OK – you’ve probably noticed on the Apple App Store that iPad apps cost more – sometimes a LOT more – than their iPhone equivalents. But trust us, it’s worth the extra cash.
Many of the best free iPhone apps cost money in their iPad incarnations, and the quality level of what’s still free for the tablet is often ropey. But among the dross lie rare gems – iPad apps that are so good you can’t believe they’re still free.
Of those we unearthed, here’s our pick of the best free iPad apps. Note that apps marked ‘universal’ will run on your iPad and iPhone, optimising themselves accordingly.
iPad Air 2 review
iPad Mini 4 review
iPad Pro review
For a mix of free and paid apps, check out our amazing Best iPad apps chart or if you’re more into a smaller form-factor or have your eye on the iPhone 7 check out our list of the best free iPhone apps.
Haven’t bought an iPad yet and not sure which is best? We’ve got them listed on our best iPad ranking – or you can check out the best tablets list to see the full range available now.
The App Store's awash with alternate cameras with editing smarts, but
MuseCam
warrants a place on your iPad's home screen nonetheless. As a camera, it's fine, with an on-screen grid and plenty of manual settings. But on Apple's tablet, it's in editing that MuseCam excels.
Load a photo and you can apply a film-inspired filter preset (based on insight from pro photographers), or fiddle around with tone curves, color tools, and other adjustment settings.
The interface is bold, efficient, and usable, making it accessible to relative newcomers; but there's also enough depth here to please those wanting a bit more control, including the option to save tweaks as custom presets.
IAP comes in the form of additional filters, but what you get for free is generous and of a very high quality, making MuseCam a no-brainer download.
On YouTube alone, something like 60 hours of new video is uploaded every minute of the day. So keeping track of the best video from across the web is impossible.
Hyper
aims to cut through the dross, serving up a daily selection of videos selected by a team of award-winning filmmakers.
The app can download videos overnight for offline playback, and presents your daily selection as a Harry Potter-like magazine page, video loops playing behind bold headlines. Simply tap to play, drag across videos to scrub, and tap to pause. On supported iPad hardware, click the home button and you can continue watching the current video with Picture-in-Picture mode.
Chances are even Hyper's considered selection won't always be to your tastes, and it's often a bit too US-oriented; but Hyper is nonetheless a great place to start your daily trawl through online video, and frequently serves up interesting things to watch.
Slash Keyboard
is a custom iPad keyboard that makes sharing online content easier. Tap the slash key for a list of commands, which you can filter by typing a letter or two, and then enter search terms and prod a result to insert it into a document.
This makes it a cinch to quickly find and add links (Wikipedia articles; SoundCloud songs; App Store products; and so on) to notes, documents and social media posts. Additionally, Slash Keyboard speeds up typing with gestural single-finger scribbles in a manner similar to Swype and SwiftKey.
It
s not a perfect app by any means, as links are US-focused and sometimes use a proprietary link shortener rather than giving you the entire URL. Also, long-pressing the top row of letters cuts off the menu displaying related special characters.
But Slash's usefulness counters such drawbacks, and it's at the very least worth considering as an occasional alternate keyboard when wanting to link to a bunch of things you've found online.
As iOS has evolved, Notification Center has become a far more useful and robust part of the iPad experience. It can now house all kinds of useful information, which is accessible via a single downwards swipe. The idea behind
Cheatsheet
is to create a place for tiny things you need to remember, such as luggage combinations, phone numbers, and Wi-Fi passwords.
The Cheatsheet app enables you to configure your list of items and their sort order; a custom icon can also be assigned to each one. On iPad, the screen is big enough to show two rows of 'cheats', meaning the widget rarely takes up much space.
Note that for free, you get all of this without even any ads, but there's a single IAP ($3.99/£2.99) to extend Cheatsheet further; this gives you extra icons, iCloud notes sync, a custom keyboard, and an action extension, along with allowing the developer to eat.
People grumble that the iPad's 4:3 display is sub-optimal for watching television (even though it's way better than 16:9 for almost everything else), but we still think it's a great device for catching up on shows or enjoying the latest movie. And with
iTunes Movie Trailers
, film buffs can check out what's coming in cinemas.
The main interface is a bunch of featured film posters. You can filter these by genre, search for something specific, or explore the charts. Tap a film and you get a giant splash of art, an overview, and access to available teasers and trailers.
The result is an uncomplicated app that's perfect for sitting back with your iPad and gorging your eyes on the best upcoming filmmaking around, and when you find a movie you'd like to see in full you can share it to email, Notes, or the app's built-in Favorites list.
There are loads of apps for making basic edits to photos and slapping on some words, but
Little Moments
stands out primarily through being rather jolly (if a little twee at times) and being extremely easy to use.
Load in a pic (or use the camera to shoot a new one), and you can quickly add a filter, adjust things like saturation and contrast, overlay some text boxes, and get creative with quotes and stickers.
Weirdly, the last two of those things are pixelated when browsing through the app, but look just fine when added (and sadly many of the categories also sit behind in-app purchases).
But everything else about Little Moments is a joy, from the non-destructive adjustments (unless you select a new filter, whereupon everything resets) to the friendly, intuitive interface.
Part meditative relaxation tool, part sleep aid,
Melodist
is all about creating melodies from imagery. All you have to do is load something from your Camera Roll, and the app does the rest.
On analyzing your photo or screen grab for changes in hues, saturation and brightness, a music loop is generated. You can adjust the playback speed, instrument and visual effect (which starts off as a lazily scrolling piano roll), along with setting a timer.
Although occasionally discordant, the app mostly creates very pleasing sounds. And while it’s perhaps missing a trick in not displaying your photo as-is underneath the notes being played (your image is instead heavily blurred as a background), you can export each tune as audio or a video that shows the picture alongside the animation.
These free exports are a pretty generous gesture by the developer; if you want to return the favor, there’s affordable IAP for extra sounds, animation and MIDI export.
