Smartphone owners are well aware that there is a truly overwhelming amount of apps available to them. Sorting through the endless pages looking for the next Flappy Bird can be tough. Many apps simply aren’t worth your time, but some can enhance your mobile experience, and perhaps your life, in ways you never imagined possible. In this article we will look at a few apps that you absolutely should have on your device this year.
Your next music app
If you’re like me, your phone is your source of music – whether it be through internet radio like Pandora or Spotify, or just songs on your device’s internal storage. Songza is an app that you may not know much about, but most likely will soon. Songza chooses music for you based on your mood, location or what activity you are doing at the time. It’s not the most revolutionary concept, but it seems to work well and all your friends will jump on the bandwagon after seeing this hot app on your phone.
Stay fit with your phone
Whoever would have guessed that your phone could encourage, or even bribe you into working out and staying fit? That’s right, a new app known as GymPact will ask you how many times during a given week you want to work out and then enter in a money amount as a wager on how likely you are to meet that goal. If you fail, your credit card will get charged whatever amount you put in. I was skeptical about this at first too, but the money doesn’t go to some random programmer or company, it actually goes to other users – the ones who did get to the gym as often as they planned. So, simply put, this free app will pay you to stay healthy. Why haven’t we all been using this?
Simplify social media
Most of us have 3 to 4 social media profiles (or more) and keeping up with updates and messages in all of them often becomes more of a chore than it’s worth. Cloze is an app that succeeds where others have failed in combining all of your social profiles into one place where you can see messages from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc… It also organizes your contacts by those you talk with the most, which is more helpful than one might even realize. The full version of this app is available for free on IOS devices, and a brand new beta test version just hit the Google Play store.
Sending secret messages
This one is a little weird, but I feel like this could be the next Snapchat once enough high school and college students get a hold of it. Backchat is a simple app that uses Facebook and Google+ messenger services and allows you to send messages to your friends completely anonymously. You’ve probably seen all of those missed connections and confession pages showing up lately – this will take that to the next level. Check it out and have some fun, but here’s hoping people won’t take the benefit that anonymity provides too far.
What to watch out for
I’m sure that many groundbreaking new apps will surface over the coming months, but one I am waiting for to hit mobile devices is the current web only application for Forgotify which takes the four million plus songs on Spotify that have a zero popularity rating (they’ve literally never been listened too) and puts them all into one single database of only the forgotten songs. I love Indie music and there are some real gems here waiting to be discovered. Once the track is listened to on Forgotify it will disappear from their database! I’d be shocked if we don’t see a cellphone app for this by the year’s end.
Audrey Thompson is a freelance writer working on behalf of the fasts.org.
