Best Mobile Apps for Everyday Life

Over the past few years, I’ve landed on a great set of apps that do a variety of things for me in everyday life. Wanted to share my experience so you can go out and give them a try yourself.

You can find most of them in the Apple App Store or on Google Play, with my experience being on iOS 8.

BillGuard (Transaction/Fraud Tracking): This app let’s me review and validate every purchase made on my credit or debit cards (as long as they are added to the app) in one streamlined interface to ensure that my cards aren’t being used by anyone else. With each transaction, the app offers the very useful ability swipe green, or, if the charge isn’t something you recognize, it can help identify transactions via Google search and crowd-sourced feedback – which in practice is very useful. You can also flag transactions to follow-up at a later time. Recently, BillGuard added an option to be notified if your card is used in a location other than where you are at any given moment (using location-services), further protecting you against fraud in real-time. Help fellow users out by correcting names of restaurants and other businesses so we can all be safe. Available on iOS and Google Play.

Prism (Bill Tracking): Formerly known as Mobiligy (not a huge fan of the name change), this app tracks all of the bills I need to pay and allows me to see whether they’ve been paid. Forgot if you paid your Credit Card bill this month? Just check Prism. It offers a useful, clean interface that shows all bills, including paid and upcoming, with the ability to add custom bills manually and notifications when bills are due. Available on iOS and Google Play.

1Password (Secure Password/Identity Storage): While not free, it’s also not just a mobile app. 1Password saves your passwords in a locked-down interface synced across all of your devices. You’ll never have to remember a password again! The app also has the ability to generate random passwords and store information in secure notes in the case you want to be extra secure. Available on iOS or Google Play.

Evernote (An Extra Brain): As the name states, it stores your notes (for)ever. I use it for a whole bunch of things – keeping work notes organized, creating and sharing holiday shopping lists, saving pictures of my Seamless orders so I remember what food was like from which restaurants, saving wines to remember, an insurance log of my belongings and a whole lot more. Evernote offers the ability to tag notes, add voice notes, pictures and anything else you may need to store in one place. The premium features offer even more flexibility with file sizes, search and other advanced features. Available on iOS and Google Play.

For a great article about note taking apps that helps cut through the noise, check out https://www.cloudwards.net/best-note-taking-apps/.

Pocket (Save to Read it Later): Pocket and Instapaper are two of the best apps around for saving articles to read later. I switched from Instapaper to Pocket recently, mostly because of the more attractive design (Instapaper is like a newspaper). Amazingly, I’m able to save articles or videos from any one of my devices (Mac, iPad, iPhone) with one easy click to read later in a clean ad-free interface. Pocket offers Chrome and Safari extensions, along with the an “add to Pocket” feature in the share menu of iOS 8. Articles you save are also available for off-line reading. Available on iOS and Google Play.

CBS Sports: My favorite sports app – beautiful, clean interface…I can do without the ads and would willingly pay a few bucks to turn them off, but nonetheless, this app is amongst the best. I especially like the newest addition of Notification Center widget for iOS, allowing you to see the upcoming games/scores of your favorite teams. Available for iOS and Google Play.