If you have a smartphone you probably find, as I do, that the apps you use on a daily basis change only slowly and that the list on your home screen can remain unchanged for months at a time. This wasn't always the case. When apps first reached the mass market on the iPhone 3G in 2008 there weren't that many apps around and the rapidly evolving market meant that the list of favourites grew and changed quickly as new apps were launched and existing apps were upgraded with exciting new features.
In today's more mature market, with hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from (I'm assuming that you're not using a Windows phone), we could use hundreds each week but my suspicion is that instead we use only a handful. Here are my current non-Apple favourites.
Reeder - Google Reader offers a great service for managing RSS feeds but the interface is a bit of a train wreck. Into this niche falls Reeder, which syncs with Google Reader and gives you a slick UI for reading RSS feeds.
Drafts - for making a quick note, scribbling a short email or updating Twitter (or any one of a few dozen other text-related tasks), Drafts is my app of choice because it is fast, simple, elegant and easy to use.
Evernote - in the realm of cloud-based note-taking solutions, Evernote is the market leader. I use it as an external memory bank dumpting documents, notes, shopping lists, to-do lists, web links and pretty much anything else straight into Evernote.
Instapaper - normally I read articles or web pages as I find them but sometimes, particularly for long or challenging texts, I prefer to save them to Instapaper and come back to them later. Instapaper is ideal for reading long articles on the train or plane when web-browsing might otherwise be tricky.
Tweetbot - Twitter's iOS client is not very good (he says, with light understatement). Tweetbot is by far the best client I've found on iOS.
Citymapper - when I upgraded to iOS 6 my previous navigator software stopped working and I was forced to change. At first, Citymapper had only a few, nicely executed, features. Now, if you want to make your way round London, Citymapper is essentially feature complete and by far the best navigation tool I have found.
PlainText - my default text editor, which I may have mentioned before. It's brilliant.
TactioHealth - I have found that tracking my weight on a daily basis helps me to keep it under control. TactioHealth does far more than just track weight.
Letterpress - And finally, when I need a little entertainment, I switch to Letterpress and play an elegantly designed, beautifully finished word game against a total strange.
Apart from boring (Facebook) or system (Safari, Calendar) apps, that’s about it. My home screen changes infrequently because I’m basically happy with my chosen apps and it takes something truly special to knock one of the above from their perch.
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