Every week, we point you in the direction of some of the App Store’s best free offerings. You’ve probably downloaded a few of the apps just to see whether or not you’d actually use them, but some apps are so incredibly useful that it’s hard to imagine why they don’t come standard on every smartphone.
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Last Friday, VentureBeat put together a list of ten apps that are good enough to be core smartphone features. It’s a list worth checking out, but if you don’t own an Android device, much of the list won’t apply to you. We’ve combed through the list to find a few iPhone-specific apps while adding a few of our own as well.
These are the apps that Apple should buy and implement into future iOS updates:
1. Fleksy Keyboard
This one might be the most obvious choice, which is why it’s first on the list. Fleksy (and SwiftKey and other third-party keyboard apps like it) were consistently some of the most requested apps for Apple’s devices until the launch of iOS 8.
Now that everyone can finally ditch the clunky standard keyboard, it might be time for Apple to invest in a third-party keyboard and perfect it in-house.
2. Gallery Doctor
If you’re a prolific smartphone photographer, you undoubtedly have more than a few crummy shots hiding deep in your camera roll taking up a few precious megabytes. When your pictures number in the thousands, it can be a pain to scroll through and find a single bad shot, which is why something like Gallery Doctor should already be a part of iOS.
For the uninitiated, Gallery Doctor automatically identifies unclear or accidental photos on your phone and prompts you to delete them. Although the reviews point out some of the apps glaring flaws, the concept is priceless.
3. Truecaller
Lately, I’ve been receiving more unwanted phone calls that ever on my iPhone. Being in the field I’m in, I’ll occasionally receive a call from a company I need to speak with, but more often than not, it’s an automated message from a telemarketer informing me I’ve won a trip to the Caribbean or that I need to file my taxes.
Truecaller gives users the ability to find out exactly who keeps calling them and identifies spam callers on the call screen before you even answer the phone. Why can’t the iPhone do this by default?
4. 1Password
I think we mention 1Password at least once a month on BGR, but it can’t be overstated how important a password manager is to the security of your data. If you’re an avid Internet user with accounts on dozens of services, you know how tempting it can be to use the same two or three passwords over and over, but you wouldn’t have to consider that if 1Password was a standard iOS app.
5. Workflow
Automating tasks on the iPhone and iPad would be a dream come true. Workflow is one of many apps that manage to give non-programmers the ability to do exactly that. As closed off as iOS can be compared to Android, apps like these show the potential of a more open operating system. If Apple picked one of these apps up, they could fine-tune it for iOS 9.
