41 best iPad apps

Whether you’re making your iPad 2 last or enjoying one of the newer Retina-equipped models, you’ll want to know which are the best apps for Apple’s tablets.

To help you get the most from your Apple tablet, we’ve rounded up the best iPad apps.

Click here to read our review of the latest iPad.

Coast

Opera’s Coast brings some much-needed fresh thinking to tablet browsing, playing to the strengths of the touchscreen, rather than merely shoe-horning a desktop browser onto the iPad. The homescreen, for example, is an easily tappable selection of tiles for your favourite websites, with an address bar at the top if you need to manually enter a URL or search for a site. Tap on a tile, and the screen dissolves to a coloured display showing the site’s logo flashing until the page is loaded; likewise, tap on a link on a web page and the link flashes until the page is ready, giving a visual indication that your tap has been recognised. You can swipe left and right to browse back and forward, and there’s also an option to skim through large previews of open tabs by clicking on an icon in the bottom-right of the screen. It all adds up to a smart-looking, intuitive and fresh iPad browser that – like many of Opera’s products – deserves greater attention than it will probably receive.

(Click here to download Coast – Free)

Duolingo

The Duolingo website has already taught one member of the PC Pro office to speak Italian, as readers of Darien Graham-Smith’s Technolog column in the magazine may recall. Now the website has been converted into a free iPad/iPhone app, allowing tablet users to brush up their French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or, of course, Italian skills. The app makes liberal use of repetition and gamification, hammering vocabulary and grammar skills into users with a variety of written, aural and oral questions, of which you can get only four wrong on each level before progressing to the next. The app can be irritatingly pedantic: translate “the boy eats cheese” instead of the “boy eats some cheese” and you stand to lose a life, but once you get into its mindset, you make impressively rapid progress. We think it’s best used as a supplement to actual lessons or as a refresher course for language skills that haven’t been tested since your fifth-form days, rather than learning a language from scratch – but you may disagree, non?

(Click here to download Duolingo – free)

Popplet

Popplet Lite makes it easy to quickly brainstorm concepts and create mind maps. The app is fast and responsive, but light on editing options. For example, there’s no way to change the font from the default Comic Sans-lookalike, which is hardly professional. You can import pictures from your photo library and tether them to your notes, as well as sketch your own drawings. There is an option to export your mind maps to your email as a PDF, but you’ll have to upgrade to the full £2.99 version in order to do so. Otherwise the free version will let you save and export JPEGs, but will only capture the image framed by the screen. This means that trying to send a large mind map can be tricky, since the text is too small to view when zoomed out to fit everything in the frame.

(Click here to download Popplet – £2.99; Popplet Lite available for free)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

Mushroom Wars

Mushroom Wars is a rare beast on two counts: a real-time strategy game (RTS) that’s (a) cute; and (b) actually playable on an iPad without endless map scrolling. It probably won’t have enough depth for Civilisation fans, but for those who fancy a quick blast of empire building, without having to learn what 85 different types of resource are needed to build a particular structure, Mushroom Wars is perfect. There are 32 single-player campaigns to complete, with a delightfully smooth ramp in difficulty, but it’s the online multiplayer maps that really add the longevity. The game offers a few sample taster levels for free, but to unlock the rest and multiplayer requires a modest £2.99 in-game purchase.

(Click here to download Mushroom Wars – Free)

News 360

There’s no shortage of good news aggregators for the iPad, but News 360 offers something a little different to office favourites Zite and Flipboard. Like its rivals, it selects stories based on your stated interests and the contents of your social network feeds (Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and Google+). News 360 differentiates itself by offering a host of different sources for each story: a story about an emergency landing at Heathrow, for example, includes reports from the BBC, Sky, Daily Mail and others, all easily accessible on different tabs, as well as video news reports from various sources. The content and chosen sources are very American-centric, but technology news is particularly well catered for.

(Click here to download News 360 – free)

Chess Pro – with coach

If, like a certain PC magazine editor, you know how to play chess but have a worse win record than Gordon Brown, Chess Pro is worth a download. Chess Pro both suggests moves as you play, and highlights when your opponent is threatening one of your pieces, so you can take evasive action.

