The 40 best free apps for iPhone and iPad

What can you get when you’re unwilling to spend anything at all? Actually, loads; as our selection shows, fantastic free iPhone and iPad apps are available for all manner of tasks, from sprucing up photos and composing music through to keeping fit and exploring the world. So, put away your wallet and hit download – these are the 40 best iOS apps you can get for nothing.

WEATHER UNDERGROUND

At the last count, there were about a billion weather apps knocking around. Weather Underground rises above the dross through a clever panel-based approach. If you just want to scan the forecast and rainfall for the coming hour, you’re set. But if you are a weather wonk, desperate to check air quality, UV risk, and what the wind speed will be like at precisely 2pm tomorrow, scroll down a bit and the details will be there.

TRIPOSO

There are plenty of travel guides on the App Store, but of the free ones Triposo is our favourite. The app isn’t restricted to just a few major cities – it has information on a wide variety of destinations. Along with providing suggestions of things to see, Triposo can build a city walk for you, based on the amount of time you want to spend ambling about. Most usefully, it works offline.

GOOGLE MAPS

The Apple Maps app is pretty good for driving directions, but it’s not great on foot and it remains poor for locating points of interest. Fortunately, Google’s alternative is excellent, accurate, and also bundles the useful Street View, for checking out routes before a long and unfamiliar journey. Smartly, it’ll also work offline, too.

GOOGLE TRANSLATE

Google has a habit of injecting its apps with a little slice of magic, and Google Translate is no exception. The app will happily translate between over 100 languages (and can handle over 50 of those offline), and translate bi-lingual conversations on the fly. The best bit, though, is when you’re ambling about somewhere, looking at strange signs and menus, and then point Google Translate’s camera at them. In an instant, it translates everything.

TAOMIX 2

There are loads of chill-out apps available for iOS, but TaoMix 2 stands out. It encourages creativity, with you adding loops of wind, rain, birdsong, and more to a pleasingly minimalist canvas. After positioning icons to suit, you place a playback circle at an optimum location or gently flick so it slowly bounces around the screen, your soundscape thereby shifting and changing over time.

RUNKEEPER

A free, efficient means of logging your hikes, runs and bike rides – and taking a quick gander at the exercise your friends are doing (or not) – RunKeeper maps routes, stores stats and, if you feel really tired half-way through a run, can help you procrastinate for a few seconds by taking a photo from inside the app.

ROUND HEALTH

Whether you’re into taking vitamins, or have other kinds of medication to keep track of, Round Health does the business. Using the app, you can quickly and easily define whatever schedules you like, and then have your iPhone bug you when it’s time to take something. The app’s very human in nature – it provides windows within which to take medication, is extremely simple to use, and has an interface that’s easy to get along with.

OAK

STRESS! ANXIETY! MORE STRESS! If your heart’s now thumping, Oak can help you unwind. Breathing exercises have you hold your breath until a circle fills, wait a bit, and then breathe out. Elsewhere, guided meditations help boost your awareness, and a little tree grows the more you use the app.

WHITE NOISE+

There’s crossover here with TaoMix 2, but, whereas the former heads towards noodly randomised soundtrack generation, White Noise+ is more focussed on customised ambient noise. It also dispenses with fluff. The interface is modern and usable, with you dragging icons to a grid. Those placed towards the top and right, respectively, play louder and with added complexity.

KITCHEN STORIES

This app wants to help you cook. Never chopped an onion? Watch a tutorial video. Halfway through a recipe and wondering if you’re on track? Compare your efforts with the current step’s photo. Good enough to eat? Steady on: glass and metal isn’t tasty – unlike whatever you’ll create using this app.

SNAPSEED

For creative enhancements to photographs, it’s hard to beat Snapseed. The app includes a slew of tools, from basic tuning and adjustments through to advanced filters, all controlled using a gestural interface. Dragging on the screen defines focal points and the strength of effects, ensuring Snapseed is intuitive and fun to use.

RETRICA

Retrica’s selection is usefully large, drawing on decades of photographic styles. Other tools further boost creativity, including vignettes, blurs and borders. Our favourite feature, though, is the interval timer, which takes a number of consecutive photos and stitches them together in a user-defined layout, and plays them as an animation you can share.

