The best apps on Android and iOS to download on your new smartphone

Whether you just got your hands on a new phone or want to give your current device a makeover, the easiest way to make the most of your smartphone is to try out new apps. The tricky part is not going overboard and installing too many. Below you’ll find a dozen of the best smartphones apps we think you should try.

Bitwarden

Bitwarden
Bitwarden

If you only take one piece of advice away from this article, it’s that you should download a password manager. If you’ve never used one before, it’s hard to go wrong with Bitwarden. It won’t wow you with beautifully designed apps, but you’ll appreciate its fair business model. The best part of the Bitwarden experience is that all of its core features are free to use. Without paying a cent, you can use Bitwarden on as many devices as you want. By comparison, LastPass charges $3 per month for that same functionality. If you want to support Bitwarden, the $10 per year Premium plan is well worth the money as you get access to features like advanced two-factor authentication.

FireFox

Firefox
Firefox

If it’s been a few years since you last used Firefox, now is a great time to revisit it. Partway through last year, Mozilla overhauled the Android version of its browser to bring over many of its best desktop features to mobile. That release saw Mozilla add more robust support for third-party add-ons. It also brought over its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature, which stops trackers from misusing your browsing data. Separately, with Apple allowing you to change your default browser since the release of iOS 14, there’s never been a better time for iPhone users to liberate themselves from Safari.

Headspace

Headspace
Headspace

I subscribed to Headspace at the start of the pandemic. Since then, it’s become one of the few apps I use every day. Yes, Headspace is a meditation and mindfulness app, but it’s also so much more than that. You’ll find it also has a mix of music designed to help you focus and workouts for unwinding at the end of a long day. Across the board, everything it offers is excellent, and you’ll find yourself turning to it for more than just peace of mind.

Notion

Notion
Notion

Notion is one of the most powerful productivity tools you can download right now, and if your goal for 2023 is to organize your personal and professional lives, I can’t recommend it enough. What makes Notion so powerful is an interface that looks simple but offers a lot of flexibility. I’ve used Notion to create to-do lists, write notes and features and manage personal projects. It can be a bit overwhelming at first. My suggestion is to head over to YouTube to see how other people have used Notion’s features to organize their lives.

Libby

Libby
Libby

If you want to do more reading in 2022, forget about buying books through Amazon and download Libby instead. If you’re not familiar with the app, it allows you to borrow ebooks, digital magazines and graphic novels from your local library. All you need is a library card, which most systems across the US offer for free. Sometimes you have to wait to borrow the books you want to read most, but you’ll find Libby will dramatically expand your reading list.

Transit

Transit app
Transit

There’s nothing worse than waiting for a bus on a cold winter’s day or watching three go by one after another. Avoid both situations with one of the best public transit planning apps on Android and iOS. Transit excels where other apps in the category fail thanks to its clean, easy-to-use interface that highlights all the options near you. It also has one of the better algorithms for predicting departure times, so you’ll know exactly when you need to run out of your house or apartment to catch the next bus, train or streetcar.

Paprika

Paprika recipe app
Paprika

Paprika is the best $5 you can spend to make feeding yourself even easier. At its core, it allows you to download recipes from your favorite websites and make them accessible on all your devices. You can also use it to scale the size of the meal you’re about to cook and convert between metric and imperial measurements. Add to that a meal planner, shopping lists and a tool for tracking the ingredients in your pantry, and you have an indispensable app for home cooks.

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts app
Pocket Casts

With podcasts becoming ever more popular with each passing year, there’s a good chance you already have a handful of favorite shows you listen to every week. As much as Spotify would like to convince you it has the best podcast app, that distinction goes to Pocket Casts. We like it because it offers a consistently great experience across every system it supports. And if you use a mix of platforms from Apple, Google and Microsoft, you don’t have to worry about syncing, either. It’s also nice to use software that doesn’t feel caught between two worlds in the way that Spotify does. Pocket Casts isn’t trying to be anything more than an app for listening to podcasts. That’s not something you can say of Spotify, and it’s often a source of frustration for those who turn to it for music.