To be clear, this isn’t a step-by-step tutorial for beginners: Chess Pro suggests moves without explaining the reasons why, and is best thought of as a helping hand for those familiar with the rules. The coaching can be switched on and off during a game, and moves can be taken back and replayed to see if you can avoid checkmate a second time. There are plenty of board designs to choose from and difficulty levels to scale, supposedly up to “candidate master”. There’s a free version that offers 20 games to try before you buy.

(Click here to download Chess Pro – £1.49)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

Captain Dash

Captain Dash is an immaculately designed dashboard for all your website and social networking analytics. It plugs into Google Analytics, Twitter and Facebook accounts, providing graphical breakdowns of key trends – such as unique visitors, followers and page views – in a far more attractive form than anything Google itself spits out. The Captain allows you to apply filters to key metrics – if you want to keep an eye specifically on UK visitor numbers to your website, for example – and save these as easily accessible dashboards. It’s not as intuitive as it might be, and the cloying, cartoon characters that guide you through the app’s features are vomit inducing. Just grit your teeth and admire the pretty graphs.

(Click here to download Captain Dash – free)

Phoster

Your iPad might not be the gadget you instinctively use for desktop publishing work, but Phoster allows those with minimal design skills to design a sharp-looking poster or flyer. The templates on offer verge towards hipster, but they’re certainly eye-catching and easy to modify. You can import photos from your Camera Roll or snap a fresh one from the camera, or simply go for a plain text design. All text elements on templates are modifiable, and there’s a decent selection of contemporary fonts to choose from, although moving text boxes around a poster is often fiddly and imprecise. Still, you can hardly complain about a free app that could well save you the expense of a professional designer for small-scale promotions.

(Click here to download Phoster – free)

Cooliris

Cooliris turns your photo collections into a scrollable 3D wall. The app will display photos stored on the iPad, as well as those stashed online in services such as Facebook, Twittter, Instagram, Google Images and Flickr. The photos scroll past with incredible smoothness, but there’s not much to do with them other than reshare on social networks or attach them to an email. But if you just want to show off an album of photos to a friend, there are few slicker ways of doing so.

(Click here to download Cooliris – free)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

The Times and The Sunday Times

Previously two separate apps, the two Times newspapers have now merged into a single Newsstand app. The big change is that both newspapers can now be downloaded automatically overnight – an option that was previously only open to The Sunday Times. In our tests, the auto downloads have been erratic, but we hope that’s something that will be fixed as the app matures. The new app appears to have built using HTML5, which allows for font sizes to be enlarged and issue download sizes to be dramatically reduced – each edition of The Times now downloads in seconds rather than minutes, and The Sunday Times no longer threatens to swallow all the free storage on your iPad and take until Monday to download. However, a little of the slickness appears to have been sacrificed, and individual sections of The Times now have to be downloaded separately – only the main news section arrives automatically. It’s a work in progress, but now a more convenient way to get high-quality journalism on your iPad.

(Click here to download The Times and The Sunday Times – free (newspaper subscription required))

MyScript Calculator

There are dozens of free calculator apps for the iPad (oddly, it doesn’t come with one, unlike the iPhone), but none are as flexible as the MyScript Calculator. As the name suggests, this calculator allows you to jot sums using handwriting recognition, as if you were using pencil and paper. Obviously, the benefits are limited for basic adding and subtracting, but it really comes into its own when performing more complex operations, such as dividing by the square root of a number, where entering the data on an onscreen keypad is cumbersome. The MyScript Calculator can also be used to solve equations: simply leave a blank space on one side of the equation and it will automatically fill in the blanks.

(Click here to download MyScript Calculator – free)

Rayman Jungle Run

A wonderful hybrid of Temple Run-style endless running, and side-scrolling platform game, this is the best thing to happen to the tired-looking Rayman franchise in donkey’s years. The goal is to collect as many bugs as possible over the course of a short level, by running, flying and leaping over a battery of obstacles. With superbly cute graphics and a gentle learning curve, this is one of those games you can pretend to download for the kids, but actually spend hours playing yourself.

(Click here to download Rayman Jungle Run – £1.99)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

Adobe Photoshop Touch

We’ve yet to see a photo-editing app that offers the fine precision of Adobe’s tablet version of Photoshop. The brilliantly conceived Scribble Selection tool lets you cut out parts of an image by doodling on the screen with your finger, with the software cleverly taking care of the rough edges. Other advanced features such as layers, and compatibility with AirPrint and full-blown Photoshop make this well worth the price.