MOTION STILLS

Live Photos on iPhone feel like a throwaway novelty, but Google’s Motion Stills makes them properly interesting. Right from the off, this app impresses with auto-playing photos as you browse your feed. But select one and temporarily disable the automatic stabilisation setting and you immediately discover how much Motion Stills has already done to improve things.

PRISMA

If you’re a big fan of painting and illustration, but not the ‘doing the hard work’ bit, Prisma is a magical button that combines low effort and art. Load a photo, select a style, and within seconds Prisma will present something fit for a gallery wall. Turn your friends into Kandinskys and amusing pet photos into painterly masterpieces.

RETROSPECS

Remember the good old days of computing? Angry that your shiny new iPhone X captures every blemish when taking selfies? Then use Retrospecs to go truly retro. Any snap or pic can be transformed into the output of a Game Boy, Amstrad CPC or ancient PC. If that’s not enough, go full ASCII with Commodore PET emulation.

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR DRAW

This app from creative giants Adobe is all about drawing with vectors. This means however far you zoom in, your artwork remains pin-sharp. Given that Illustrator Draw is a freebie, you get a surprising pile of powerful features: layers; shapes to draw around; perspective grids. You can trace over imported photos, use a finger or a stylus, and bask in your amazing artistic prowess when things go particularly well.

BRUSHES REDUX

The original Brushes was the app that finally convinced a lot of people the iPhone could be suitable for work rather than just play. Jorge Colombo used it to paint a New Yorker cover, and David Hockney also became a fan. The app sadly keeled over (boo!) but became open source (hurray) and now Brushes Redux brings the app to modern devices.

CLARITY

Plenty of freebie wallpaper apps exist for iPhone, but Clarity gets the nod in our list, through its focus on tasteful, minimal design. Using the app, you can blur any image, or add a gradient mask over a favourite photo (to make the clock more readable on the lock screen). There’s also a standalone gradient option for when you just want a slab of colour as your background.

PICSART

Much like our former favourite Animatic, PicsArt Animator is an app that makes it easy to get into animation. It’s a virtual flip-book of sorts, with onion-skinning smarts: you draw each frame, and see previous ones beneath in faded form. This ensures smooth transitions in your miniature movie, rather than something resembling an explosion in a fly factory.

CLIPS

Unlike Apple’s own iMovie, Clips doesn’t want to be a full-fledged video editor. Instead, it’s about capturing moments, and doing something interesting with them. Recorded shots can be slathered in filters and stickers, have live titles applied, and be set alongside editable ‘posters’ that sort of work like title cards.

GARAGEBAND

GarageBand’s actually free to anyone who’s activated a device after September 1, 2014. And for nothing, you get a hugely capable app. Newcomers can tap out tunes on a loops grid, and always play in tune with smart piano strips. For pros, there’s multi-track and multi-take recording, a slew of effects, Audio Unit support, and the mightily impressive new Alchemy synth.

GROOVEBOX

GarageBand’s great for making music, but if you want something more immediate and modern, try Groovebox. You choose from three modules (drums/bass/synths), and pick an instrument. On doing so, a pattern plays. If you don’t like the pattern, choose another. Do this with several tracks and you’ve a music loop.

NOVATION LAUNCHPAD

Launchpad is absurdly fun and manages that tricky proposition of appealing to music newbs and pros alike. It’s essentially a board of pads, which you prod to trigger pre-set loops. It’s almost impossible to play something that doesn’t make you want to get up and dance about like a loon.

SEAQUENCE

This one feels like the result of developers spending too much time in the pub. “Let’s create an album of algorithmically generated music, and enable people to edit it, like in GarageBand!” “Yeah! But instead of having a timeline, let’s have all the loops be brightly coloured digital sea life that swims about!” “OK, pipe down, drunk Dave!”

MUSIC MEMOS

Even fairly recently, a musician was limited when an idea popped into their head. After a bit of scrabbling and idiot humming Music Memos hurls ideas to iCloud, can whack automated drums and bass behind your noodling, and even attempts to transcribe chords.

