From budgeting to travel
It seems like hundreds of new smartphone apps pop up every day, but which ones should you bother trying? Here, TIME offers a look at five apps for iPhone and Android that stand out and are worth a try.
Pennies
App Store
Although online budgeting tools like Mint have helped streamline the way many people track expenses, the genius of Pennies is that this iOS app understands how time-consuming (not to mention nerve wracking) it can be to maintain an expense file that looks like an Excel spreadsheet. The developers say Pennies works because it’s flashy and not boring, but this young app’s success may stem from the fact that it’s about as intuitive and easy-to-use as a Fisher Price toy. Gone, perhaps, are the days of daunting month-to-month graphs.
MiFlight
App Store
A new app available only on iOS for now, MiFlight allows airline passengers to crowdsource wait times at different airports, aiming to eliminate the anxiety of arriving at an airport a few hours too soon, or worse, a few minutes too late. Passengers on line in security send their wait times, allowing the rest of us to plan ahead. Although it depends entirely on the connectivity and kindness of strangers, users may quickly understand that MiFlight is an efficient, guerrilla-style approach to circumnavigating mostly useless airline guidelines.
MiFlight is available free in the iTunes App Store
Push
Most people have a collection of news and social media apps that will regularly send notifications to lock screens. Push allows users to aggregate notifications from various news outlets as well as curate pings from other online sources, alerting you to events like trending topics on Twitter or football scores. In short, the app turns your phone into a highly personalized news wire.
Push is available free in the iTunes App Store.
Snowball
For those who regularly use Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp or other messaging apps, Snowball, an Android app still in beta, curates notifications from these different apps onto one platform. Snowball makes sure you can keep track of different conversations in various apps, and, at the very least, that you don’t accidentally leave one conversation idle for hours before remembering to respond.
Seasonal Cities
Released a few weeks ago just in time for Fall (and Oktoberfest), Seasonal Cities is a mobile tour guide for major cities that offers new content packages every season. The recommendations in each update change depending on the weather, and the app even tailors suggestions based on the weather that week. 11 cities are on the list so far, including London, New York, Tokyo, and Paris. Guides are written by travel journalists and take different travel budgets into consideration.
Season Cities is available free in the iTunes App Store, every seasonal update will cost about $1.
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