One of the great things about the app revolution is how these bits of software can help you experience creative fare that would have previously been inaccessible, unless you were armed with tons of cash and loads of time.
Folioscope
is a case in point, providing the basics for crafting your own animations.
We should note you’re not going to be the next Disney with Folioscope – the tools are fairly basic, and the output veers towards ‘wobbling stickmen’.
But you do get a range of brushes (of differing size and texture), several drawing tools (pen, eraser, flood fill, and marquee), and onion-skinning, which enables you to see faint impressions of adjacent frames, in order to line everything up.
The friendly nature of the app makes it accessible to anyone, and there’s no limit on export – projects can be shared as GIFs or movies, or uploaded to the Folioscope community, should you create an account.
After years of eyesight deterioration, John Hull became blind in 1983.
Notes on Blindness VR
has six chapters taken from his journal of the time. Each is set in a specific location, marrying John’s narrative, binaural audio, and real-time 3D animation, to create an immersive experience of a ‘world beyond sight’.
Although designed as a VR experience, this app remains effective when holding an iPad in front of your face, moving the screen about to scan your surroundings. The mood shifts throughout – there’s wonder in a blind John’s discovery of the beauty of rain, disconnection when he finds things ‘disappear’ from the world when sound stops, and a harrowing section on panic.
Towards the end, John mulls he’s “starting to understand what it’s like to be blind,” and you may get a sense of what it’s like, too, from the app, which ably showcases how to craft an engaging screen-based experience beyond the confines of television.
Among the various finger-painting apps for iPad,
Nebula
is one of the weirdest. You draw by dragging two fingers on the screen, which results in a set of neon lines atop the background. Twisting your fingers changes the nature of the futuristic ribbon you’re creating, and subsequent taps and twists add to its length.
Using the app’s settings, you can play with the thickness and density of the lines and switch between angled and wavy compositions. The results are very abstract whatever you do, but Nebula’s a fun app for creating something visually different on your tablet.
There’s no saving your work in the free version, though (beyond snapping a screen grab) – you’ll need the $1.99/£1.49 Tools IAP for that, which also adds symmetry functionality and high-resolution PDF export.
The thinking behind Auxy Music Studio is that music-making – both in the real world and software – has become too complicated. This app therefore strives to combine the immediacy of something like Novation Launchpad’s loop triggers with a basic piano roll editor.
For each instrument, you choose between drums and decidedly electronic synths. You then compose loops of between one and four bars, tapping out notes on the piano roll’s grid. Subsequent playback occurs on the overview screen by tapping loops to cue them up.
For those who want to go a bit further, the app includes arrangement functionality (for composing entire songs), along with Ableton Link and MIDI export support. Auxy’s therefore worth a look for relative newcomers to making music and also pros after a no-nonsense scratchpad.
It’s become apparent that Adobe – creators of photography and graphic design powerhouses Photoshop and Illustrator – don’t see mobile devices as suitable for full projects. However, the company’s been hard at work on a range of satellite apps, of which Photoshop Fix is perhaps the most impressive.
Built on Photoshop technology, this retouching tool boasts a number of high-end features for making considered edits to photographs. The Liquify tool in particular is terrific, enabling you to mangle images like clay, or more subtly adjust facial features using bespoke tools for manipulating mouths and eyes.
Elsewhere, you can smooth, heal, color and defocus a photo to your heart’s content, before sending it to Photoshop on the desktop for further work, or flattening it for export to your Camera Roll. It’s particularly good when used with the Apple Pencil (still a funny name) and the iPad Pro, such is the power and speed of that device and input method.
The idea behind Canva is to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to creating great-looking layouts based on your photos. Select a layout type (presentation, blog graphic, invitation, and so on) and the app serves up templates to work with.
These are mostly very smart indeed, but the smartest thing about Canva is that these starting points can all be edited: swap out images for your own photos, adjust text boxes, and add new elements or even entire pages.
Because of its scope, Canva isn’t as immediate as one-click automated apps in this space, but the interface is intuitive enough to quickly grasp. Our only niggle is the lack of multi-item selection, but with Canva being an online service, you can always fine-tune your iPad creations in a browser on the desktop.
Many of us are caught in high-stress environments for much of our lives, and electronic gadgets often do little to help. Apple has recognised this, promising a breathing visualization tool in iOS 10. In the meantime, Breathe+ brings similar functionality to your iPad.
You define how long breaths in and out should take, and whether you want to hold your breath at any point during the cycle. You then let Breathe+ guide your breathing for a user-defined session length.
The visualization is reminiscent of a minimalist illustrator’s take on a wave rising and falling on the screen, but you can also close your eyes and have the iPad vibrate for cues. For free, there are some ads, which aren’t pretty, but don’t distract too much. For $1.99/£1.49, you can be rid of them, along with adding themes and usage history stats.
Between quickly trimming a video in Photos and immersing yourself in the likes of iMovie sits Splice. This is a free video editor that on the surface looks accessible – even simplistic – but that offers surprising depth for those who need it.
To get started, you import a bunch of clips. These can be reordered, and you can for each choose a transition if you don’t want standard crossfades. Access an individual clip and a whole host of additional tools becomes available, including text overlays, speed adjustment, and animation effects. It’s also possible to layer multiple audio files, including on-board music and narration.
For more demanding wannabe directors, Splice might still not be enough – in which case, head towards a more powerful product like Pinnacle Studio Pro or iMovie. But for everyone else, it really hits that sweet spot in being straightforward, approachable, and powerful.
With a native weather app bafflingly absent from iPad, you need to venture to the App Store to get anything beyond the basic daily overview Notification Center provides. Weather Underground is the best freebie on the platform, offering a customizable view to satisfy even the most ardent weather geeks.
Current conditions are shown at the top, outlining the temperature, precipitation likelihood, and a local map. But scroll and you can delve into detailed forecasts, dew point readings, sunrise and sunset times, videos, webcams, health data and web links. The bulk of the tiles can be disabled if there are some you don’t use, and most can be reordered to suit.