OVERCAST

Overcast is great for discovering new podcasts to listen to and organising your favourites. During playback is where Overcast truly excels, though, with superb smart speed adjustment and voice boost tools that none of the competition – paid or otherwise – have yet matched.

BBC IPLAYER

BBC iPlayer’s the video catch-up app we want to shove in the faces of execs from certain other networks and yell: LOOK! THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE DONE! Finding programmes is simple, and they can be streamed live (over Wi-Fi or 3G/4G) or downloaded to your device for later playback.

LETTERBOXD

Watch enough films and they all blur into one, at which point you run the risk of accidentally watching something by Michael Bay. Save yourself by using Letterboxd to make a record of the films you love. All your films can then be browsed in a grid that can be filtered by various criteria.

CHUNKY

There are quite a few comic readers available for iPad, and Chunky rarely gets a mention – which is rather bizarre when you consider that it’s free and astonishingly good. Its organisational chops are a touch basic for large collections, but otherwise this is a first-class product. Settings enable you to adjust aspects of panning, page turns and rendering.

INSTAPAPER

Quite often, you’ll stumble upon an article you want to digest but don’t have time for. That’s where a read-later service comes in. Safari has Reading List, but it’s a bit rubbish; download Instapaper instead. Articles are stripped of cruft, leaving only words and images. You can fiddle about with text styles, and sort your article list in all sorts of ways.

SKYVIEW FREE

With SkyView, you can take your device outside, stare up at the heavens, and discover precisely what stars and planets you’re looking at. If it’s a bit cold out, you can do the same from inside, or partake in a bit of time travelling, checking out the sky on different times and dates.

LINGVIST

If you fancy learning a language but lack the time, Lingvist will happily give you a shot by worming its way into every spare moment. Its razor-sharp design streamlines the learning process to a series of flashcards. In each case, you’re tasked with typing in a missing word. The idea is that over time vocabulary will be burned into your brain, whereupon new cards then appear.

SWIFT PLAYGROUNDS

If the notion of learning to code fills you with terror, Apple’s iPad-only app aims to put a friendly face on the process. Rather than hurling you deep into a sea of code, it splits the screen in two. On the left sits your work in progress. On the right, there’s an interactive 3D world you control by way of your typed commands.

JIGSPACE

Time was, you’d fire up Wikipedia to learn about something. But with augmented reality you get something better: your subject hovering before your face, explorable from any angle. JigSpace only contains a few dozen items (with a handful more added via IAP), but is great fun to use, whether you’re staring at a massive cross-section of an eyeball, an exploded clock, or a 3D trebuchet.

YOUSICIAN

It’s fun pretending to rock out with a tiny plastic guitar with colourful buttons, and learning to play a real guitar can be tedious. Enter Yousician, which spins Guitar Hero 90 degrees and has you play along with a real guitar, aiming to get your timing right as coloured notes and chords work their way leftwards

WORKFLOW

Workflow is all about streamlining mundane sets of repeated actions, which can be grabbed from the gallery or built from scratch. It’s a user-friendly but powerful app, and it’s flexible, too: your workflows can live within the app, or be saved as Home screen apps, Today view widgets, action extensions, or even apps for Apple Watch.

1PASSWORD

There’s iCloud Keychain for sharing your login and payment details across various versions of Safari, but 1Password is loads better. First, you can very easily edit your login details; secondly, it’ll save notes and multiple identities (for example, if you have an abbreviated one for forums); thirdly, it works cross-platform.

BEAR

Sitting slightly awkwardly between full-fledged writing tool and minimal note-taker, Bear is nonetheless a rather lovely app for tapping out words on an iPad (or, if you’re fleet of thumbs, an iPhone). It offers robust Markdown support, a theme with great clarity, plenty of configuration options, and a clever tagging system for grouping arbitrary documents.

GBOARD

The default iOS keyboard is perfectly fine, but it does require you tap individual keys. If that all sounds like too much bother, try Gboard. It allows you to blithely scribble across keys to form words, or even to avoid typing entirely through dictating whatever you want to jot down.

PCALC LITE

For reasons that baffle us, Apple still doesn’t provide a calculator with the iPad. PCalc Lite is the best of the freebies, boasting an elegant interface, RPN mode, alternate themes, and conversions for length, speed, volume and weight.