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There’s an ocean of apps out there. Whether you just got your iPhone and are feeling adrift or you’re a salty old dog seeing what you might’ve missed, here are the absolutely essential apps.
full list after the jump…
Social
Twitter: Twitter thankfully didn’t make too many changes when they gobbled up the already-great Tweetie 2 from Atebits—same clean interface, same Tweet swiping, and the same it-feels-so-good pull to refresh mechanism. Free.
Facebook: The new, panel-based interface takes a little getting used to, but once you’re acclimated it’s the most effective way to throw yourself, fingers first, into the black hole timesuck that is Facebook. Free.
Fring: Not only a decent multinetwork chat client, Fring also allows for free (or in some certain cases dirt cheap) VoIP calls and, for those with a front facing camera, video calls over WiFi and 3G. Free.
Meebo: Meebo is the king of iPhone messenger apps right now, with support for AIM, Google Talk, Facebook and the like (as well as an impressive list of smaller networks) all packed into a pretty, polished package. Free.
Instagram: Take a photo and dress it up with one of the supplied Hipstamatic-esque filters, Then you share it over the usual suspects—Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, etc —or, and here’s the interesting part, over Instagram’s built-in social networking service. It’s new and ambitious and that’s why we like it. Free.
GroupMe: A godsend of a group messaging app, GroupMe killed for us at CES. The idea is simple: your friends are grouped together via a phone number and when you text that number it sends the message to everyone (with your name in front). Like a SMS chat room. Free.
Entertainment
Netflix: All the joys of Netflix in your pocket, all the time—including the power to battle that always growing Watch Instantly queue. Streaming’s silky smooth over Wi-Fi, less so over 3G, but the app itself is indispensable. Free.
Remote: Apple’s official app for controlling iTunes from wherever your butt might find itself planted is pretty much perfect. Browse your entire library by artist, song, playlist, whatever, pick a tune, and there it is, playing in your iTunes. Free.
Shazam: You know that song you keep hearing everywhere but can’t quite place? Shazam can place it. Like, almost every time. Shazam Encore, $6, gets you unlimited tags and a host of other features like charts, recommendations, lyrics, etc.
SoundHound: Like Shazam, SoundHound dabbles in tune recognition (smaller library of songs, snappier tagging), but it also serves as a full replacement for your iPhone’s comparatively barren iPod app. Think lyrics, artist info, YouTube links, etc. $5.
Flixster: While it blows my mind that I can watch movies on my phone, one thing I need it to do, and need it to do well, is find movie times for theaters nearby. Flixter does that and much more, packing box office charts, Rotten Tomatoes reviews, DVD releases and what seems like a thousand other movie-related features in one extremely handy app. Free.
StreamToMe: A lightweight client on your computer catalogues the videos of your choosing, as well as all your iTunes playlists, and then lets you easily stream the files in them easily to the app on your iPhone. The best part: all the transcoding is done on the fly, and pretty much any video format plays back superbly. $3.
Pandora: Pandora. You know the one. The internet radio app that has uplifted a million work hours and scored a million make-outs. It’s simply the best out there, streaming music at home or on the go over Wi-Fi or 3G. Free.
Kindle: Just because you don’t own a Kindle doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be buying Kindle ebooks—especially when Amazon’s iOS app is this good. While it looked for a while like iBooks might come along and disrupt Amazon’s ebooks hegemony, well, that didn’t happen. Free.
Rdio: It’s our favorite subscription music service and can easily replace your iPod app altogether. The baked-in social elements make it super easy to find new music your friends are digging, and the whole app just got an attractive makeover. $10/month.
Hipstamatic: Why do everyone’s iPhone photos look so damn hip while yours look so, you know, not. Probably cause they’re using Hipstamtic, the preeminent “make my photos look cool” app which lets you mix and match films and lenses (available for in app purchase) to make your iPhone photos look more analog than ever. $2.
Brushes: Even for the artistically disinclined, having a 3.5″ palette and canvas in your pocket can be fun. Brushes is the only one you’ll ever need, easy enough for the uninitiated to jump into and advanced enough to keep real artists happy. Hell, they paint New Yorker covers with this thing. $6.
