The Best iPhone and Android Apps of 2024

If you're looking to get the most from your Android or iPhone, you'll need to find the right apps, ones that will help you organize your life, navigate the world, and, sometimes, just help you pass the time.

But finding the best apps is easier said than done. Both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store feature millions of apps, including tens of thousands that do little more than take up valuable storage on your device.

As experts in the telecom space since 2008, we've watched the evolution of both smartphones and their apps. We've done the dirty work of sifting through all that the app stores have to offer, collecting the best new apps for Android and iPhone every month. Now we've gathered them here so you can explore the best options to improve your phone, with 10 recommended apps in 6 categories: entertainment, food and cooking, gaming, health and fitness, parenting, and photography. 

We're updating this guide as we find more great apps, so be sure to check back regularly. In the meantime, read on to find the best Android and iPhone apps for 2024.

Best Entertainment Apps

Apple Sports

An all-in-one sports destination

Free from Apple

This is a simple and straightforward app, giving you the pertinent information from the games that matter most to you—you're able to choose which leagues and teams you follow from a selection that includes all the major professional sports and some college options. Do we want more? Sure, although the lack of noise is one of the more appealing things about the app. Still, we'd be interested to see video highlights, season stats, and more sports/leagues integrated into the app. There's also a glaring absence of a widget for the app. It'd be great to have scores right there on your Home Screen—don't be surprised if one is available soon. 

As for privacy, well it is an Apple-built app. While none of the big tech companies is exactly perfect when it comes to data privacy, Apple is widely considered pretty rock-solid.  

Best of March 2024
Recommended by Angelo Ilumba

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Callsheet

Revolutionize your movie and TV show exploration

Free trial from Apple, subscription available 
Read our full review

Callsheet is a breath of fresh air in the world of movie and TV show databases, offering a sleek, modern interface that cuts through the noise to deliver the information you're actually looking for. From detailed cast lists to fascinating trivia, everything you want to know about your favorite films and series is just a tap away, without the frustration of navigating through ads or unnecessary prompts.

Callsheet isn't just about looking better; it's about functioning better. It leverages The Movie Database to bring you comprehensive and accurate data, but with several clever enhancements over IMDb. You can personalize the app with a customizable "quick access" button for your favorite resources, toggle on and off information to avoid spoilers, and even see where to stream your picks across countries, thanks to integration with JustWatch.

The app also respects your viewing habits and preferences. Whether you want to pin your current watches for quick access or adjust settings to hide potential spoilers, Callsheet has thought of it all. This attention to detail extends to its subscription model. Callsheet is ad-free, powered by user subscriptions that are reasonably priced and tiered, not just for access but for those who wish to support the app further.

Best of April 2024
Recommended by Angelo Ilumba

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Pigment Adult Coloring Book 

Tap and paint your way to zen

Free from Apple, subscriptions options after trial

As a kid, nothing was more entertaining and calming to me than sitting at my Nana’s dining room table with a stack of coloring books and some crayons worn to nubs, letting my creativity fly. As an adult with far less free time (and storage space!), I love the idea of packing away the colored pencils and zoning out to the next best thing—a coloring book on my iPhone.

Enter Pigment, the balm to soothe my over-stimulated psyche. Originally released in early 2023, Pigment has hit its stride over the last year thanks to frequent tweaks and updates that have expanded its book library to over 10,000 pages to color, plus the ability to upload your own images to play with. The app offers a free 7-day trial, followed by weekly, monthly, or annual subscription options starting at $4.99/week.

The image library offers categories such as Elements, Culture, Sports, Flowers and Plants, Food, and more—there’s sure to be something that piques anyone’s interest. Within each category are themed books—for example, the “Culture” category includes “A Pirate’s Life” and “Ancient Egpyt,” while “Foods” features books called “Delicious Treat”s and, my particular favorite, “Caffeinated.”

You can choose your favorite color palettes and customize them further using a color wheel and slider, resulting in infinite colors to match your aesthetic. Make it easy on yourself with the tap-to-fill mode, or play around with advanced features like Freehand. With over 30 brush types, including Fuzzy Fur, Glitter, and Blender, you can really let your creativity fly. Add texture and patterns to your pictures with options like Aluminum, Fabric, Wood, and Swirl.

Need a little inspiration? Check out the community gallery to see what others have done with the picture you’re interested in. In fact, turn it into a social affair by following other community members and using hashtags to label your art, making it visible within the larger gallery. Want to show off your artwork to friends and family? From the My Work tab, simply pick your masterpiece and share it. You can even print your images, either directly to a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth-enabled printer or to another device you can then print from.