(Click here to download Adobe Photoshop Touch – £6.99)

Snapseed

Snapseed – a beautifully designed photo editing app that has long been a PC Pro office favourite – wasn’t new for 2012, but it’s had a hugely significant year. Developer Nik Software was acquired by Google in September, which could have major implications for its future as a standalone app. Google has a history of swallowing startups and rolling their features into its own products, which means you could well see Snapseed’s spot-editing tools and range of stunning filters blended into Android. Snap up the iOS app while you can.

(Click here to download Snapseed – £2.99)

Artrage

Artrage is a painting and drawing app that lets you create stunning images with a series of natural brushes, pencil and inking tools. It isn’t strictly new, but it was updated for the Retina display earlier in the year, and this is where it really looks its best. Our favourite feature is its ability to import photos and paint over them. With painting and drawing tools sampling colour from the picture underneath, it’s possible to turn unremarkable photos into striking paintings no matter what your skill level.

(Click here to download ArtRage – From £1.99)

Paper

This app delivers the closest experience to writing with real pen and paper that we’ve found on a tablet. Don’t be fooled: this is an artist’s sketchbook, not a note-taker, and without an option to pan and zoom around pages, the canvas is limited to the size of the iPad screen. That said, the pen strokes are beautifully authentic, and with the paid-for additional tools it’s possible to create lovely pieces.

(Click here to download Paper – Free (£4.99 for extra tools))

500px

500px has replaced the labouring Flickr as the site for showing off your wares for many photographers, and its stunning tablet app is one of the reasons why. The 500px app is essentially a viewer, that shows off the intimidatingly high quality Editor’s picks and user-voted photos in glorious full screen. It can also be used as a slideshow for the photos in your own or others’ accounts, with smooth transitions and music stored on your device playing in the background.

(Click here to download 500px – Free)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

Kingdom Rush HD

In the tower defense genre, successive hordes of enemies march through a map for your assembled defences to stop. That simple concept has spawned hundreds of titles, but few capture its essence as purely as Kingdom Rush HD. Its cartoonish creativity, with knights and ogres marching alongside spiders, wolves and wizards, belies a devious tactical approach, with tower upgrade paths forking between snipers, wizards and Big Bertha mortar guns. It offers up that rare perfect balance of difficulty and fun, with some basic RPG elements thrown in too.

(Click here to download Kingdom Rush HD – From free)

The Room

There are puzzle games, and there’s The Room. As the name suggests, the “action” takes place in a single, strange room, and in the middle sits an ornate wooden box. All you have to do is find a way to open the box, but as you solve each ingenious visual riddle another layer of the onion is peeled back to reveal more, each one building on yet subverting previous solution techniques. It’s not so much a game as an elaborate method of torture, often seeming like The Room has you beaten, only to relinquish its next secret in a breakthrough that literally had us punching the air at times. It’s really only a test of attention to detail and lateral thinking, yet it proved to be one of the most engrossing, fiendishly enjoyable experiences of the year. Hint: if you want that sporadic feeling of elation only a game this tricky can elicit, don’t accept the offer of hints until you absolutely have to.

(Click here to download The Room – £2.99)

Ticket to Ride

Board games make perfect iPad fodder, and although Ticket to Ride isn’t too well known in the UK, its simple yet strategic card-based play is easy enough to pick up. Each card is a carriage; carriages make trains; trains connect cities – except you need the right colour carriage and some of the cities are a continent apart. It’s as much about hitting your goal as it is about blocking your opponents’, and those opponents can even be playing on a PC.

(Click here to download Ticket to Ride – From £1.49)

Bastion

It says a lot about the power of modern tablets that this wonderful action RPG can make the transition from PC and Xbox to the iPad without losing a bit of its lush vibrancy and easy charm. The tale of a boy fighting to save civilisation, its distinctive style comes from three things: the dreamscape approach to level layouts, in which the floor appears out of nothing in front of our hero as he fights his way towards his goal; the wonderful array of weapons, challenges, power-ups and foes; and from the perfect combination of soundtrack and laconic, near-constant narration. Among a growing crowd of big-budget, ultra-slick yet ultimately vacuous iPad titles, Bastion stands out a mile.