NPR News: You’ve gotta have a news app on your iPhone, because, you know, news is important. NPR’s happens to be great—you can read NPR’s reliably-interesting stories, download them for offline reading, and, and, listen to NPR radio stations while you’re doing it. Free.
TuneIn Radio: A truly great radio app, TuneIn has a dizzying amount of stations both local and global, and it gives you the ability to pause, rewind, or record live radio on the fly. $1
Camera+: After a brief beef with Apple over a (much-missed) volume button shutter easter egg, Camera+ is back in the App Store and updating at a steady clip. It has a bevy of filters and effects that make Hipstamatic and Instagram look downright cheap by comparison. $1.
Vimeo: The video selection on Vimeo is always stellar but the real cherry on top? Free HD video editing for all your movies, right from your iPhone. Free.
Photosynth: It’s a free-wheeling panorama photography app by Microsoft. With Photosynth, you just just spin around, fire away and let Photosynth stitch the picture together. Free.
Games
Angry Birds: Probably the world’s most popular iPhone game, and for good reason. There’s something about launching these different sorts of aviary ammunition into the precarious pig pens that just never gets old. There are always new birds and new stages coming out the pipeline to keep things fresh, too. $1.
The Incident: With excellent pixel art and an admirably morbid sense of humor, twisting your iPhone around to avoid falling objects is way more fun than it sounds. And you have to appreciate anything that makes the apocalypse this enjoyable. $2.
Cut the Rope: Some have called it the heir apparent to Angry Birds for quick, clever, doesn’t-really-ever-get-boring iPhone gameplay—lofty praise, but in many ways deserved! Cutting a rope to swing a candy into a little monsters mouth, avoiding electrical currents and spiders along the way, is quite fun. $1.
Real Racing: It’s just the best racing game out, walking the tightrope between looking highly realistic and being incredibly fun to play. There’s a good selection of cars and tracks and the graphics look wonderful. $5.
Archetype: An exceptionally shiny first person shooter optimized for the iPhone 4 with slick, functional controls. Best of all is the 5v5 team deathmatch mode, just like the consoles—including multiple guns, grenades, maps, and medals—except this one you play while you’re sitting on the toilet. $1 (map updates cost extra).
Doodle Jump: You know those people you see standing on the subway or waiting in line at the grocery store clutching their iPhone to their face and tilting their entire body to the side like they’re the leaning tower of Pisa? This is the game they’re playing. $1.
Words With Friends: Why did we, as an iPhone-wielding society, suddenly decide that push-notified Scrabble (or, more specifically, this knock-off) was the most fun to be had with words since Alphabet Soup? That I don’t know. But it is a hell of a lot of fun trying to slot that Triple Word Score against friends, family, and coworkers. Free with ads, or $3.
Infinity Blade: Angry Birds may be fun, but the graphics aren’t going to blow your hair back. Infinity Blade, the first iOS game to run on the Unreal Engine, could easily be called Angry Knights. And it looks f-ing incredible. $6
NBA Jam: I was gonna have to go Ron Artest on EA if they bungled the iPhone port of this classic, but thankfully they’ve turned out a excellent, faithful update of the original. “He’s on fire.” “Boomshakalaka.” Big head mode. It’s all there waiting for you. $5.
Tiny Wings: Slide an adorable bird up and down hills to collect coins. The trick is to gain momentum and beat the night. Surprisingly addictive with extremely cute animations. $1.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP: A game that’s an epic experience. One part 8-bit graphics, one part beautiful original music, one part adventure, and one part RPG combine for a game that’s essentially about exploring and brings your childlike wonder back. $5.
Productivity
Instapaper: Perhaps the most universally loved of all iPhone apps, Instapaper, in conjunction with a bookmarklet on your PC, strips websites of all that crap and leaves just the text, synced to your iPhone and pristinely awaiting your eyeballs. Free with ads, or $5.
