Our weekly app picks
It’s Appday Sunday and that means we’re back with more of our favorites to share. Every week we bring a handful of great apps to the table and share them with everyone. Sometimes they are new apps, sometimes old standards, but every time they are apps we love to use.
Give these a look and then take a minute to tell us all about the apps you are using and love so we can give them a try. We all find some of our favorites right in the comments on these posts!
Jerry Hildenbrand — Acorns
I’m really good at spending money, but I need all the help I can get when it comes to saving or investing it. I stumbled across the Acorns app last week and so far I’ve put away about $40 without having to think too hard about it.
The cool part is how you put money into your Acorns account. When you set things up, you connect a bank account. As you pay for things, Acorns lets you put the change into an investment account. If I spend $8.71, I have an option to deposit the $0.29 that would round my purchase to the next dollar. While not the best way to get rich, it’s easy and kind of fun,
Download: Acorns (Free)
Jen Karner — Genius
I’m constantly finding new music, and since I like to sing along this means I am regularly looking up lyrics. While it’s really easy to just do a google search and find lyrics to any song, having a single app that can help me out is always preferable. Genius has over a million song lyrics available for you to check out, with some really awesome features to check out. Their catalog has some serious variety too, from Beyonce and Kanye West to Nine Inch Nails, or The Hamilton soundtrack.
When you’re looking at lyrics, you’ll see some lines that are highlighted. If you tap on these, you’ll get annotations that give you more information. Genius will also offer to give you lyrics if it sees that you are playing music through Spotify or Pandora.
Download: Genius (Free)
Russell Holly — Checky
I keep seeing all of these “reports” from “experts” that claim the average person wakes their phone 150+ times every day. Everything about that figure gets brought up when talking about always-on displays and smartwatches being good for your overall battery. Figure the only way to be sure was to count the number of times I wake my phone every day, and since that surely was never going to happen manually I decided to give Checky a shot.
It’s a simple free app that keeps an eye on how many times you wake your phone every day, with a log for the previous days going back a week. Couldn’t be any easier, and I’m eager to see what the results tell me.
Download: Checky (Free)
Ara Wagoner — 1 Radio News
News never really stops, but I don’t always have time to read it with my eyeballs. Sometimes my eyeballs have had too much news (and other stuff) and they just need a break. Being able to snack on the headlines from news radio around the world is a boon, because on some days American media may be captivated by the asshole with the tiny digits, but the BBC is still paying attention to the rest of the world. It also has a selection of live radio streams from around the world, which is invaluable during breaking news (especially breaking international news). 1 Radio News isn’t the most polished app (yet), but it saved me from going to fifty different websites and apps to pull down a five minute headlines clip, and I’m more than happy to support an app that saves me time and helps me be more informed than my producers. Especially as they ramp up their election coverage.
Download: 1 Radio News(Free, $2.99)