Although not making the best use of iPad in landscape, the extra screen space afforded by Apple’s tablet makes the Weather Underground experience a little more usable than on iPhone, enabling faster access to tiles. And for free, it’s a top-notch app, although you can also fling $1.99/£1.49 at it annually if you want rid of the unobtrusive ads.
Formerly known as Replay, Quik is a video editor primarily designed for people who can’t be bothered doing the editing bit. You select photos and videos, pick a theme, and sit back as Quik pieces together a masterpiece that can subsequently be saved and shared.
For tinkerers, there are styles and settings to tweak. Post-Replay, the app offers its 28 varied styles for free, and you can delve into the edit itself, trimming clips, reordering media, adjusting focal points, and adding titles.
Alternatively, the really lazy can do nothing at all and still get results – every week, Quik will serve up highlights videos, enabling you to relive favorite moments. These videos are quite random in nature, but are nonetheless often a nice surprise. Still, anyone willing to put in the slightest additional effort will find Quik rewards any minutes invested many times over.
Although envisaged as a freely open system of communication, the harsh reality is the web has plenty of roadblocks. Often, these are geographical in nature, thrown up by governments or corporations, in order to stop people living in certain places being able to see certain things. VPNs enable you to get around such restrictions and Opera VPN gives you the means to do so for no outlay whatsoever.
The app installs quickly and is simple to use. You can select a region and optionally block adverts and web trackers. When connected, it’ll also tot up how many ads and trackers have been blocked.
In use, we found Opera VPN broadly reliable, stable and fast enough to view all kinds of content, including video within certain popular geo-locked apps. There are some moral questions lurking – Opera reportedly sells anonymized user data, and, bizarrely, is considering adding adverts in the future (despite Opera VPN’s ad-blocking stance). In the meantime, it’s a solid download if you need a VPN for nothing.
We’ve always found the Remote app a bit of an oddball. On the one hand, it’s sort of iTunes for iPad, streaming your Mac or PC’s library to your device. On the other, it’s also a means of controlling an Apple TV.
In the former case, it’s fine, if a bit slow to load large libraries. Still, the interface is in many ways superior to Music’s, which now seems determined to sideline anything that isn’t Apple Music.
As for controlling an Apple TV with a massive glass-screened tablet, that might seem ridiculous until you’ve grappled with the Siri Remote. After that point, you’ll be glad to have Remote installed, enabling you to navigate your Apple TV and quickly input passwords, rather than getting frustrated to the point of wanting to hurl everything you’ve ever bought from Apple into the heart of the sun.
There’s a tendency for relaxation aids to be noodly and dull, but TaoMix 2 bucks the trend. You get the usual sounds to aid relaxation (wind, rain, birds, water), but also an interface that nudges the app towards being a tool for creating a kind of ambient personal soundtrack.
The basics are dead simple: tap the + button, select a sound pack, and drag a sound to the canvas. You then manually position the circular cursor within the soundscape, or slowly flick so it lazily bounces around the screen, your various sounds then ebbing and flowing into the mix.
This makes TaoMix 2 more fun to play with than its many rivals. Of course, if you just want to shut the world out, that option exists too: load a soundscape you’ve previously created, set a timer, and use TaoMix 2 to help you nod off.
Should you want something other than what’s found within the generous selection of built-in noises, packs are available for purchase (including whale sounds, ‘Japanese garden’ and orchestral strings); and if you fancy something entirely more custom, you can even import sounds of your own.
It says something that what once required a powerful desktop computer and a copy of something like After Effects can now be achieved using a freebie app on your iPad. With Vimo, you load a video and can add to it a bunch of animated effects and ‘motion stickers’.
What makes this app all the more impressive is the level of control it affords. You’re not limited to some kind of canned wiggly motion that doesn’t fit your video. Instead, you drag across the timeline to play through your video and can at any point pause to rotate and move placed stickers. Vimo then figures out all the complicated bits — paths, keyframes, and so on — before you share your creation with friends.
There’s IAP to remove an (unobtrusive) Vimo watermark and buy new stickers, but the free app includes plenty of content to make even the dullest home video a bit more animated and a lot more fun.
Although it’s apparently designed for kids aged 9-11, Seedling Comic Studio comes across a lot like a free (if somewhat stripped back) take on iPad classic Comic Life. You load images from your Camera Roll (or take new ones with the camera), arrange them into comic-book frames, and can then add all manner of speech balloons, filters and stickers.
Decided that your heroic Miniature Schnauzer should have to save the world from a giant comic-book sandwich? This is your app! Naturally, there are limitations lurking. The filter system is a bit rubbish, requiring you to cycle through the dozen or so on offer, rather than pick favourites more directly, and a few of the sticker packs require IAP.
But for no outlay at all, there’s plenty of scope here for comic-book creation, from multi-page documents you can output to PDF, to amusing poster-like pages you can share on social networks. And that’s true whether you’re 9 or 49.
Although Photofy includes a decent range of tools for performing typical edits on photos – including adjustments, cropping, saturation, and the like – this app is more interested in helping you get properly creative.
Within the photo editing tools are options for adding in-vogue blurs and producing collages; and in ‘Text & Overlays’, you’ll find a wealth of options for slapping all kinds of artwork and text on top of your photographic masterpieces.
The interface works well through bold, tappable buttons and chunky sliders (although it takes a while to realise the pane containing the latter can be scrolled). And although some filters and stickers require IAP to unlock, there’s loads available here entirely for free. (Also, Photofy rather pleasingly gives you alternatives for its watermark, if you don’t want to pay to remove it, but aren’t too keen on the default. Nice.)
With a noodly soundtrack playing in the background, WWF Together invites you to spin a papercraft world and tap points of interest to learn more about endangered species. 16 creatures get fuller treatment – a navigable presentation of sorts that hangs on a key characteristic, such as a panda’s charisma, or an elephant’s intelligence.