The physical user experience on an iPhone can be a smidge clunky at times, which is why I knocked off half a star—because of the small real estate on the screen, you’re constantly having to pinch, pan, zoom, and rotate to color things in. That said, I have a much better experience on my iPad, and Pigment also supports Apple Pencil for honing in the finer details.

Additionally, the color payoff on deeper hues doesn’t match perfectly with the color displayed in the palette. For example, I customized a basic purple to be super dark and rich, like an eggplant… but when I tapped to add it to my picture, the color was much more muted and pastel. Womp womp.

Best of March 2024
Recommended by Lauren Hannula

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Radiooooo

The antidote to Spotify monotony

Free from Apple and Google

If you're like me, you're always on the hunt for unfamiliar music. Spotify and Apple might seem like infinite libraries primed for exploration, though those apps' recommendations often leave a lot to be desired, with algorithms that pin your tastes down to a highly specific demographic. The typical experience ends up feeling less like listening to an inspired D.J. and more like setting your old iPod on shuffle.

Radiooooo offers a much-needed alternative. As the name implies, it's closer to Pandora than Spotify, but with an important distinction: the app allows you to travel to different decades and hear what radio would've sounded like at the time. Select a country from the global map, pick an era, and then choose the broad style you're feeling. Not a fan of mainstream radio? Not to worry. We love the "Weird" setting, which yields tons of unexpected sounds.

The app offers more opportunities for rabbit holes, too, with Islands dedicated to themes, artists, and labels and highly curated channels that change week to week. A premium membership allows you to access more Islands and the Taxi feature, which allows you to access multiple countries and decades at the same time. While we wish there was more of these features available in the free version, we've still found a lot to love without paying, including about a dozen new favorite tracks.

Best of March 2024
Recommended by Kevin Kearney

Best Food &
Cooking Apps

Seed to Spoon

Grow a garden to improve your health

Free from Apple and Google with an optional paid subscription
Read our full review

Seed to Spoon is an all-encompassing app that helps you plan your garden. You can pick from thousands of different plants, see live weather reports, and educate yourself on common pests that threaten your plants. There’s also a built-in calendar for everything you plant, so you’ll have a good idea of when your seeds will sprout and when they’ll be ready for harvesting.

Seed to Spoon has been around for a few years, but it recently released a new AI-driven feature called “Growbot” that’s revamped the app. Growbot is an AI chatbot that can answer questions and provide customized garden advice.

For most average gardeners, the app and its functionality are perfect. It’s easy to use, offers free features, and doesn’t use a ton of storage space. On the other hand, some of its best features are locked behind the premium subscription of $4.99/month. Using just a free subscription, you’re limited to 10 different kinds of plants in your garden tracker and three questions a day from Growbot. Master gardeners who plant more than 10 types of plants or new gardeners who have a lot of questions might be best served by a paid subscription.

Best of April 2024
Recommended by Max McCaskill

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Paprika

No recipe is out of reach

Free from Apple and Google
Read our full review

Nothing against Grandma’s famous meatloaf, but many of us now look to the internet for cooking inspiration. That said, the World Wide Web is the Wild West of recipes. Long-winded food blogs, subscription paywalls, and endless options can make it difficult to sort and save the recipes you want. Enter Paprika: the one-stop recipe browser and organizer. From storing your favorite recipes to scaling ingredients, this handy app will simplify your cooking game, I promise.

Paprika automatically trims the fat by parsing a recipe down to its essential parts: the ingredients and the directions. No more scrolling past the monologue (no offense, writers) or “jumping to recipe.” Paprika knows what we need. Plus, you can use the Scale & Convert feature to customize to your desired serving size.

And for those worried about Grandma’s famous meatloaf, there’s no need to part with the sentimental. Simply save your own recipes by tapping the + button at the top right corner of your Paprika home screen and transcribe to your heart's content.

Best of April 2024
Recommended by Alissa Bird

Best Gaming Apps

NYT Strands

A word search for the Worldle-obsessed

Free on iPhone and Android (for now)
Read our full review

Move over, Wordle and Connections, there’s a new linguistic sheriff in town. The New York Times has debuted Strands, its version of a word search game with a twist, and my personal favorite new distraction. I immediately go to this game first thing in the morning while I’m enjoying my cup ‘o’ Joe.

The object of Strands is to find hidden words, which can zig and zag all throughout the letter field. Each word is connected to its fellows by a theme (much like in Connections), but NYT doesn’t just hand that theme over to you. You get a hint at the top that broadly alludes to it, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes beat-your-head-against-your-desk vague.

