There is no denying that Apple’s iPhone 6 is a brilliant piece of kit, both inside and out. Well made, sleekly designed, bursting with power, and pre-loaded with a lot of great apps, that mean you can hit the ground running the second you turn it on.
But are there ways to improve it? Certainly! For every default Apple app, there are 1000s of replicas, rip-offs and improvements. There’s something for everyone from really good increasing productivity apps to fitness and health ! Here are a few alternatives for the iPhone 6’s standard apps:
Camera+
There is no improving the iPhone 6’s built in camera, but you can certainly improve on the app that controls it. Camera+ gives users a wider array of tools for their photos. You can take pictures as usual (with geotagging options), and then, in app, you can add filters & effects, crop images, and save them to your normal camera roll. It simply offers a more versatile experience than the standard app, allowing you to edit the photo how you want without having to port the images to a different app or on to a browser.
TweetBot
The go-to 3rd party Twitter app for many, TweetBot simply makes your Twitter browsing more fluid. It comes with built in muting, for when you don’t want to unfollow someone, but you’d rather avoid their tweets for a set amount of time (avoiding TV spoilers etc.). You can also utilise different themes for day and night, enjoy more intuitive replying and favoriting methods, and best of all, manage multiple accounts from one app.
Google Maps
While Apple Maps, the default map browser, got off to an infamously bad start when it replaced Google Maps as the iPhone’s default map app. It labelled entire cities as hospitals, and got nurseries confused with airports! Google Maps released soon afterwards, and has been a popular alternative ever since, offering voice-over navigation and the option to save routes for when you’re offline.
iCab
Again, there is nothing wrong with the iPhone 6’s Safari web browser, but iCab simply offers more options. It can be customised to your choosing – menu layouts, shortcuts, and gesture integration. It also comes with tools that allow you to see what pages link to the page you are viewing, save pages as PDFs, and see if Google has an older cached version of a website available to view.
SwiftKey
Improving on the standard keyboard, SwiftKey adds swipe-to-type functionality and predictive spelling, augmented by learning your language patterns, which allow it to better predict what you are going to say the more you use the app. It plugs into all apps that use the keyboard, so it has immense integration.
Dark Sky
What’s the most important thing a weather app could tell you? If it’s going to rain! Dark Sky sets out to put an end to those rain soaked nightmares by offering real time, upfront updates on the likelihood that it will rain in the next hours. This is on top of all the other weather tracking features it incorporates.
Fantastical 2
This final app combines two default apps – the reminders and the calendar. Fantastical 2 allows you to set reminders in real language. What does that mean? You can type in “Dinner with Emma tonight at 8”, and it will set up an event for 8pm that night that reads “Dinner with Emma”! The other neat trick it can do is geo-fenced reminders – set the reminder to a location, and when you arrive/leave there, the reminder will be triggered!
Image credit: apple.com
This post was submitted by Lily, a student from Birmingham. She is a passionate productivity blogger at Productiveme.weebly.com.
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