These sections are arranged as a three-by-three grid, each screen of which gives you something different, be it statistics, gorgeous photography, or a ‘facetime’ movie that gives you a chance to get up close and personal.
Apps that mix charity and education can often come across as dry and worthy, but WWF Together is neither. It’s informative but charming, and emotive but fun.
Rather neatly, stories can be shared by email, and this screen further rewards you with origami instructions to make your own paper animal; once constructed, it can sit on the desk next to all your technology, reminding you of the more fragile things that exist in our world.
GarageBand offers a loop player, but Novation Launchpad was doing this kind of thing years before, and in a manner that’s so intuitive and simple that even a toddler could record a track. (We know — ours did.)
The app comprises a set of pads, where you choose a genre, tap pads, and they keep playing until you tap something else in the same group. Performances can be recorded, and you can also mess about with effects to radically change the output of what you’re playing.
Whether you’re a musician or not, Launchpad is a great app for making a noise. And if you fancy something a bit more unique than the built-in sounds, there’s a $6.99/£4.99 in-app purchase that lets you import your own samples.
The iPad’s well catered for in spreadsheet terms with Google freebie Sheets and Apple’s Numbers, but the reality is the business world mostly relies on Microsoft Excel. Like Microsoft’s other iOS fare, Excel is surprisingly powerful, marrying desktop-style features with touchscreen smarts.
You can get started with a blank workbook or choose from one of the bundled templates, which include budget planners, schedules, logs, and lists. Wisely, the app has an optional custom keyboard when you’re editing cells, filled with symbols, numbers, and virtual cursor keys. This won’t make much odds if you’re armed with a Bluetooth keyboard, but it speeds things up considerably if you only have your iPad handy.
You might be wondering what the catch is, and there aren’t many if you own a standard iPad or a mini. Sign in with a free Microsoft account and you’re blocked from some aesthetic niceties, but can do pretty much everything else. If you’re on an iPad Pro, however, Microsoft demands you have a qualifying Office 365 subscription to create and edit documents, but the app at least still functions as a viewer.
You might argue that Google Maps is far better suited to a smartphone, but we reckon the king of mapping apps deserves a place on your iPad, too.
Apple’s own Maps app has improved, but Google still outsmarts its rival when it comes to public transport, finding local businesses, saving chunks of maps offline, and virtual tourism by way of Street View.
Google’s ‘OS within an OS’ also affords a certain amount of cross-device sync when it comes to searches. We don’t, however, recommend you strap your cellular iPad to your steering wheel and use Google Maps as a sat-nav replacement, unless you want to come across as some kind of nutcase.
The original Brushes app was one of the most important in the iPhone’s early days. With Jorge Colombo using it to paint a New Yorker cover, it showcased the potential of the technology, and that an iPhone could be used for production, rather than merely consumption.
Brushes eventually stopped being updated, but fortunately went open source beforehand. Brushes Redux is the result.
On the iPad, you can take advantage of the much larger screen. But the main benefit of the app is its approachable nature. It’s extremely easy to use, but also has plenty of power for those who need it, not least in the layering system and the superb brush designer.
Adult colouring books are all the rage, proponents claiming bringing colour to intricate abstract shapes helps reduce stress – at least until you realise you’ve got pen on your shirt and ground oil pastels into the sofa.
You’d think the process of colouring would be ideal for iPad, but most relevant apps are awful, some even forcing tap-to-fill. That is to colouring what using a motorbike is to running a marathon – a big cheat. Pigment is an exception, marrying a love for colouring with serious digital smarts.
On selecting an illustration, there’s a range of palettes and tools to explore. You can use pencils and markers, adjusting opacity and brush sizes, and work with subtle gradients. Colouring can be ‘freestyle’, or you can tap to select an area and ensure you don’t go over the lines while furiously scribbling. With a finger, Pigment works well, but it’s better with a stylus; with an iPad Pro and a Pencil, you’ll lob your real books in the bin.
The one niggle: printing and accessing the larger library requires a subscription in-app purchase. It’s a pity there’s no one-off payment for individual books, but you do get plenty of free illustrations, and so it’s hard to grumble.
For a free app, Status Board is rather canny. The idea is to use a dormant iPad for displaying interesting and useful information: a clock, weather reports, calendar entries, unread email subjects, Twitter replies, and RSS feeds.
These can be arranged by dragging widgets about on a grid. Status Board works in landscape or portrait, and there’s an alternate HD layout if you want to output to, for example, a wall-mounted telly.
There’s also a single expansion pack IAP (£7.99/$9.99), which gives you access to more widgets: graphs, tables, custom HTML, countdowns, text, and photos. The last of those in particular might convince you to open your wallet; but even if you don’t, get Status Board to make your iPad actually useful during its downtime.
For a long while, Paper was a freemium iPad take on Moleskine sketchbooks. You made little doodles and then flipped virtual pages to browse them. At some point, it went free, but now it’s been transformed into something different and better.
The original tools remain present and correct, but are joined by the means to add text, checklists, and photos. One other newcomer allows geometric shapes you scribble to be tidied up, but without losing their character.
So rather than only being for digital sketches, Paper’s now for all kinds of notes and graphs, too. The sketchbooks, however, are gone; in their place are paper stacks that explode into walls of virtual sticky notes. Some old-hands have grumbled, but we love the new Paper. It’s smarter, simpler, easier to browse, and makes Apple’s own Notes look like a cheap knock-off.
There are loads of iPad apps for reading and annotating PDFs, but LiquidText is different. Rather than purely aping paper, the developers have thought about the advantages of working with virtual documents.
So while you still get a typical page view, you can pinch to collapse passages you’re not interested in and also compare those that aren’t adjacent.