Pocket

Pocket app
Pocket

Another way to read more in 2022 is to download Pocket. It’s among the most popular read-it-later apps out there, allowing you to save articles you find online. Much like Pocket Casts, what makes this app compelling is that it offers a consistently excellent device-agnostic experience, making it a great option for those who haven’t gone all-in on one ecosystem. Whether you use Chrome, Safari or Edge, you can install a browser extension to save articles you stumble upon. You can then read them later without distractions on your phone or tablet. Just don’t forget to make a dent in your Pocket reading list occasionally.

Signal

Signal
Signal

We understand, asking your friends and family to install another messaging app on their phone can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean task, but the effort has also never been more worth it. In Signal, you’ll find one of the most secure chat apps on the market. It has all the features you would expect from a messaging program, including support for stickers and Snapchat-like Stories, but more important are the ways Signal is different from rivals like WhatsApp and Telegram. Signal is a nonprofit and is one of the few apps committed to privacy rather than revenue via data collection. That means you won’t see any ads in the app, nor will the company sell your data to third-party marketers.

Tunnelbear

Tunnelbear for Android
Tunnelbear

After a Password manager, one of the best tools you can use to safeguard your online privacy is a VPN. Again, there are many options out there, but we like TunnelBear for its simplicity and whimsical ursine theme. A VPN isn’t as essential as a password manager, but you’ll want to get one if you frequently find yourself traveling or using the public WiFi at places like cafes and libraries. Using a VPN in those contexts will ensure your connection is protected with encryption so that any information you send over remains safe and private.

Snapseed

Snapseed
Snapseed

Most recent phones come with great cameras. Still, even with the latest iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel, almost every photo can benefit from an edit before you share it. The options you have for photo editing apps are nearly endless, but if you want something that works well, look no further than Snapseed. It’s an old favorite that offers a comprehensive suite of editing options but never gets bogged down in too many sliders and dials. Best of all, it makes it easy to save edits to your camera roll and upload them to apps like Instagram.

Microsoft’s humble NotePad might be getting tabs in Windows 11

Shortly after Windows 11 arrived, Microsoft made some key improvements in the Notepad app that hasn’t seen much change since the Windows 95 days. Now, it may be introducing an even bigger feature, judging by a leak from a senior Microsoft product manager spotted by The Verge. “Notepad in Windows 11 now has tabs!” the person said on Twitter, before the tweet was deleted several minutes later. 

The screenshot included in the tweet shows two tabs, along with a note “confidential, don’t discuss features or take screenshots.” That warning clearly failed to do the job, but the screenshot indicates that tabs are in testing and may arrive to Windows Insiders sometime down the road.

Microsoft's humble NotePad might be getting tabs in Windows 11
Microsoft

Given how much we all depend on tabs in web browsers, it’s hard to believe they’re not more ubiquitous on other apps. Microsoft added that feature to File Explorer on Windows 11 earlier this year, helping reduce the sprawl across screens when you’re searching or copying files. The company did test tabs for Windows 10 apps some years ago, but essentially abandoned that project.

Notepad is an old app, to say the least, having arrived in 1983 to help Microsoft sell people on using a mouse in MS-DOS. Considering it’s largely the same plain text editor it was two decades ago, it’s amazing it’s still used as much as it is. If you’re using Notepad so much that you need tabs, my hat’s off to you — but the feature is just a rumor until we see it released into the wild. 

Apple pulls new iOS 16.2 HomeKit architecture after users report Home app issues

Apple has stopped rolling out an optional Home app upgrade after users began reporting issues with the software. “We temporarily removed the option to upgrade to the new Home architecture,” the company says on a support page spotted by M…

The Lastpass hack was worse than the company first reported

After being hacked for the second time in as many years this August, password manager app Lastpass announced on Thursday the most recent intrusion was much more damaging than initially reported with the attackers having made off with users’ password vaults in some cases. That means the thieves have people’s entire collections of encrypted personal data, if not the immediate method to unlock them.