Reeder: The best all-around RSS reader, Reeder syncs flawlessly with Google Reader (not as common as you’d think!), includes intuitive, swipe-friendly controls, and has a spartan interface that gets out of the way of the stuff you care about: your feeds. $3.
Simplenote: It takes notes, simply. That’s a good thing! Without any whiz-bang features for tagging or appending images, SimpleNote just lets you jot things down and, crucially, keeps them flawlessly in sync with the app’s website, a client (like Notational Velocity, for Mac), and its iPad app. Total note nirvana. Free.
Evernote: Everybody’s favorite do-it-all note taker got a big update for iOS: a new home screen with an information-dense snippet view; a new split-view note screen which allows for multiple attachments to a single note; and easy browsing by notebook or tag. Free.
Dropbox: Dropbox is like the SimpleNote of files—seamless, effortless syncing across as many machines as you want. And with the slick native Dropbox app, you can count your iPhone among those machines. Check out documents and photos, attach them to emails, export them to other apps, all with the cloud as your safety net. Free.
BoxCar: Most apps, if they send you push notifications at all, do so on their own terms. Boxcar lets you pipe in notifications for all aspects of Facebook, Twitter, and email for the unbeatable price of free.
Kayak: Sometimes it seems like the internet can make traveling more of a hassle, what with all the different rates to sort through and confirmation numbers to manage. Kayak actually makes the process easier—from booking your flights and hotels to organizing your itinerary. Free.
DocumentsToGo: If you’re a businessperson, you undoubtedly are adrift in a sea of documents, pretty much every day of your life. DocumentsToGo is the best way to deal with them on your iPhone. You don’t have a lot of room to stretch out when you’re editing, but you’ll get the job done. $10.
Google Voice For iPhone: What kind of bizarro alternate universe are we living in? Well, it’s one with an official Google Voice iPhone app. It’s missing some advanced features like calling groups and scheduling, but the important stuff—texting and calling—works beautifully. Free.
PasteBot: You’d never think you’d use the word “ultra-powerful” to describe a “clipboard manager,” but that’s basically what PasteBot is, an app for organizing and managing copy clippings—text, photos, links, whatever—not only on your iPhone but, and here’s where the magic happens—between your iPhone and your Mac, too. $3.
2Do: A to-do app on some serious steroids, 2Do can organize parts of your life you didn’t even know needed organizing. It has a slick interface and enough features and syncing options to keep even the most fastidious productivity nuts busy. $7
WolframAlpha: WolframAlpha—formerly $50, now just $2—is smart. Like, scary smart. It’s part calculator, part search engine, but for any situation in which you need facts—population of Waco, TX; observable stars in the universe; unemployment rate in Boise—it’s indispensable. $2
Google Translate: Google Translate’s been kicking around for a while, but the new native iPhone app really makes translations enjoyable. It supports tons of languages—many of which it’ll speak back to you—and has handy features like full-screen text translations for when you’re waving your phone at some bewildered cab driver. Free.
PhotoSync: Don’t ever tie your iPhone to your computer for pictures again. It wirelessly transfers photos and videos to and fro your computer through Wi-Fi and can even dance with the iPad. So easy. $2.
Wi-Fi Photo Transfer: Wi-Fi Photo Transfer brings photos from your iPhone to your computer (not the other way around) and is super easy to use. Just fire up the app, plug in an address in your computer’s browser and pick and choose which iPhone pictures you want to bring over. Easy. Free.
Lifestyle
Google Earth: It’s, like, the entire world…on your iPhone. Google Earth is cooler than ever when you’re using your fingers to manipulate it, seamlessly zooming around the globe and diving into various places to take a closer look. Free.
MotionX GPS Drive: A solid turn-by-turn navigation app for $3 a month with no long term commitment. There are others that are richer (and far more expensive), but if you just need turn-by-turn directions once in a while, MotoinX GPS is the ticket. $1, $3 a month.
Google Mobile: Yeah, there’s no two ways about it: you have to have Google’s Swiss Army Knife app on your iPhone. Search the internet by voice, location, or now, with the recent addition of Google goggles, by picture. Free.