There’s a ‘focus’ view that shows only annotated sections, and you can even select chunks of text and drag them to the sidebar. Tap one of those cut-outs at a later point and its location will instantly be displayed in the main text. Smartly, you can save any document in the app’s native format, export it as a PDF with comments, or share just the notes as an RTF.
Although Apple introduced iCloud Keychain in iOS 7, designed to securely store passwords and payment information, 1Password is a more powerful system.
Along with integrating with Safari, it can be used to hold identities, secure notes, network information and app licence details. It’s also cross-platform, meaning it will work with Windows and Android.
And since 1Password is a standalone app, accessing and editing your information is fast and efficient. The core app is free (the company primarily makes its money on the desktop), although you will need to pay a one-off $9.99/£7.99 IAP to access advanced features (multiple vaults, Apple Watch support, tagging, and custom fields).
We’re not sure whether Slack is an amazing aid to productivity or some kind of time vampire. Probably a bit of both. What we do know is that the real-time messaging system is excellent in a work environment for chatting with colleagues (publicly and privately), sharing and previewing files, and organising discussions by topic.
There’s smart integration with online services, and support for both the iPad Pro and the iPad’s Split View function.
Note that although Slack is clearly designed with businesses in mind, it also works perfectly well as a means of communicating with friends if you don’t fancy lobbing all your worldly wisdom into Facebook’s maw.
Podcasts are mostly associated with small portable devices – after all, the very name is a mash-up of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore your favourite shows when armed with an iPad rather than an iPhone.
We’re big fans of Overcast on Apple’s smaller devices, but the app makes good use of the iPad’s extra screen space, with a smart two-column display. On the left, episodes are listed, and the current podcast loads into the larger space on the right.
The big plusses with Overcast, though, remain playback and podcast management. It’s the one podcast app we’ve used that retains plenty of clarity when playback is sped up; and there are clever effects for removing dead air and boosting vocals in podcasts with lower production values.
Playlists can be straightforward in nature, or quite intricate, automatically boosting favourites to the top of the list, and excluding specific episodes. And if you do mostly use an iPhone for listening, Overcast automatically syncs your podcasts and progress, so you can always pick up where you left off.
The prospect of drawing can fill people with terror, and so the idea of animation probably sends such folks fleeing for the hills. Animatic might calm their nerves, being the friendly face of iPad animation. Start a new project and you get a small canvas and a bunch of effective and broadly realistic tools – markers, crayons, pencils, biros – for scribbling with.
Once you’ve composed a frame, Animatic makes use of traditional ‘onion skinning’ techniques to help you produce smooth motion thereafter: up to three previous frames are shown in translucent fashion behind the one you’re currently drawing. Tap ‘Next’ and you’ll see your animation looping. Its speed can be adjusted, and you can export to video or GIF.
Beyond Animatic’s approachable nature, we’re big fans of its flexibility. You simply return to the main ‘My Animations’ screen to save (which we recommend doing often with lengthy projects, because a crash can take work with it), and can later edit any frame from any animation – nothing’s fixed forever.
And while, as the bundled examples suggest, you’re more likely to end up with Roobarb and Custard than Pixar’s finest, Animatic is a superb way to explore making drawings move – entirely for free.
The majority of comic-book readers on the App Store are tied to online stores, and any emphasis on quality in the actual apps isn’t always placed on the reading part.
But with many more publishers embracing DRM-free downloads, having a really great reading app is essential if you’re into digital comics. Chunky Comic Reader is the best available on iOS.
The interface is smart, simple and boasts plenty of settings, including the means to eradicate animation entirely when flipping pages.
Rendering is top-notch, even for relatively low-res fare. And you get the option of one- or two-up page views. For free, you can access web storage to upload comics. A single £2.99/$3.99 pro upgrade adds support for shared Mac/PC/NAS drives.
VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are becoming very popular, due to issues people increasingly face when browsing the web. A VPN can be used to circumvent region-blocking/censorship and security issues on public Wi-Fi. Such services can baffle people who aren’t technically adept, but TunnelBear is all about the friendlier side of VPNs. With bears.
After installing the app and profile, you’ll have 500 MB of data per month to play with. Tunnelling to a specific location is simply a case of tapping it on the map and waiting a few seconds for the bear to pop out of the ground.
Tweet about the product and you’ll get an extra free GB. Alternatively, monthly and annual paid plans exist for heavier data users.
The problem with modern telly isn’t finding something you want to watch, but figuring out where to watch it. There are so many streaming and download services that keeping track of shows is tough.
JustWatch speeds up the process: you tell it where you live and the services you use, and it lists shows and films you might like.
Various searches and filters are available, including one for price-cuts, to snag cheapo downloads and rentals. There are bugs and listing errors here and there, but for free this is a great starting point for figuring out where to find a potential new telly favourite.
If you delve into browser developer tools, the size of web pages these days is astonishing. Frequently, the actual content isn’t weighty, but associated ads and tracking scripts are. Moreover, content is often a tiny letterbox surrounded by a sea of ads, and you might not have time to read anything right now anyway.
Instapaper is designed to place content front and centre, and be there whenever you want to read it. You visit a site and send the URL to Instapaper, or share to Instapaper from the likes of a Twitter client. Instapaper then dutifully pulls down text and imagery for later.
The main view is stripped-back, clutter-free and very readable, with plentiful options regarding typography. An optional monthly/annual premium subscription adds full text-search, text-to-speech highlights, send-to-Kindle, and more, but the free version should suffice for most users.
We’re big fans of Duolingo on iPhone. Its bite-size exercises are perfect for quickly dipping into, when you’ve a spare moment to tackle a bit of language-learning. On iPad, the app is basically the same, and the screen’s relative acres make everything feel a touch sparse.
However, Duolingo remains the same impressive and approachable app, and the iPad’s form-factor lends itself to more extended sessions, which is great for when you want to properly crack the next challenge the app throws your way.
As ever, we remain baffled that this app remains entirely free. We’ve yet to find the catch.
