There's an ocean of apps out there. Whether you just got your iPhone and are feeling adrift or you're a salty old dog seeing what you might've missed, here are 50 absolutely essential apps.
Social
Twitter: Twitter thankfully didn't make too many changes when they gobbled up the already-great Tweetie 2 from Atebits—same clean interface, same Tweet swiping, and the same it-feels-so-good pull to refresh mechanism. Free.
Facebook: The new, panel-based interface takes a little getting used to, but once you're acclimated it's the most effective way to throw yourself, fingers first, into the black hole timesuck that is Facebook. Free.
Fring: Not only a decent multinetwork chat client, Fring also allows for free (or in some certain cases dirt cheap) VoIP calls and, for those with a front facing camera, video calls over WiFi and 3G. Free.
Meebo: Meebo is the king of iPhone messenger apps right now, with support for AIM, Google Talk, Facebook and the like (as well as an impressive list of smaller networks) all packed into a pretty, polished package. Free.
Instagram: Take a photo and dress it up with one of the supplied Hipstamatic-esque filters, Then you share it over the usual suspects—Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, etc —or, and here's the interesting part, over Instagram's built-in social networking service. It's new and ambitious and that's why we like it. Free.
Entertainment
Netflix: All the joys of Netflix in your pocket, all the time—including the power to battle that always growing Watch Instantly queue. Streaming's silky smooth over Wi-Fi, less so over 3G, but the app itself is indispensable. Free.
Remote: Apple's official app for controlling iTunes from wherever your butt might find itself planted is pretty much perfect. Browse your entire library by artist, song, playlist, whatever, pick a tune, and there it is, playing in your iTunes. Free.
Shazam: You know that song you keep hearing everywhere but can't quite place? Shazam can place it. Like, almost every time. Shazam Encore, $6, gets you unlimited tags and a host of other features like charts, recommendations, lyrics, etc.
SoundHound: Like Shazam, SoundHound dabbles in tune recognition (smaller library of songs, snappier tagging), but it also serves as a full replacement for your iPhone's comparatively barren iPod app. Think lyrics, artist info, YouTube links, etc. $5.
Flixter: While it blows my mind that I can watch movies on my phone, one thing I need it to do, and need it to do well, is find movie times for theaters nearby. Flixter does that and much more, packing box office charts, Rotten Tomatoes reviews, DVD releases and what seems like a thousand other movie-related features in one extremely handy app. Free.
StreamToMe: A lightweight client on your computer catalogues the videos of your choosing, as well as all your iTunes playlists, and then lets you easily stream the files in them easily to the app on your iPhone. The best part: all the transcoding is done on the fly, and pretty much any video format plays back superbly. $3.
Pandora: Pandora. You know the one. The internet radio app that has uplifted a million work hours and scored a million make-outs. It's simply the best out there, streaming music at home or on the go over Wi-Fi or 3G. Free.
Kindle: Just because you don't own a Kindle doesn't mean you shouldn't be buying Kindle ebooks—especially when Amazon's iOS app is this good. While it looked for a while like iBooks might come along and disrupt Amazon's ebooks hegemony, well, that didn't happen. Free.
CameraBag: Every iPhone photographer needs a catchall filter app for adding some artistic flair to their shots. Hipstamatic can make them look, uh, hip, but CameraBag can make them look like everything else. $2
Hipstamatic: Why do everyone's iPhone photos look so damn hip while yours look so, you know, not. Probably cause they're using Hipstamtic, the preeminent "make my photos look cool" app which lets you mix and match films and lenses (available for in app purchase) to make your iPhone photos look more analog than ever. $2.
Brushes: Even for the artistically disinclined, having a 3.5" palette and canvas in your pocket can be fun. Brushes is the only one you'll ever need, easy enough for the uninitiated to jump into and advanced enough to keep real artists happy. Hell, they paint New Yorker covers with this thing. $6.
NPR News: You've gotta have a news app on your iPhone, because, you know, news is important. NPR's happens to be great—you can read NPR's reliably-interesting stories, download them for offline reading, and, and, listen to NPR radio stations while you're doing it. Free.
Games
Angry Birds: Probably the world's most popular iPhone game, and for good reason. There's something about launching these different sorts of aviary ammunition into the precarious pig pens that just never gets old. There are always new birds and new stages coming out the pipeline to keep things fresh, too. $1.
The Incident: With excellent pixel art and an admirably morbid sense of humor, twisting your iPhone around to avoid falling objects is way more fun than it sounds. And you have to appreciate anything that makes the apocalypse this enjoyable. $2.
Cut the Rope: Some have called it the heir apparent to Angry Birds for quick, clever, doesn't-really-ever-get-boring iPhone gameplay—lofty praise, but in many ways deserved! Cutting a rope to swing a candy into a little monsters mouth, avoiding electrical currents and spiders along the way, is quite fun. $1.
Real Racing: It's just the best racing game out, walking the tightrope between looking highly realistic and being incredibly fun to play. There's a good selection of cars and tracks and the graphics look wonderful. $5.
Archetype: An exceptionally shiny first person shooter optimized for the iPhone 4, with slick, functional controls. Best of all is the 5 v 5 team deathmatch mode, which is just like the multiplayer action you're used to on the consoles-including multiple guns, grenades, maps, and medals-except this one you play while you're sitting on the toilet. $1 (map updates cost extra).
Doodle Jump: You know those people you see standing on the subway or waiting in line at the grocery store clutching their iPhone to their face and tilting their entire body to the side like they're the leaning tower of Pisa? This is the game they're playing. $1.
Words With Friends: Why did we, as an iPhone-wielding society, suddenly decide that push-notified Scrabble (or, more specifically, this knock-off) was the most fun to be had with words since Alphabet Soup? That I don't know. But it is a hell of a lot of fun trying to slot that Triple Word Score against friends, family, and coworkers. Free with ads, or $3.
