Brandon at Random Reviews

There are a handful of lesser-known apps out there that don’t come by default on your phone and can maybe help make your life a tad easier? Shit, I don’t know, I’m just bullshitting the essay of life like everyone else.

Now I probably need to preface this by saying I have an iPhone. These apps are available on the Apple App Store. I can’t say for sure what is and is not on your silly Android.

MyFitnessPal

What can I say about MyFitnessPal that hasn’t already been said about the Mona Lisa. The concept is very simple. This app allows you to track your food information by either looking it up by scanning with a barcode or keyword searching the immense MyFitnessPal database. You can set manual or automatic goals for daily caloric intake and nutrients. You can input your weight however regularly you weigh-in and track it from the very beginning of a weight-loss journey and see how far you’ve come or just check out how well you’ve maintained things over time or maybe see how much you’ve ballooned up since you started eating two of everything you were having one of before. There is a premium membership option, and I did splurge on that for a year all in one go once, but I didn’t find that it had enough benefits to pay for again. You get more than enough out of the base app. There are many apps that want to be like this one, but they all fall short. MyFitnessPal is king.

EveryDollar

This is a budgeting app that I recently started using and I absolutely adore it. Most other money managing apps want you to connect your financial accounts and update your transactions automatically, they also lose sight of the planning aspect of it all. Don’t get me wrong, EveryDollar has this option with a premium membership (a whopping $130/year), but I don’t want it. Mint, TrueBill, and NerdWallet are among the many terrible apps that pale in comparison to EveryDollar. Everything is manual with this app, which does mean more work, but it is also more attention paid to what’s going on. The idea behind the name is the philosophy of its creator that states you should always have a plan for every dollar, every month. Once you plan for your first month, it gets pretty slick and easy as you can roll your monthly goals over to the next. You just regularly input all of your transactions and make sure you’re staying within your plan. It’s so fucking nifty, I actually feel like I’m really starting to get good at managing my money and spending way less. I honestly haven’t done this in my life before, not on this level.

PantryCheck

This one is also a new one I just recently started using. You inventory your food! All of it! You scan barcodes and easily take a count of all you have at your house. Then when you’re at the grocery store thinking “Fuuuuuck, do I have any of that?” you can just look it up. It also allows you to put in expiration dates and to pull a report of what’s coming up to expire. It’s awesome. My only gripe is the 200 item limit, which doesn’t sound bad, but shit adds up quickly. It’s only $12 a year to bump up to 2000 so I guess I could live with it if I wasn’t sticking to my budget.

Medisafe

Do you take more pills than a group of senior citizens organizing a bridge tournament? Do you often forget to take your pills at certain times when you’re supposed to? Medisafe’s got your back. You put in all your meds and doses and include what time(s) you’re supposed to take them. You turn on push notifications and you will get reminded at the time you put in! Then if you don’t select “take all” on the notification or within the apps, it will remind you twice more in 10 minute intervals and provided that you turn on badges it will also display on your app icon until you take them. It also checks for potential issues like adverse drug interactions. It’s pretty fucking slick, been using it for years.

Waze

There is an app for navigation/GPS that doesn’t come with Apple or Android that I’m hoping most of you have heard of. It’s called Waze and it’s great for getting guidance to your destination as well as using user reported issues on the route in front of you including: police, construction, accidents, cars on the shoulder, etc. you can report these things yourself as well. It works great, pretty spectacular.

Hoopla and Libby

I think I’ve mentioned this before in my movie reviews, but in case you weren’t aware, go get a library card if you don’t have one. You can use your library card number and PIN for a vast library of digital movies, books, audiobooks, etc. Anything you might find at the library, but in a more convenient form.

Hoopla is the video borrowing service where you can go and rent any of a wide variety of digital movies for free, although there is a limit on how many per month and the interface isn’t super great, it’s still amazing because it’s free! The Hoopla app is available on most devices, so look for it!

Libby is basically the same way with the library card input and explore, tons of great books and audiobooks to choose from, the only drawback is the availability of some of the more popular books. If a book you want is checked out by others, depending on the number of copies, it could be several weeks before being able to check it out. So you just place a hold to get your place in line and get the book when it’s available. This does create a bit of shuffle if you want to check out a series of books in order, you just have to be patient and bounce around some in the mean time unfortunately. But it’s free! Check it out!