Learning a musical instrument isn’t easy, which is probably why a bunch of people don’t bother, instead pretending to be rock stars by way of tiny plastic instruments and their parent videogames.
Yousician bridges the divide, flipping a kind of Guitar Hero interface 90 degrees and using its visual and timing devices to get you playing chords and notes.
This proves remarkably effective, and your iPad merrily keeps track of your skills (or lack thereof) through its internal mic. The difficulty curve is slight, but the app enables you to skip ahead if you’re bored, through periodic ‘test’ rounds. Most surprisingly, for free you get access to everything, only your daily lesson time is limited.
Maybe it’s just our tech-addled brains, but often we find it a lot easier to focus on an app than a book, which can make learning things the old fashioned way tricky. That’s where Khan Academy comes in. This free app contains lessons and guidance on dozens of subjects, from algebra, to cosmology, to computer science and beyond.
As it’s an app rather than a book it benefits from videos and even a few interactive elements, alongside words and pictures and it contains over 10,000 videos and explanations in all.
Everything is broken in to bite-sized chunks, so whether you’ve got a few minutes to spare or a whole afternoon there’s always time to learn something new and if you make an account it will keep track of your progress and award achievements.
We elsewhere say nice things about the official Twitter client, but Twitterrific is a better bet for the more discerning Twitter user. It has a beautifully designed interface that’s a delight to use, helpfully merging mentions and messages into a unified timeline, saving you mucking about switching tabs.
Customisation options give you the means to adjust the app’s visual appearance (and the app can optionally automatically switch to a dark theme at night), and powerful mute and muffle features block users and hashtags you want no part of.
Pay $4.99/£3.99 and the app adds notifications, Apple Watch support, and translation support, along with removing ads.
It’s not like Microsoft Word really needs introduction. Unless you’ve been living under a rock that itself is under a pretty sizeable rock, you’ll have heard of Microsoft’s hugely popular word processor. What you might not realize, though, is how good it is on iPad.
Fire up the app and you’re greeted with a selection of handy templates, although you can of course instead use a blank canvas. You then work with something approximating the desktop version of Word, but that’s been carefully optimized for tablets. Your brain keeps arguing it shouldn’t exist, but it does — although things are a bit fiddly on an iPad mini.
Wisely, saved documents can be stored locally rather than you being forced to use Microsoft’s cloud, and they can be shared via email. (A PDF option exists for recipients without Office, although it’s oddly hidden behind the share button in the document toolbar, under ‘Send Attachment’, which may as well have been called ‘beware of the leopard’.)
Something else that’s also missing: full iPad Pro 12.9 support in the free version. On a smaller iPad, you merely need a Microsoft account to gain access to most features. Some advanced stuff — section breaks; columns; tracking changes; insertion of WordArt — requires an Office 365 account, but that won’t limit most users.
Presumably, Microsoft thinks iPad Pro owners have money to burn, though, because for free they just get a viewer. Bah.
According to the developer’s blurb, Zen Studio is all about helping children to relax and focus, by providing a kind of finger-painting that can only exist in the digital realm. Frankly, we take issue with the ‘children’ bit, because Zen Studio has a welcoming and pleasing nature that should ensure it’s a hit with every iPad user.
You start off with a grid of triangles and a column of colored paints. Tap a paint to choose your color and then tap individual triangles or drag across the grid to start drawing. Every gesture you make is accompanied by musical notes that play over an ambient background soundtrack. Bar the atmosphere being knocked a touch by a loud squelch noise whenever a new paint tube is selected, the mix of drawing tool and musical instrument is intoxicating. When you’re done, your picture can be squirted to the Photos app, ready for sharing with the world.
This is, however, a limited freebie in some ways. You get eight canvases, which can be blank or based on templates. If you want more, you pay $1.99/£1.49 to unlock the unlimited premium version of the app. Still, for no outlay at all, you get a good few hours of chill-out noodly fun — more, if you’re happy drawing over the same canvases again and again.
As you launch Kitchen Stories, you catch a glimpse of the app’s mantra: “Anyone can cook”. The problem is, most cooking apps (and indeed, traditional cookery books) make assumptions regarding people’s abilities.
Faced with a list of steps on a stark white page, it’s easy to get halfway through a recipe, look at the stodge in front of you, reason something must have gone terribly wrong, and order a takeaway.
Kitchen Stories offers firmer footing. You’re first met with a wall of gorgeous photography. More importantly, the photographs don’t stop.
Every step in a recipe is accompanied by a picture that shows how things should be at that point. Additionally, some recipes provide tutorial videos for potentially tricky skills and techniques. Fancy some Vietnamese pho, but not sure how to peel ginger, prepare a chilli or thinly slice meat? Kitchen Stories has you covered.
Beyond this, there’s a shopping list, handy essentials guide, and some magazine-style articles to peruse. And while you don’t get the sheer range of recipes found in some rival apps, the presentation more than makes up for that — especially on the iPad, which will likely find a new home in your own kitchen soon after Kitchen Stories is installed.
The social networking giant has gone back-and-forth with its mobile apps, finally settling on this smart, native implementation.
Much like the slightly simpler iPhone equivalent, Facebook on iPad is such that you won’t want to use the comparatively clunky website again for seeing which of your friends really shouldn’t have internet access after midnight.
Safari’s embedded in iOS to the extent that there’s not a great deal of point in using any rival browser by default. But that doesn’t mean alternatives shouldn’t be considered at all.
Opera Coast is a case in point. The browser’s bookmarks pages house massive icons, and its search is fast and to the point.
With an interface that’s helpful and yet stays out of your way, Opera Coast therefore becomes an excellent lean-back browser for key sites you like to spend a lot of time with, leaving Safari for hum-drum day-to-day web browsing.
Beatwave is a simplified Tenori-On-style synth which enables you to rapidly build pleasing melodies by prodding a grid.
Multiple layers and various instruments provide scope for complex compositions, and you can save sessions or, handily, store and share compositions via email. You can also buy more instruments via in-app purchases.
