Face it: the best thing about iOS is the App Store. The iPhone has come a long way since version one, but the ability to add to the fifteen built-in apps has been the biggest improvement.
These days, Apple’s default apps are showing their age. What’s more, they suffer from being too simple for power users and too complex for new users. Ask anyone who needs to get serious work done with their iPhone and they’ll tell you that the first step to a more productive life is to ditch the defaults and replace them with apps built from the ground-up for power.
At least, that’s what I’ll tell you. Here are my picks for how to step your app game up a notch.
Swap Mail for Outlook
I know. Outlook. Made by Microsoft. Bane of office workers everywhere. Home of recall requests that don’t work, weird proprietary smilies, and the most famous computer virus in history. But that’s only on the desktop. On mobile, Outlook is really, really good.
That might be because it wasn’t really made by Microsoft. Outlook Mobile is based on an app called Accompli, bought by Microsoft back in 2014 and rebranded a few months later. Like Mailbox and Sparrow before it, Accompli was a delightful stripped-down mail client, working with multiple webmail platforms and offering now-standard features like swiping to archive or schedule for follow-ups and a focus on inbox-zero mail management.
Unlike those two, though, Accompli wasn’t shut down after its acquisition, but instead overhauled further. Microsoft built on the app’s productivity features, adding syncing with cloud storage platforms, improving the built-in calendar, and adding support for a huge number of email services.
Swap Calendar for Fantastical
The built-in Calendar is one of the better apps that comes with iOS. It’s clean, relatively fully-featured, and syncs well with third-party services. It handles time-zones terribly – I’ll never forgive it for making me miss the last Eurostar out of Paris on a Sunday night – but that’s about all.
Fantastical is still better, though.
The app, now in its second version for mobile, has a few specific features which make it worth the £4. There’s a nifty “day ticker” which lets you see how busy you are in any given day from the top level view. It has an impressive natural language engine which, unlike Apple’s, actually works, letting you type “write a post about great productivity apps at 3pm on Friday” and get a calendar event already populated.
If you want to take it further, you can swap in the desktop version of Fantastical too – though at $39.99, that’s a bigger commitment.
(Where Microsoft gives with one hand, it takes away with the other: Sunrise would probably have taken Fantastical’s place here, except the calendar app was bought by Microsoft last year and will be shut down next month)
Swap iCloud Keychain for 1Password
Apple’s password manager isn’t an app, strictly speaking – but that’s part of the reason why it’s worth replacing. The feature, which is part of iCloud, will automatically sync passwords across devices, and suggest new randomised ones when you’re signing up to a site through Safari.
When it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, it’s hopeless. The service has no easy “front door”, instead being buried deep in the settings menu, which means if you need to actually find out what the random password you just assigned is – say, to log in on a non-Apple device – you’ll be clicking for a while. And while suggesting passwords randomised to a standard format, as Apple does (four hyphen-separated groups of three characters), is only a mild security risk, it’s much more annoying if you’re trying to log in to a site with a restrictive password policy banning hyphens.
So switch to a password manager that fixes those issues, and improves in other ways too: 1Password lets you store any other sensitive information in encrypted format, from credit cards to passport numbers.
Swap Notes for Simplenote
Apple’s Notes is actually quite good. But the app’s syncing features are sub-par: it’s hard to escape from Apple’s walled garden, for one, meaning you have to use the Notes client on desktop unless you’re willing to dig in to the weeds of iCloud.
Simplenote, by contrast, syncs not only with its own web service, letting you access it anywhere, but also keeps a history of notes, letting you roll back to an earlier time if you want to see what your life was like in the past. It’s halfway between a backup and a memory aid, and can be exceedingly useful in a pinch.
Then there’s Notational Velocity. Not, strictly speaking, relevant here, because it’s a desktop app, but it syncs with Simplenote and has become one of the best stripped-down note managers available for Macs. If you use one, definitely use the other
Swap Reminders for Wunderlist
Another Microsoft-owned app, Wunderlist is a neat and tidy to-do list app. It can sync between platforms, remind you about events at a specific time, and sort items between lists, but it does it all with a panache that the built-in Reminders app falls down on. One missing feature, though, is the ability to be reminded in a specific location. If you need that, look elsewhere.
Or… swap them all for Omnifocus
With a hardcore price ($40 each for the mobile and desktop versions, rising to $60 and $80 for the pro versions), and a hardcore feature-set, omnifocus isn’t going to be for everyone. But those who do use it swear by it, to the point that it isn’t exaggerating to say that if you took it away, their lives would fall apart.
The app is fundamentally built around the “Getting Things Done” framework, which encourages users to break goals up into simple tasks that can be done in one sitting, and then review those goals on a weekly basis. It has its roots in a book by productivity guru David Allen, but is simple enough to be explained in 15 minutes. If you really want to get better at everything, give it a go. But be warned, it’ll suck you in.