Letterboxd

You know, I feel like everyone knows about IMDb, but not everyone is aware of its more social media-centric counterpart Letterboxd. This site is for sharing what movies you’ve watched, rating them, writing reviews, and you can also friend other movie reviewers if you like their taste or their reviews or know them or whatever else. I found the site when I was looking for an alternative to IMDb that was more well designed for sharing to social media. I like to share what movies I’ve watched and how I rated them to my FB and IG stories so people who give a shit can see and give me a raft of shit about my opinion. It’s fun.

Goodreads

There is something of a social network out there for books. Much like IMDb and Letterboxd are for movies, Goodreads (GR) is great for rating books. You can go through and rate the books you’ve read, look up books you want to read and see their rating, and you can mark books “want to read”, “reading”, or “read”. You build different “shelves” to put books into collections for one category or another. You can friend other readers whether you personally know them or not. I have a handful of real friends on GR, but I’ve also friended people like this one reviewer named simply “Anne” who reads a lot of graphic novels and has entertaining, earnest takes on the crazy amount of books she reads. I’d almost liken her to a BrandonAtRandom for books but that’s not fair, Anne is way bigger time than my blog. Seriously. You should check it sometime, it’s a great community and gives a lot of helpful advice on what to read next.

Apollo

If you’re a Redditor, chances are pretty good that you’ve thought from time to time about how much the default Reddit app sucks. With the default, you have a stunning lack of features. An inability to tailor your interface to what you prefer and what works better for you. There is little in the way of shortcuts and things feel so constricted. With Apollo, user-friendliness, self-tailoring options, and shortcuts are a cornerstone and allow users to really make the app behave the way they want to have it be. Totally worth it to upgrade to the paid version, especially if it’s still a one-time pay deal.

Whitagram

Have you ever gone to share something on Instagram and the pic was too wide or tall to fit in the frame even when tapping the button to shrink-to-fit? Whitagram allows you to put a border on the top/bottom or left/right of an image to make it fit the square that IG gives you for some dumb reason. Simple, but effective.

Cozi

This is a great app for organizing ideas, lists, recipes, and events and getting them all in one place. You can make lists with different headers to help categorize, the items have checkboxes to indicate completion, and there is also a neat manual feature to remove all checked items in one swoop. The event/daily planner allows you to create calendar events much as you would in a standard calendar app, but you can also have shared events with family members also using Cozi. There are also standard reminder options. The app is pre-loaded with a nice selection of recipes, but you can put in your own. The feature is a bit generic, but honestly that makes it flexible and easier to input stuff. As always, this app is probably significantly better if you splurge on the $29.99/year membership, but as I mentioned, I’m on a budget, so no thanks to that unnecessary cost.

Stash

This app is for investing in stocks. I need to mention that the app membership is for $1, $3, $9 a month. I will be talking about the $9 option. You can have a personal portfolio, a smart portfolio, and a retirement portfolio for yourself. If you have kids, you also have the option to create portfolios for them. You can set certain amounts to be transferred in to each portfolio from your bank account. You can either manual invest or “smart” invest and the app will figure out a diverse collection of stocks to invest in automatically. You can manually choose your stocks based on whatever you want, familiar companies, companies that seem to be growing or trending upward, ones that you just happen to like, whatever. If you do opt to use the retirement portfolio, the same standard rules apply for withdrawing money early so watch out for that if you like your assets with more liquidity. Stash does like for you to set regular intervals of investment to maintain a healthily diversified group of investments and growth. You can set things up so the app will automatically invest a certain amount in specific stocks if you want. It’s a really cool app, it’s great for if you want to get your money working for you. But keep an eye on it, you want your returns to be greater than $9 a month if you get that membership and it may take a couple months to get there depending on your investment amounts and regularity.

Conclusion

So anyway, those are some apps that I really like and have gotten a lot of use out of. I hope that at least some of them will prove useful for you if you haven’t heard of them before. So please, by all means share your thoughts in the comments or suggest another app that people should check out that has fairly universal applications. Thanks.