the app presumably got a visit from an angry Jony Ive and went all minimal – but a sneaky button still gets you back to that old-school cool.

4. Affinity Photo for iPad

With Photoshop conspicuously absent from iOS when it came to full-fat photo editing, Serif ported its entire wallet-friendly desktop app across. Even with modern iPads in 2017, this was seriously ambitious stuff, and yet it worked. Here was desktop-grade photo-editing on a tablet, freeing people from cables, PCs and sitting in boring offices for days on end. On iOS, there’s nothing else like it; on Android, there’s of course just nothing like it.

5. Streaks

To-do lists can be a great way to organise, but also the bane of your existence when you stare at 47 things that must be achieved before breakfast. Streaks has no truck with that, instead doubling down on simplicity. It strips back to-dos to six recurring items, the aim being to infuse them into your routine and form good habits. And the system works – when you’ve six massive buttons to prod, goals aren’t hidden away; but when you fancy seeing how you’re doing, all manner of wiggly graphs exist to feast your eyes on.

6. Scrivener

Microsoft Word and Google Docs won the mainstream, but Scrivener became a desktop darling for writers. Its mix of flexibility and power – stashing notes and documents in a sidebar; index cards for synopses; speedy organisation of drafts and chapters – gave you a shot at being the next J.K.Rowling in a way rival tools could not. On iPad, it’s basically the same app – and arguably even better in some ways due to a sleeker, minimal interface. Even on iPhone, you can potentially pen a bestseller – if your thumbs don’t cramp easily. Either way, it beats the other usual suspects on mobile by far.

7. Fugue Machine

You might think you’ve seen music apps that go old-school, but this one claims to be ‘Bach in a box’, through providing an entry point into composition techniques used in Baroque music and Serialism. Which may make you want to nod off, but wait, because Fugue Machine is brilliant. It lets you create hypnotic, mesmerising music using loops and a multi-playhead system. Assuming you can twiddle dials and tap notes on a piano roll, chances are you’ll be able to create something beautiful within minutes.

8. Journeys of Invention

A textbook? Yes, we’re shoving education in your face, but that’s because this one’s the pinnacle of interactive tomes. It comes across like a tour of the Science Museum as you work your way along interweaving paths that chart the history of invention. It’s not just words and photos. You can step inside the Apollo 10 command module, examine a flea under a microscope, and send secret messages using an Enigma Machine. The book’s insightful, smartly designed, and makes you wonder if there really is something in a post-paper world after all.

9. Oilist

Swing David Hockney around the App Store and you’d crack his head on a dizzying number of filter apps that attempt to turn photos into paintings. But none feel like painting – you just tap a button to see a special effect. By contrast, load a photo into Oilist and it wipes everything away before simulating a tiny painter in a Groundhog Day loop, reworking the same image over and over, gradually changing details and styles.

10. Brian Eno : Reflection

Yes, we know: a Brian Eno album that costs thirty quid. Madness! Only, this isn’t an album in the conventional sense, more the logical culmination of the ambient master’s work. The app constantly reworks Reflection, making it unfold differently all the time. Eno likens it to a river – always the same, but always changing – and this is reflected (OHO!) in the slowly shifting displayed artwork. If you’re not into ambient music, you’re probably baffled at our excitement; but if you’re a fan of Eno, this app’s like locking him in your house, and having him remix his album forever – only without the subsequent kidnapping charges.