Productivity
Instapaper: Perhaps the most universally loved of all iPhone apps, Instapaper, in conjunction with a bookmarklet on your PC, strips websites of all that crap and leaves just the text, synced to your iPhone and pristinely awaiting your eyeballs. Free with ads, or $5.
Reeder: The best all-around RSS reader, Reeder syncs flawlessly with Google Reader (not as common as you'd think!), includes intuitive, swipe-friendly controls, and has a spartan interface that gets out of the way of the stuff you care about: your feeds. $3.
Simplenote: It takes notes, simply. That's a good thing! Without any whiz-bang features for tagging or appending images, SimpleNote just lets you jot things down and, crucially, keeps them flawlessly in sync with the app's website, a client (like Notational Velocity, for Mac), and its iPad app. Total note nirvana. Free.
Dropbox: Dropbox is like the SimpleNote of files—seamless, effortless syncing across as many machines as you want. And with the slick native Dropbox app, you can count your iPhone among those machines. Check out documents and photos, attach them to emails, export them to other apps, all with the cloud as your safety net. Free.
BoxCar: Most apps, if they send you push notifications at all, do so on their own terms. Boxcar lets you pipe in notifications for all aspects of Facebook, Twitter, and email for the unbeatable price of free.
Kayak: Sometimes it seems like the internet can make traveling more of a hassle, what with all the different rates to sort through and confirmation numbers to manage. Kayak actually makes the process easier—from booking your flights and hotels to organizing your itinerary. Free.
ReaddleDocs: Is it a file sharing app? Is it a document reader? It's hard to say, but Readdle will let you grab your files—whether they're on Google Docs, MobileMe, Dropbox, or wherever—and read them with more options than you thought possible. $5
GV Mobile+: Recently something weird happened: Apple started letting Google Voice apps back into the App Store. Back from jailbreak purgatory, GV Mobile+ is currently your best option for tapping into Google's all-in-one telephone service on your iPhone.
PasteBot: You'd never think you'd use the word "ultra-powerful" to describe a "clipboard manager," but that's basically what PasteBot is, an app for organizing and managing copy clippings—text, photos, links, whatever—not only on your iPhone but, and here's where the magic happens—between your iPhone and your Mac, too. $3.
Lifestyle
Google Earth: It's, like, the entire world...on your iPhone. Google Earth is cooler than ever when you're using your fingers to manipulate it, seamlessly zooming around the globe and diving into various places to take a closer look. Free.
MotionX GPS Drive: A solid turn-by-turn navigation app for $3 a month with no long term commitment. There are others that are richer (and far more expensive), but if you just need turn-by-turn directions once in a while, MotoinX GPS is the ticket. $1, $3 a month.
Google Mobile: Yeah, there's no two ways about it: you have to have Google's Swiss Army Knife app on your iPhone. Search the internet by voice, location, or now, with the recent addition of Google goggles, by picture. Free.
Yelp: Everyone's a critic when it comes to bars and restaurants; Yelp puts that impulse to work for you. Search for food, drink, or whatever else by location, price, style and then read up on what people have to say about it. Free.
Wikipanion: If you aren't using your iPhone to settle petty disputes, what's the point? Wikipanion gives you iPhone-optimized access to all of Wikipedia, that great argument-ending resource, with added features like bookmarking, quick wikitionary lookup, intelligent search and more. Free, $5 for Wikipanion Plus.
Nike+ GPS: Nike, it turns out, knows a lot about fitness. And with its latest iteration, their Nike+ GPS app can track you on your runs, no sensor required, and keep you going with features like Cheer Me On (a Facebook-integrated social encouragement tool) and One More PowerSong (adding one last song to your pump-up playlist). $2.
AppShopper: Aside from the shiny facade of the "featured apps" front page, Apple's App Store is not easy to navigate. AppShopper delivers some sanity to the process, allowing you to easily check out new apps, create wishlists of ones you want, and get alerted when those apps go on sale. Free.
Amazon Mobile: Amazon Mobile does an admirable job of shrinking the shopping behemoth that is Amazon.com down into iPhone-friendly form. It recently picked up the ability to scan barcodes, which means that whenever you're out there shopping in the real world (gross) you can easily check back to see if you can get a better deal on Amazon. You probably can. Free.
MenuPages: If you live in New York, San Fran, LA, Philly, Boston, Chicago, DC, or South Florida and you like food, Menu Pages should be part of your arsenal. It has full menus for an impressive roster of restaurants, so you'll be able to know what you want before you even get there. Free.
Layar: Augmented reality is often cooler in theory than it is in practice. Layar's one of the few places where you can peer into the future and see how this whole AR thing might actually amount to something. Free.
OpenTable: Easily make reservations at some 14,000 restaurants which you can search by name or location. Just remember to put down your phone while you're actually dining. Free.
Weatherbug: It may not be as cute as some of the competitors, but who ever said weather should be. Weatherbug gets down to business with forecasts, maps, and video, doing so reliably and straightforwardly. Free with ads, $1 for Weatherbug Elite.
How To Cook Everything: OK, the name of the app is sorta an exaggeration, but not by as much as you'd think. For those of us who aren't concerned with preparing gourmet meals and are just happy with making something, How To Cook Everything, adapted from the excellent cookbook of the same name, is like the Holy Grail. $5.
Epicurious: A food app with a bit more context than How To Cook Everything—it lets you find recipes based on what's in season, create interactive shopping lists, etc.—it is well designed and packed with utility. Free.
Adobe Photoshop Express: It's not the powerhouse that the desktop version is, but for basic edits like crop, straighten, rotate and simple tweaks like changing exposure, saturation, and tint, this stripped down Photoshop does the trick. Free.