It used to boast an eye-searing white-and-orange-on-black colour scheme that was a little like being repeatedly punched in the eyes, but now Bloomberg has grown up, discovered a palette (a subtler, serious ‘things on black’, for the most part), and has subsequently become a much more usable business news and stocks app.
We have other comic readers in this list, but Electricomics is something different. Spearheaded by a wealth of creative talent, including writers Alan and Leah Moore, it’s more akin to a collaborative art project that seeks to find new ways of creating and presenting comics.
The app itself is (for now) a one-off publication, with a small selection of comics to read, playing with the artform’s conventions by way of structure, interaction and navigation.
Behind everything lies a self-publishing ecosystem and open source code; if inspired by what you find, add to and improve what’s there, or make and publish your own digital comics that dare to think a bit different.
Dropbox is a great service for syncing documents across multiple devices, and chances are you’re familiar with it already. On the iPad, we used to consider Dropbox essential as a kind of surrogate file system.
Even now that Apple’s provided easier access to iCloud Drive, Dropbox remains a useful install, largely on the basis of its widespread support (both in terms of platforms and also iOS apps).
The Dropbox app itself works nicely, too, able to preview a large number of file types, and integrating well with iOS for sending documents to and from the various apps you have installed.
In a sense Evernote is an online back-up for fleeting thoughts and ideas. You use it to save whatever comes to mind — text documents and snippets, notes, images, web clips, and even audio. These can then be accessed from a huge number of devices. (We suspect any day now, Evernote will unveil its ZX Spectrum app.)
The app itself could be friendlier, and there’s a tendency towards clutter. But navigation of your stored bits and pieces is simple enough, and the sheer ubiquity and reliability of Evernote makes it worthy of investigation and a place on your Home screen.
When the YouTube app presumably became a victim of the ongoing and increasingly tedious Apple/Google spat, there were concerns Google wouldn’t respond.
Those turned out to be unfounded, because here’s yet another bespoke, nicely designed Google-created app for iOS. The interface is specifically tuned for the iPad, and AirPlay enables you to fire videos at an Apple TV.
Amazon’s Kindle iPad app for reading myriad books available at the Kindle Store is a little workmanlike, and doesn’t match the coherence of iBooks (you buy titles in Safari and ‘sync’ purchases via Kindle).
However, Kindle’s fine for reading, and you get options to optimise your experience (including the ability to kill the naff page-turn animation and amend the page background to a pleasant sepia tone).
One for film buffs, Movies figures out where you are and tells you what’s showing in your local cinemas – or you can pick a film and it’ll tell you where and when it’s on.
This is a great case of an app that does something simple and useful, and that does it very well. Instead of combing through listings across various websites, everything’s there in a single app. You can also watch trailers, rate whatever you’ve seen, and add to a list anything you fancy checking out.
PCalc Lite‘s existence means the lack of a built-in iPad calculator doesn’t bother us. For anyone who wants a traditional calculator, it’s pretty much ideal. The big buttons beg to be tapped, and the interface can be tweaked to your liking, by way of bolder and larger key text, alternate display digits, and stilling animation.
Beyond basic sums, PCalc Lite adds some conversions, which are categorised but also searchable. If you’re hankering for more, IAP lets you bolt on a number of extras from the paid version of PCalc, such as additional themes, dozens more conversions, alternate calculator layouts, a virtual paper tape, and options for programmers and power users.
A more international news app than most, Reuters is also known for attempting to be impartial. It’s very much a case of ‘just the facts, man’.
The app itself therefore does much what you’d expect, flinging news headlines and articles your way. But the interface is smarter than most, and you can customise a personal list of tickers. There’s also an offline mode for cobbling together some stories to read on the train.
Airbnb makes travel affordable and social, as rather than staying in a hotel you can stay in someone’s house. Options range from crashing on someone’s sofa to renting a private island, or if you have a spare room you could even rent your own space out.
The iPad app is one of the best ways to browse it too, letting you search and book using an attractive image-heavy interface.
There’s nothing wrong with using the Wikipedia website in Safari on your iPad, but dedicated apps make navigating the living encyclopaedia simpler and faster. Wikipanion is an excellent free app.
The design is sleek, utilising an efficient two-pane view that places section links in a sidebar. The larger pane is then left for the article’s content, along with fast access to navigation, share and search options.
Usefully, the app includes bookmarking for your favourite articles, and a history, so you can peruse what you’ve recently looked at.
Although you get the sense eBay’s designers can’t get through a month without redesigning their app, it’s always far superior to using the online auction site in a browser.
eBay for iOS works especially well on an iPad, with images looking great on the larger screen, and browsing proving fast and efficient. Speedy sorting and filtering options also make it a cinch to get to listings for whatever it is you fancy buying.
Soundrop is a minimal generative sound toy that offers an endless stream of balls, which make noises when they collide with and bounce off user-drawn lines.
The overall result is surprisingly fun and hypnotic. For more advanced features – save, multiple instruments and gravity adjustment – there’s an in-app ‘pro’ purchase option.
Instagram might be the current online photo-sharing darling, but it’s clear veteran Flickr remains up for a fight. On iPad, it’s a lovely app, with a refined and minimal UI that makes browsing simple and allows photography to shine.
Another smart aspect of Flickr is its extremely generous 1 TB of free storage. You can set videos and photos to automatically upload, and they stay private unless you choose to share them.
There are compatibility issues with the most modern Apple toys as Live Photos end up as stills on Flickr. Even so, Flickr makes Apple’s free 5 GB of iCloud storage look pathetic by comparison; and even if you use it only as a belt-and-braces back-up for important images, it’s worth checking out.
SkyView Free is a stargazing app that very much wants you to get off your behind and outside, or at least hold your iPad aloft to explore the heavens.
Unlike TechRadar favourite Sky Guide, there’s no means to drag a finger to manually move the sky around – you must always point your iPad’s display where you want to look – but there’s no price-tag either. And for free, this app does the business.
