What are your favorite 5 apps on your phone?
My phone has long since stopped being a phone. It is my laptop, my notebook, my filing cabinet, my photo archive and, increasingly, my preferred place to work. I still use a desktop computer, but I love the extreme mobility of the iPhone: the fact that everything I need is with me, wherever I happen to be.
So my five favourite apps are probably the five that best explain what I actually do with it.
1. Google Docs
I write. A lot. Probably six to nine hours on an ordinary day, in one form or another. Google Docs has therefore become my principal writing environment: diary reconstruction, memoir, blog posts, research, council papers, swimming plans, notes and whatever else happens to be occupying my head.
I have been writing since I was eleven. Fifty-five years later, the archive must amount to something like 50,000 pages, if a ‘page’ remains a meaningful unit in a digital world. Docs is simply the latest manifestation of something I was doing with exercise books, typewriters and sheets of A4 long before it existed.
2. ChatGPT
This has become part of the writing process rather than a substitute for it. I use it to interrogate what I have written, recover memories, test ideas, restructure material, research questions and sometimes simply push against my own thinking.
That distinction matters to me. I have an enormous body of my own material; I don’t particularly need a machine to invent things for me. What interests me is what happens when I can put fifty-five years of notes, diaries, photographs, memories and half-remembered connections into conversation with something capable of asking questions back.
3. Jetpack
I have been blogging since 1999 and using WordPress since 2007, so publishing online feels almost as natural to me now as writing in a notebook once did. Jetpack is the working end of that habit on the phone: drafting, editing, checking and publishing wherever I happen to be.
There is something wonderfully absurd about having begun all this in an age when publishing meant physically making something and now being able to write, illustrate and publish a piece while sitting on a train.
4. Chrome
The rabbit-hole machine.
Research has always been inseparable from writing for me. One minute I am checking the location of a road junction in Northumberland in 1977; the next I am looking up an obscure film, a swimming result, a species of tree, a historical event or some object I remember from childhood.
The extraordinary thing is no longer that the information exists. It is that virtually the whole reference library travels around in my pocket.
5. Google Photos
I have more than 65,000 images, so photographs are not incidental to the way I use technology. They are another archive.
Increasingly, particularly with my memoir writing, an image isn’t merely an illustration added afterwards. It can be evidence: a room, a face, a landscape, a piece of clothing, a car in the background, the position of a window. One photograph can unlock a chain of memories that has been inaccessible for fifty years.
I suppose there is a fairly obvious thread running through all five apps: writing, remembering, researching, archiving and publishing.
I’ve always been an early adopter. I had a computer in the mid-1980s, was online in the 1990s, began blogging in 1999 and moved onto WordPress in 2007. The technology keeps changing, but what I am doing with it has remained remarkably consistent.
The iPhone is simply the latest—and by far the most portable—tool I’ve found for doing it.
Addendum: But Those Aren’t Actually My ‘Favourite’ Apps!
Having answered the question with the apps I use most, I realise that wasn’t the question. An ace at written exams as a lad I should have understood the need to ‘read the question ‘.
My favourite apps are NOT the most used. Though clearly I enjoy jetpack.
BBC News, because I want to know what is going on in the world. I do not have any social media on my phone. I have too much to do.
Ventusky, because weather presented as moving systems across a map is endlessly absorbing. I can watch rain fronts, wind, temperature and pressure evolving. With the premium app I get Dew Point, the zero isotherm, likelhood of snow (low in Sussex).
RateWatch, because I use it constantly on poolside for timing swimmers, monitoring sets and keeping an eye on turnaround times. It is one of those specialist apps that does something very specific and does it extremely well. When we had 30 x 50 FC at a variety of set laces and turnaround times I was on it!
Reframe, which has quietly infused my mind with a great many reasons to be content and not down the pub. That probably makes it the most consequential app on the list. What is more it is a superlative example of how to do ‘online learning’ (I should know I did an MA in the subject).
Then we reach an increasingly crowded equal fifth place. Who gives a monkeys about the question? Everyone else goes off on a tangent! It’s what is stimulates you to come up with.
There is Rightmove, for doomscrolling through every conceivable house we could buy somewhere between here and Berwick. This is not house-hunting so much as a geographically extended form of fantasy. At times I feel I have so bought into a village in West Sussex or a town in Northumberland that I don’t need to move there are all. Courtesy of RightMove, Google Maps Streer View and Google Earth and some webcams on Ventusky and I already live there!
WhatsApp, because family, friends and colleagues have collectively decided that this is how human beings now communicate instead of ringing each other or sending a text. I can get like social media so I have all alerts turned off.
Prime Music, because it contains my enormous playlists and therefore a considerable chunk of the soundtrack to my life.
And did I mention IMDb? Of course IMDb. I appear incapable of watching a film without wanting to know who somebody is, what else they were in, who directed it, when it was made and what peculiar chain of events brought it into existence. Just last night I discovered Michael Caine playing a Policeman at the checkpoint in Val Guest’s ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire’ and was promoted to watch his totally awful but wonderful ‘Toomorrow’. (Go see).
Then there is Waze. I wouldn’t leave the house without checking it first. This remains true even when I can look out of the window and see that the gas company has dug up our road and there is no alternative route unless I drive through the back garden and over the back wall. At least I can update the world when they moved the diversion signs.
So five favourite apps?
Apparently I don’ read the question, Mr Rhodes my Geography teacher would be fuming.
Is Chrome an App?
I’m never off it. Then medical apps like PEF log for asthma. A game changer – I can spot an impending illness with the app before I’m aware of what’s about to hit me.
Someone should ask what are the five apps you never use but cannot delete?
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