(Click here to download Bastion – £2.99)

Super Hexagon

Hard games are in fashion right now, and few come tougher than the retro, minimalist Super Hexagon. There are only two controls – spin left, spin right – and only one goal, which is to not die. You will die, though. Quickly and repeatedly. To a pounding techno soundtrack, the walls close in and you dodge, and dodge, and die. And go again, and dodge, and die. Go. Die. Repeat. The office record is 41.49 seconds of survival; the average game is probably less than ten.

(Click here to download Super Hexagon – £1.99)

Plague Inc

Imagine a game of Risk where, instead of armies moving across the world map, it’s the spread of disease. And you are that disease. Choose your starting nation and plague type, evolve your transmission methods for different climates, target human weak points and rapidly mutate into something horrific as you devour the earth’s population, all the while combating the efforts of man to develop a cure to beat you. Don’t worry, Plague Inc is a lot less gruesome and a lot more tactical than it sounds.

(Click here to download Plague Inc. – 69p)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

Hunters 2

Genuinely good turn-based strategy games are few and far between on mobile devices, but this one nails the format perfectly. Hunters 2 sees you control a team of bounty hunters in space, blasting aliens, levelling up and bagging loot and weapons as you track down the rogue veteran Cauis Black. As anyone who loved X-Com or Jagged Alliance will appreciate, it’s about using the terrain and your team’s distinct weapons and abilities to keep them alive and make everyone else dead.

(Click here to download Hunters 2 – 69p)

Uplink

This one will be familiar to older readers, as it’s a straight conversion of Introversion’s classic hacking sim from 2001. The good news is that it plays identically to before, with the new touch controls fitting perfectly. The not so good news is that it has understandably aged, but there’s something wonderfully nerdy about the retro hardware you accumulate and the methods you use to steal, sabotage and cover your tracks. Still as compelling an experience as it was over a decade ago.

(Click here to download Uplink – From £2.99)

Machinarium

Quite possibly the most beautiful game to appear on a tablet, Machinarium is a treat for both the eyes and the brain. The aim is to reunite Josef the robot with his missing girlfriend by solving a series of magnificently conceived puzzles. The steampunk-style animation is so adorably intricate that the hardest part of the game is finding the objects needed to solve the puzzles. If you get stuck (which you will, frequently), a pencil-sketch of the solution is provided – if you first complete a mini shoot-em-up.

(Click here to download Machinarium – £2.99)

Paprika

There are many recipe apps out there, but Paprika is more than that. To begin with, it’s a dedicated search engine for meals, and those that catch your eye can be clipped into a personal and editable recipe book that syncs across mobile devices and your Mac. You can control what sites are included in searches from a long list of supported sources, and you can search by ingredients too. The recipe layout is perfect for a tablet propped up on a kitchen counter while you cook, but there’s still more: Paprika is also a weekly meal scheduler and a grocery list maker, cleverly importing any ingredients you don’t have in your fridge directly from your chosen recipes.

(Click here to download Paprika Recipe Manager – From £2.99)

Zite

Personalised news is something many apps attempt to bring you, but Zite manages it better than most. By selecting your categories, then spending the first few weeks rating the stories you’re offered as relevant to you or not, Zite gradually evolves into a news gatherer that works to your interests. It can be a little over-zealous – don’t go liking too many articles from the same source unless you want your homepage swamped by it – but if rated sparingly it’s a great news reading and sharing tool.

(Click here to download Zite – Free)

Longform

This year has seen a surge in the appeal of longform writing, with all manner of curated print periodicals and websites popping up to produce the kind of in-depth, intelligent articles that most of the internet lacks the attention span for. The Longform iPad app acts as a repository for such pieces, collating the best from a variety of (mostly American) sources and presenting them in a clean and readable way. It also connects to Instapaper and Readability.

(Click here to download Longform – £1.49)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

Storify

Twitter is the first social network people turn to when discussing live events, but how do you later look back on the event as it unfolded? Storify allows you to create edited highlights of events – be it a tech launch, football match or gig – as told on Twitter and other social networks. The smooth interface allows you to drag and drop posts from people in your timeline to form a coherent narrative that can be saved and published under its own URL. It’s also possible to enhance the story with videos from YouTube or photos from Flickr and Instagram.

