Best iPhone & iPad Apps & Games

A genuinely clever mash-up of *Stardew Valley* comfort and *Slay the Spire* tactics that pulls off the fusion better than it has any right to—so long ...

Fastmail's mobile app is a fast, reliable, privacy-respecting email client that asks a fair price for the radical act of not selling you out—but it's ...

Castro rejects the firehose model of podcast consumption in favor of deliberate curation, and for listeners who feel buried by their own subscriptions...

A gorgeous, razor-sharp 90-minute story about growing up that trades puzzles and combat for the most believable dialogue in games. If you can accept t...

A gorgeous, big-hearted throwback that coasts on charm and comedy more than mechanics — short, funny, and genuinely touching, so long as you don't com...

A solo-developed comedy RPG that treats every battle as a chance to reinvent itself — sometimes you fight, sometimes you draw the boss yourself. Uneve...

PCalc is the rare utility that turns a solved problem into a craft object — a scientific calculator so thoughtfully built and endlessly configurable t...

Darkroom is the rare mobile editor that respects your time as much as your pixels — a genuinely fast, thoughtfully built tool that edits straight from...

Widgetsmith is the closest thing iOS has to a personality kit — a deep, endlessly tweakable widget studio that turned a locked-down home screen into a...

A pile of tiny, unglamorous AI utilities that solve a real neurological problem better than any $12/month productivity suite on the market — and then,...

Louis Rigaud's card-battler about fighting your own depression is one of the sharpest, most emotionally honest roguelikes of its generation — but the ...

RetroArch is the most capable retro gaming software ever built and one of the least welcoming. Push through the menu system and you get 100+ consoles,...

Cascadeur is the rare AI-assisted tool that makes you better at your craft instead of doing it badly on your behalf — a focused, physics-literate anim...

Beli replaces the tyranny of the 4.3-star average with a ranking engine built from your own comparisons, and it works better than it has any right to ...

Gaia GPS is the most serious backcountry navigation app you can buy, offering a depth of map data that shames dedicated GPS hardware costing three tim...

Copilot Money is the rare personal finance app that treats design as a feature, not an afterthought — a gorgeous, genuinely intelligent money tracker ...

Two Dots is one of the most elegantly designed puzzle games ever made for a touchscreen — and one of the most quietly persistent about separating you ...

Pocket City is a small game with a big spine—a genuinely respectful, paywall-free tribute to classic SimCity that fits in your pocket and refuses to r...

*Prune* is a rare thing — a mobile game with the soul of an art installation and the discipline to never overstay its welcome. Ten years on, it remain...

A wordless, hand-painted meditation on regret and reconciliation that hits like a short story you'll remember longer than most 40-hour epics — just do...

More than a decade on, Ironhide's fantasy tower defense still sets the standard—tight, funny, and ruthlessly well-designed. If you own a screen and a ...

A hand-drawn hidden-object game that ditches the exploitative freemium playbook for something rarer — patience, craft, and 2,000 sound effects made wi...

Alto's Odyssey doesn't reinvent the endless runner—it perfects it. This is a mobile game built for people who think they hate mobile games, and its Ze...

Ringotan is the rare free tool that does one hard thing exceptionally well — teaching your hand, not just your eyes, to know 3,500 kanji. It's ugly, o...