There are minimal ads, a noodly atmospheric soundtrack, an optional augmented reality view (to overlay app graphics on to the actual sky), and a handy search that’ll point you in the direction of Mars, Ursa Major, or the International Space Station.
Tens of thousands of recipes at your fingertips (as long as you have a web connection) ensure Epicurious is worth a download for the culinary-inclined.
The app even composes a shopping list for recipes; it’s just a pity it doesn’t include measurements for those of us who use that new-fangled metric system.
This official WordPress app has a reputation for being a bit clunky, but it’s fine for authoring the odd blog post on the go, along with making quick edits to existing content and managing comments. It also offers both text-based and visual approaches to crafting posts, so you’re not stuck with HTML.
Truth be told, we’re always a touch suspicious of apps that claim to test your connection speed, but Speed Test SpeedSmart seems to do a decent job.
It’s also handy to have installed for when your broadband goes all flaky and you need to record the figures for a subsequent moan at your ISP.
Find my iPhone would perhaps be better named ‘Find my Apple stuff’, because it’s not just for figuring out where a missing iPhone is – it can also track iPads, iPods and Macs. The app is simple, elegant and, generally speaking, provides an accurate location for devices. It also enables you to remote-lock or wipe a device.
Initially, Flipboard looked like a gimmick, trying desperately to make online content resemble a magazine. But now it can integrate Flickr and other networks, beautifully laying out their articles, Flipboard’s muscled into the ‘essential’ category – and it’s still free.
While perhaps less practical than on the iPhone, Find My Friends on the iPad nonetheless works well, enabling you to track any pals that are happy with you digitally stalking them. The iPad’s large display improves the app’s usability, simultaneously displaying your friend list and a map.
IMDB might be a wee bit US-focused at times (much like the movie industry), but the app is a great way to browse more movie-related info than you could ever hope to consume in a single lifetime. Settings enable you to define which sites IMDB and Amazon info is taken from, and the show times finder works pretty well.
Choosing between Pocket and Instapaper for your read-it-later service is a bit like trying to figure out which of your equally lovely kids is the best. Like its rival, Pocket makes it simple to stash web pages for later, stripping them of cruft, leaving only images and text.
This content can then be digested in an easy-to-view layout that’s not desperately trying to punch adverts into your eyeballs. Instapaper probably has the lead on minimalism and typography, but Pocket’s colourful interface is a bit more welcoming, and we prefer it when it comes to saving videos.
TED describes itself as “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. The app pretty much does as you’d expect – you get quick access to dozens of inspiring videos. However, it goes the extra mile in enabling you to save any talk for offline viewing, and also for providing hints on what to watch next if you’ve enjoyed a particular talk.
Skyscanner‘s website is pretty good, but the iPad app’s another great example of how an app’s focus can really help you speed through a task. You use the app to search over a thousand airlines, and it provides straightforward competitive journey lists and comparison graphs. If you’re planning a flight, it’s an indispensable download.
Every now and again, we get a little bit twitchy at global marketplaces. Certain online stores are getting too big, to the point they’ll probably soon attempt to embed a ‘buy now’ button inside your brain. Etsy feels like little guys fighting back.
It’s a storefront for handmade, vintage and creative goods. Instead of polished iPad stands fresh from Jony Ive’s pencil, you’re more likely to find something beautiful made out of driftwood. The app’s interface is clean and simple, making browsing a treat; and you can of course flag shops and items as favourites, and receive notifications when an order ships.
It’s not the most efficient weather forecasting app around, but MeteoEarth is perhaps the most fun to fiddle around with. You can spin and explore the Earth with a fingertip, and add overlays for meteorological data you’re interested in, such as temperature, precipitation and wind.
Tap-hold anywhere on the map to get the current conditions, or switch to the climate view for averages. Google ads pop up every now and again, periodically obliterating the geekery, but are easily dismissed.
We tend to quickly shift children from finger-painting to using much finer tools, but the iPad shows there’s plenty of power in your digits — if you’re using the right app.
Autodesk SketchBook provides all the tools you need for digital sketching, from basic doodles through to intricate and painterly masterpieces; and if you’re wanting to share your technique, you can even time-lapse record to save drawing sessions to your camera roll. The core app is free, but it will cost you $3.99 / £2.99 to unlock the pro features.
The description for Cove is rather noodly — all about self-expression and creating soundtracks to capture your mood. In reality, it’s a somewhat controllable instrument for creating ambient music loops. You start with a mood (which determines the scale), ‘base’, ‘melody’ and a filter (effect).
You can then play your creation, or save it alongside a kind of diary entry, noting how you feel. Unlike many simple iPad music apps, Cove does enable you to create discordant output, but beyond the hippy vibe, there is the potential here to fashion great beauty.
It’s as ugly as they come, but XE Currency is the best free currency app you’ll find. You define which currencies you want to see, along with the number of decimals to show. Double-tap a currency and you can set it as the base currency by tapping 1.0 in the calculator, or do bespoke conversions by typing any other value.
In theory, we should be cheerleading for FaceTime, what with it being built into iOS devices, but it’s still an Apple-only system. Skype, however, is enjoyed by myriad users who haven’t been bitten by the Apple bug, and it works very nicely on the iPad, including over 3G.
Unlike on the iPhone, where Skype clearly wants to be a Windows Phone app, the iPad version feels a lot more like a restrained desktop app. Usefully, Skype works well in Split View, too, so you can message people while referring to an open document or web page.
If you’re still convinced the iPad is only a device for staring brain-dead at TV shows and not a practical tool for education, check out iTunes U. The app enables you to access many thousands of free lectures and courses taught by universities and colleges, thereby learning far more than what bizarre schemes current soap characters are hatching.
For instructors, it’s similarly a boon, enabling them to build lessons, collect and grade assignments, and have one-to-one or group discussions.