“No customer data was accessed during the August 2022 incident,” LastPass CEO Karim Toubba, explained. However, some of the app’s source code was lifted and then used to spearphish a Lastpass employee into giving up their access credentials, then used those keys to decrypt and copy off, “some storage volumes within the cloud-based storage service.”

Among the encrypted data obtained by the hackers included basic customer account information like company names, billing, email and IP addresses; and telephone numbers, Toubba continued. “These encrypted fields remain secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password using our Zero Knowledge architecture,” Toubba said. “As a reminder, the master password is never known to LastPass and is not stored or maintained by LastPass.” 

Still, you’re going to take the company’s word for it? I’m not. It’ll be a pain but swapping out all of your various existing site passwords for new ones — as well as picking a new master password — might ultimately prove necessary to regain your online security. Or you could just tell Lastpass to go kick rocks and switch over to 1Password or Bitwarden.

TikTok will explain why it recommends videos on its ‘For You’ page

The algorithm that powers TikTok’s “For You” page has long been a source of fascination and suspicion. Fans often remark on the app’s eerie accuracy, while TikTok critics have at times speculated the company could subtly manipulate its algorithm to influence its users in more nefarious ways.

Now, the company is taking new steps to demystify some aspects of its algorithm. The app is introducing a feature that will “help people understand why a particular video has been recommended to them.” With the update, users will be able to tap on a new question mark icon, which will list some factors that played a role in the recommendation.

In a blog post, the company notes that its “recommendation system is powered by technical models” and the feature is meant to make “technical details more easily understandable.” For now, that also means the details shared sound a bit vague. For example, “this video is popular in the United States,” and “you are following Hanna” are two of the explanations provided by Tiktok. Other explanations may be based on “user interactions, such as content you watch, like or share, comments you post, or searches.”

The company says it plans to add “more granularity and transparency” to the feature over time, though, so the explanations could eventually get more detailed. A TikTok spokesperson said that future versions may also incorporate other factors that influence the app’s algorithm, like an individual’s account settings.

While the feature will likely not do much to assuage critics who think TikTok, or parent company ByteDance, uses the algorithm to manipulate users, it could help make its recommendations a bit more understandable to its users. And the change is part of a broader move from TikTok to prove it’s willing to be more transparent about the inner workings of its app. The company has also partnered with Oracle to conduct a review of its algorithms and content moderation system.

Microsoft brings full Teams integration to HoloLens 2

Microsoft’s latest update for the HoloLens 2 makes it easier for users to collaborate with colleagues. One of the biggest additions is perhaps the full integration of Microsoft Teams, because users will no longer have to hop on a computer or a phone to attend meetings with the rest of their organization. While the headset has had the capability to make and receive Teams video calls for years, its collaborative features were still pretty limited. 

With this new update, Microsoft is giving HoloLens 2 users the capability to display an array of holographic windows with Teams calls, chats and calendars. Since the update also adds OneDrive integration, users will be able to access their cloud-based folders and see Word documents, PDFs and videos shared during calls. 

Microsoft has also combined its two Dynamics 365 Mixed Reality apps, namely the Dynamics 365 Guides app that provides step-by-step holographic instructions to users and the Dynamics 365 Remote Assist app that lets frontline workers show colleagues what they’re seeing in the field. The company said the combined application was a priority request from Toyota, which has been providing feedback for the headset since 2016. 

David Kleiner, who leads Toyota North America’s Applied Technology & Research Lab, explained that giving frontline workers laptops won’t work, because they don’t have desk jobs and that using a device they can wear with all the tools they need is much more practical. “Someone can grab a HoloLens, start a Guides session, and literally have a trainer in their head,” Kleiner said. “If they do need help, they can call an expert right from the app.”

In addition to discussing the headset’s new capabilities, Microsoft also said that it would release a successor to the current iteration. Reports earlier this year claimed that the tech giant scrapped its plans for the HoloLens 3 and that it was going to be the end for the device. Microsoft, however, denied that it was killing the HoloLens and called it “critical part of [the company’s] plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse.” Now, Microsoft mixed reality VP Scott Evans said that the company is “just looking for the right design point to make it a meaningful update” because “[customers] want a successor device that’s going to enable an even higher return on investment.”