The theme itself is one of the words to find, and it spans the entire length or width of the field, thereby nicknamed the “Spangram.” It was only a few more moments before the theme of the game above popped out at me: “mythological.” I then filled in the rest of the grid pretty easily.

Strands is currently in beta, meaning anyone can access and play it without a NYT Games subscription. Though not technically a downloadable app—yet—you can save Strands to your device’s homescreen and treat it like one. Here’s mine, for example, nestled comfortably in my Games folder on my iPhone like a real app:

If the game proves as addictive as its predecessors, it’s sure to be roped into NYT’s Games app (iPhone, Android), which costs $6/month (you can also upgrade to an All-Access subscription for $25/month, which includes NYT’s digital newspaper, Wirecutter, NYT Cooking, and The Athletic). So play it for free-nintey-nine while you still can… and maybe you’ll learn a word or two along the way.

Best of April 2024
Recommended by Lauren Hannula

Best Health & Fitness Apps

Yuka

Avoid the dirty dozen and more

Free from Apple and Google

Whether or not you're a health nut, avoiding additives, preservatives, and forever chemicals is a smart idea. Yuka is a simple and intuitive tool for checking the quality of the cosmetic and food products you love most. Simply open the app and scan the barcode of any product, be it fruit snacks, juice, or your deodorant, for a health rating and other helpful metrics, including the nutritional value, the risk level of certain additives, and how those additives might harm your body.

Our favorite feature is the recommendation section, which features healthier substitutions for low-rated products. (Going clean doesn’t mean giving it all up.) Yuka also saves your past scans for later reference and allows you to favorite items you like most. You can even browse their Top Products section for the cleanest body wash in town or guilt-free candy substitutions. (Access to all the Top Products requires a subscription).

The only downside (dare I call it that) is getting too scan-happy and dumping your partner's hazardous hair gel without asking (just me?).

Best of March 2024
Recommended by Alissa Bird

Best Parenting Apps

BabyQuip

Gear for your kids when you're away from home

Free from Apple and Google
Read our full review

I hadn't heard of this app until my friends, who have a 4-month old, visited this past week. They arrived from the airport without all of the gear I'd expected. Where was the stroller? What about the crib? Were they planning on just...winging it?

Instead, they'd planned ahead by downloading BabyQuip, which is like Airbnb for infant and toddler essentials. With a few swipes, they ordered a stroller, a crib, and some blackout curtains (!) from a local vendor who'd been vetted by BabyQuip. A few days later, after they'd left for the airport, I texted the vendor, who came to grab the items. Everything else was handed via the app.

There are some small downsides. For one, the prices are expensive, especially considering most parents are on tight budgets. I'm hoping that as the app grows in popularity the prices might decline, though the latter might need to happen before the former. The second thing that could be improved is the method of communication: once you book a vendor, you correspond with them via private text, which can complicate things if plans go awry. BabyQuip would be wise to bring all communication within the app, as models like Airbnb and Uber have done, in order to avoid some of these potential problems.

Best of 2024
Recommended by Kevin Kearney

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Best Photo Apps

FixMyPics

Harness the power of AI to restore your family photos

Free from Apple and Google subscription options after trial

If you’re looking for a way to breathe new life into your old family photos, FixMyPics is a great option. It’s an AI-driven app that can repair damage, sharpen images, and even colorize black-and-white images. FixMyPics was originally released in late 2021 and had thousands of downloads, but user results and reviews were not great. The app’s AI features were upgraded in late 2023 leading to much better image quality. Since then, downloads and positive reviews have skyrocketed.

FixMyPics offers multiple options for restoring your photos. Each offers extra features where you can further tweak the AI adjustments. It can be as simple as just removing a bit of blur from your image to as extreme as creating a new AI-generated background. In my experience testing the app, as long as you started with a high-quality image or scan (not a picture of a picture), the results were great.

Would you get a better result by paying for a professional touchup using Photoshop? Yes. But that can be expensive and take a lot of time. Plus, it’s just not needed for most photos. FixMyPics can give you a great result in under 10 seconds for free.

The app uses encryption to protect your photos and doesn’t share your data with third parties. FixMyPics is free to download and offers a free three-day trial. If you have a small number of pictures, that’s plenty of time to do your editing. If you decide you want access to the app for longer, basic monthly subscriptions start at $2.49/month. You can also choose weekly or annual subscriptions depending on your needs. Nobody likes to pay for apps, but that’s still a cheaper price than most other AI-driven photo apps.

Best of March 2024
Recommended by Max McCaskill