Yelp: Everyone’s a critic when it comes to bars and restaurants; Yelp puts that impulse to work for you. Search for food, drink, or whatever else by location, price, style and then read up on what people have to say about it. Free.
Wikipanion: If you aren’t using your iPhone to settle petty disputes, what’s the point? Wikipanion gives you iPhone-optimized access to all of Wikipedia, that great argument-ending resource, with added features like bookmarking, quick wikitionary lookup, intelligent search and more. Free, $5 for Wikipanion Plus.
Nike+ GPS: Nike, it turns out, knows a lot about fitness. And with its latest iteration, their Nike+ GPS app can track you on your runs, no sensor required, and keep you going with features like Cheer Me On (a Facebook-integrated social encouragement tool) and One More PowerSong (adding one last song to your pump-up playlist). $2.
AppShopper: Aside from the shiny facade of the “featured apps” front page, Apple’s App Store is not easy to navigate. AppShopper delivers some sanity to the process, allowing you to easily check out new apps, create wishlists of ones you want, and get alerted when those apps go on sale. Free.
Amazon Mobile: Amazon Mobile does an admirable job of shrinking the shopping behemoth that is Amazon.com down into iPhone-friendly form. It recently picked up the ability to scan barcodes, which means that whenever you’re out there shopping in the real world (gross) you can check to see if you can get a better deal on Amazon. You probably can. Free.
MenuPages: If you live in New York, San Fran, LA, Philly, Boston, Chicago, DC, or South Florida and you like food, Menu Pages should be part of your arsenal. It has full menus for an impressive roster of restaurants, so you’ll be able to know what you want before you even get there. Free.
Layar: Augmented reality is often cooler in theory than it is in practice. Layar’s one of the few places where you can peer into the future and see how this whole AR thing might actually amount to something. Free.
OpenTable: Easily make reservations at some 14,000 restaurants which you can search by name or location. Just remember to put down your phone while you’re actually dining. Free.
Weatherbug: It may not be as cute as some of the competitors, but who ever said weather should be. Weatherbug gets down to business with forecasts, maps, and video, doing so reliably and straightforwardly. Free with ads, $1 for Weatherbug Elite.
How To Cook Everything: OK, the name of the app is sorta an exaggeration, but not by as much as you’d think. For those of us who aren’t concerned with preparing gourmet meals and are just happy with makingsomething, How To Cook Everything, adapted from the excellent cookbook of the same name, is like the Holy Grail. $5.
Epicurious: A food app with a bit more context than How To Cook Everything—it lets you find recipes based on what’s in season, create interactive shopping lists, etc.—it is well designed and packed with utility. Free.
Adobe Photoshop Express: It’s not the powerhouse that the desktop version is, but for basic edits like crop, straighten, rotate and simple tweaks like changing exposure, saturation, and tint, this stripped down Photoshop does the trick. Free.
Mixologist: The gold medal winner of our best drinking apps battle, Mixologist is an encyclopedic database of drinks searchable in a variety of ways. At some point, you will impress someone by following this app’s instructions.
WordLens: WordLens is a taste of the future. Point it at a sign in Spanish and it’ll overlay an English translation on the fly while approximating the size and typeface of the original text. It’s not perfect but it works well enough to blow your mind into a thousand little pieces. $10.
Seamless: Paired with a free app in the Mac App Store, Seamless can fade out a song you’re playing in iTunes on your desktop and fade in that same song on your iPhone’s iPod app (you have to have the file on both). So you never have to stop listening to music. $1.
MLB At Bat 2011: Hands down, the best sports application on any device. You’ll be able to keep up with your favorite team in a snazzy new customizable homescreen and stream live games (if you have a MLB.tv package). For any self respecting baseball fan, it’s an absolute must have. $15.
WatchESPN: If you have the right cable provider, you can stream ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and ESPNU through WatchESPN. That’s a ton of sports streaming right to your phone. Free.
HBO Go: If you’re smart enough to order HBO with your cable, HBO Go will let you watch every episode of every season of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Rome, and any other awesome show HBO has ever made. Oh, and you can stream movies too. Free.
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