What are your list of essential iOS apps?

Besides the big ones:

• Octal - App for Hacker News
• Poe - Quora’s implementation of ChatGPT
• Artifact - News app that lets you mark headlines as clickbait and then uses AI to rewrite them with helpful info
• LunaSea - Interface for my home instances of Sonarr and Radars
• Strong - Weightlifting app
• Diarium - Low-cost and straightforward journal app

Bitwarden for password management.

Anki for learning anything that can be made into a flashcard.

Infuse for connecting to my Plex server or for watching local content I loaded myself.

Sleep Cycle for tracking my sleep and being my alarm clock.

Trakt for tracking movies and TV shows.

MyAniList for tracking specifically anime and manga.

AppRaven for setting up price/updates/release alerts for apps in the App Store.

Sentinel 2FA Authenticator is my 2FA choice since it syncs with iCloud and I’m well into the Apple ecosystem.

AdGuard for adblocking and DNS filtering.

DeepL is my my choice of translator app.

GoodNotes 5 for taking notes on my iPad.

Overcast for listening to podcasts. I also use it to listen to audiobooks so that I have the same features for speeding up and removing quiet portions, but this requires uploading mp3 files through a web portal and requires the subscription to have more space available.

Paprika 3 for managing cooking recipes.

TechniCalc for my calculator.

Zotero is my reference manager since I’m in academia.

StopTheMadness is such a powerful safari extension.

Logseq (my everything app)
Ulysses (for all my writing)
Procreate (for drawing)
Raindrop.io (for links)
Bend (stretching app, great for creating my own routines based on health status)
Antistress (app with all sorts of low stress games for when anxiety goes through the roof)
wefwef, vernissage and mona (fediverse)

Two of my favourite apps are

• Obsidian - App for personal knowledge management
• Zero - App for tracking fasts

Here are the apps I used that I'm not seeing.

• FoodNoms for calorie counting
• Waking Up for guided meditation
• Finch for gamified general mental health
• Future for asynchronous virtual training
• Tripsy for travel tracking
• Organic Maps for offline mapping
• Transit for navigating most US cities via public transit
• Fastmail for personal email (Apple Mail for work email)
• 1Password for password management
• Elaho for browsing Gemini
• Tidal for music
• Vellum for cool backgrounds
• SwiftScan for scanning documents
• iPlum for a cheap business phone number
• Kagi Search to set the Kagi search engine as the default in Safari
• Parcel for package tracking
• Mona for Mastodon

And I'll second some others.

• Overcast
• Bookplayer
• Reeder
• AnyList
• Sleep Cycle
• Signal
• Obsidian
• Vinegar
• Noir

• Reeder for RSS (connected to FreshRSS)
• Overcast for podcasts
• Linkthing for reading list/saved links (connected to linkding)
• Bookplayer for audiobooks (can airdrop a folder of audio files to ingest)
• MyNetDiary for diet tracking
• WebSSH for ssh client
• Infuse for all things video (connected to Jellyfin)
• FE File Explorer for connecting to SMB shares
• Bitwarden for passwords
• DailyArt widget for nice art on home screen
• Shockwave to kill Google amp

Sofa and Up Ahead are my two favourites. Neither of them fulfill an essential “function” and they both have subscriptions but they bring a ton of joy to my life.

Not iOS-only but, great on iOS:

Telegram: fav messenger

TickTick: best reminders app imo

Bitwarden: great password manager

Marvis: cool 3rd party app for Apple Music, connects with Last.fm too

I have answered so many of these posts with just one app: Apollo. Mighty sad it’s gone. Therefore I’d pick Reeder, I think.

Most of the apps I use for my personal life exist for both iOS and macOS

• Ghostery as an AdBlocker
• Reeder 5 RSS client syncing over iCloud
• DayOne journaling app
• Omnifocus GTD app

On smartphone only

• Wikipedia, because most of the search I make on iPhone are knowledge related
• WefWef! Because you know why

Obsidian (Notes) Twobird (My mail app) Cron (Calendar)

• Feedly for RSS feeds
• Pocket to save everything I want to tag as wanting to read later (super useful for recipes, tech blogs for work…) I use this with Feedly.
• AnyList for all my lists
• Tody to track household chores with rest of family
• Libby for library e books
• Yousician for guitar lessons
• Sketches Pro and Canva for doodling and creative design
• Day Organizer for combined calendar, to do list and habit tracker. (https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/day-organizer-schedule-planner/id1385049326)
• JustWatch to track movies and tv shows

I know this is sort of the opposite of the answer you’re looking for , but I think it’s interesting there’s all of these apps listed and my app usage is 99% Apple’s includes apps and YouTube with a tiny bit of Instagram tossed in.

I’ll say one of my all time favourite apps that I do use quite often is Konvert.

Overcast - https://overcast.fm/

Reeder - https://reederapp.com/

Meta for iPhone, the best network utility tool you can get

Since all big service are killing them selfs I lost may of my favourite app.

But Watcht for tracking movies and TV shows is still my favourite. Seems development stopped 3 years ago, but as all good apps still works great

Hevy is my go to workout app. Previously used Strong but decided to give Hevy a go and I am now converted.

I use song shift to easily transfer other people's playlists on Spotify/Deezer to my Amazon music account.

Ps as for obsidian:

it is said to be comparable, but Obsidian was too confusing and limited for me. Logseq is intuitive for me and that’s what I need for my addled brain 😊

TechniCalc - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/technicalc-calculator/id1504965415

As the developer of this, I can confirm it’s fantastic

1Password - password and vital secret mgmt

Quicken- finance apps with all banking apps

Signal - private messaging

Telegram - messaging plus Ukraine war news

Todoist - task manager

Hey! On FARK - replacing Apollo

wefwef - replacing Apollo

Octal - replacing Apollo

Hack - replacing Apollo

Dystopia - replacing Apollo

Inoreader - rss aggregator

Libby - library books and audiobooks

Kindle - books

Goodreads - books

Downcast - podcasts

Zillow - buying a home

HOMES - buying a home, most like MLS

realtor.com - buying a home but has flood and noise maps

MyFitnessPal - food tracking

Minecraft - fun with the kiddos

Music Tracker is a good app for scanning your Apple Music library and telling you when songs have been added, deleted, or upgraded to Spatial Audio.

Since I’m so into photography, pixelmator photo, and affinity photo are amazing for me. Those 2, and luma fusion are all great creativity apps.

Weawow for weather OTP Auth CheapCharts Cryptomator Fakespot Infuse Hoopla Libby Noir (safari extension) QuakeFeed Wefwef

Some apps not mentioned yet if I’m correct:

ssh terminal
messenger signal
app for navidrome play:sub
homeassistant
rss reader

Bitwarden, Firefox, Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, Maps. I try not to over-app myself -- if I can use the website in Firefox comfortably, I default to that.

Apple bots made it to Lemmy real quick

• Photosync - Handles transfers of photos and videos from the phone to any platform you can think of with ease, can automatically convert HEIC and HEVC files to jpg and mp4, can rename in multiple formats or make your own (I name mine as YYMMDD-HHMMSS). Probably my favorite app ever. A total media swiss army knife.
• Goodreader - For reading any kind of document or consuming media files. Supports using extra AES file encryption on top of regular Apple encryption.
• Layout - Good for making small photo layouts for posting to social media
• Tailor - Stitches screenshots together into a single large photo
• Censor (App store link is down, probably because they haven’t updated their privacy policy yet). Allows you to obscure faces or any other information you want to redact from photos.
• Signal, because it’s an awesome and secure messaging app for people without iPhones.

Those are my most commonly used apps that aren't "big names".