Regardless of your financial status, everyone loves free stuff and who doesn’t love finding the best free apps for their smartphone? When you walk the aisles of a grocery store on the weekends you’ll often find vendors cooking up some appetizers or offering a taste of a new energy drink. Some salons offer free coffee or a pitcher of ice-cold water with cucumber, while you wait for your stylist. There are even some stores that offer appetizers and cocktails at their soft opening events. These stores offer you all of this free stuff all in the hopes that you’ll buy something. This is also the goal of many smartphone app developers. They will entice you with their product and try to reel you in to buying the full-blown version or purchase a monthly subscription.
If you are like me, you look for and install apps that help you to be more productive. The following list is my pick of the 5 best free apps of 2019. Before I begin, I want you to know that many of these apps have been out for a while, but it wasn’t until 2019 when I discovered them. So, in my opinion, they are still the best free apps of 2019!
Wunderlist
My favorite app that I found this year is Wunderlist and it is absolutely wonderful! Over the past several years I used an app called List Colors and I loved the app so much that I paid for the full version which was supposed to allow me to sync between all my devices via iCloud. However, shortly after I made the purchase and requested support on how to configure it, they stopped supporting it and now it’s no longer available.
I consider myself to be very task-oriented and I need lists to help me stay on track. Wunderlist solved all of my problems (well at least helped me keep them organized). You can set up multiple lists for all of your tasks in one app, best of all it easily syncs across all of your devices.
Although the app has been around since 2011, I just found it this year. I also learned that Microsoft acquired Wunderlist and is planning on shutting it down and replacing it with their version of the app called Microsoft To-Do. However, the app is still available in the Apple App Store and on Google Play. We can only hope that the app remains as good as it is now, once Microsoft is ready to shut it down.
Waze
Since the first commercial offering of GPS apps, it has become a part of our lives. No more going to MapQuest.com to enter your destination and printing out a map, or using a foldable map. Now we just plug in our destination and the GPS does the rest! I’ve tried several GPS apps over the years and my favorite was Google Maps, that was until I discovered Waze. Google Maps is great, but it lacks that first-person perspective that is truly helpful when it comes time to make a turn.
Waze gives you accurate maps like Google Maps, but it also gives you the first-person perspective and a lot of other fun features. I love the fact that I can store my favorite locations and easily access them without having to search through my driving history or looking up the address again. I also love being able to change the voice to celebrities or characters. Darth Vader was always my favorite!
Game of Thrones (GoT) Map
If you have never watched Game of Thrones you have never seen or felt a more powerful, sexy, suspenseful, and action-packed show! The GoT Map is a really nice companion for the show and I wish that I had it at the start of the show. It provides you with a map of the fictional world of Westeros and really helps give you a better understanding of the distance many of the characters had to travel. In addition to the map, there are sections that talk about most of the characters and give a detailed description of the areas and settlements. Almost everything you want to know about Game of Thrones is found in this app.
Norton Password Manager
Today, we have a password for everything. Every shopping, banking, social media, and anything else that wants to collect personal information requires us to have a password to log in. It’s always a best practice to use a different password for all of our websites to help keep our information secure, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to remember the million and one passwords!
The leader in antivirus software now offers a free application that securely stores and encrypts all of your login information so all you need to remember is a single password to log into the app! Norton Password Manager syncs across all of your devices, so even if you leave your phone at home you can still access your passwords from any computer through their secure website. This app is really a must-have, especially for everyone who still writes down their passwords!
Family Guy – Another Freakin’ Mobile Game
The 5 best apps of 2019 would not be complete without at least one mobile game! If you are a fan of the show Family Guy, then you will love the Family Guy mobile game! The gameplay is similar to Candy Crush, but instead of candy, you are matching up cocktails and beer! In addition to the fun of matching up cocktails, there are numerous and hilarious cut scenes with all of your favorite characters. It is my go-to game to pass the time (sometimes too much time).
That’s my list of the best 5 apps of 2019. I hope that you find them as useful as I have and if you have any suggestions for any others, please comment on the post and let me know what you find.
Please visit the technology page for more posts!