(Click here to download Storify – Free)

The Guardian & Eyewitness

While the iPhone and Android apps are decent enough portals that merely drag in the website feed, the Guardian iPad app is a full-on digital conversion of the daily paper. Your opinion on the content may vary, but in design, layout and navigation it’s the best of all the conversions we’ve read. Plus, whatever your political views may be, everyone should download the free Guardian Eyewitness app for its stunning daily photography updates. If your iPad has a Retina display you’re in for quite a treat.

(The Guardian – subscribe; Click here to download Eyewitness – Free)

BBC iPlayer

The mobile version of iPlayer has been around since 2008, but this year’s update was a big one. You still get the vast majority of the BBC’s output, including plenty of sport and film, but the update allows you to download video directly to your device. Not only does this make you less reliant on battery-killing 3G when you’re on the train, but means you can stock up with a few episodes of Eastenders before you head abroad.

(Click here to download BBC iPlayer – Free)

Sky+

On phones it’s a great way to check what’s currently on TV and remotely record your favourite series, but the Sky+ iPad app takes things up a notch: it’s now a full remote control for your Sky box. It has interactive channel listings, complete with favourites, showing full programme information and Sky’s highlights, and when you click Watch your TV responds instantly. Then you can flip to the live gesture interface and rewind what you’re watching with a simple swipe. Sky has said the remote control feature will also be coming to phones “very soon”.

(Click here to download Sky+ – Free)

Sky Sports for iPad

While Sky has loads of apps, it’s the dedicated Sky Sports iPad app that we couldn’t do without. While it performs the obvious staple duty of giving you a full remote-record EPG and live access to your subscribed sport channels on the go, it’s even better as a second-screen viewing companion. The Premier League Match Centre keeps you up to date on a Saturday afternoon, with a Champions League alternative for midweek; the Formula One Race Control has (not quite) live timing updates and video feeds; and Sky added a great live scorecard and feeds just in time for the recent Ryder Cup.

(Click here to download Sky Sports for iPad – Free)

Soundcloud

Soundcloud puts a whole world of audio at your fingertips. Members can record and upload their own music, DJ mixes, sound effects or audio recordings and share them with as many, or as few, people as they care to – which also makes it an invaluable resource for collaborating with fellow music-makers from across the globe. Soundcloud has taken the place of MySpace for many professional musicians, artists, record labels and DJs, who regularly share exclusive tracks fresh from the studio, upload DJ mixes from recent events, or demo their latest releases.

(Click here to download SoundCloud – Free)

From games, social apps and creative utilities to education and more, we round up the best iPad apps. Click the link below each review to download the app on your tablet.

Monster Physics

With the production values of a big-budget studio it’s hard to believe Monster Physics is a one-man creation. A little like the popular Flash game Fantastic Contraption, Monster Physics begins with some simple assembly tasks – feed your monster by creating a swing to roll an apple into his mouth, for example – but quickly progresses into more complex assault courses that demand some real thinking about the physics involved. Although it’s aimed at kids, it’s moreish enough that parents will soon be joining in – just to supervise, of course.

(Click here to download Monster Physics™ – 69p)

Little Digits

As five minutes on YouTube will confirm, toddlers and touchscreens are a winning combination, so what better way to teach them about numbers than by using their own fingers? Little Digits is a cute learning app that takes full advantage of the iPad’s ten-point multitouch. In basic mode the number on screen responds on the fly to the number of fingers touching it, and that same concept is extended into add and subtract modes. It’s simple, it’s child-safe and it’s wonderfully intuitive.

(Click here to download Little Digits – £1.49)

King of Maths

If you want your kids to speed up their mental calculations – from basic addition to complex equations – then give King of Maths a try. The free version is limited to addition and subtraction, with 69p unlocking further levels. With a straightforward interface, easy achievements and multiple choice answers, it’s a great way to persuade reluctant children to spend a few minutes honing their Maths skills.

(Click here to download King of Maths – From free)

iTunes U

It’s easy to forget the astonishing amount of knowledge that’s freely available from Apple’s own educational repository – which may be why it was separated out into a standalone app this summer. The courses are growing in number as well as in ambition and creativity as time goes on, and the service has been embraced by some of the most prestigious educators in the world.

(Click here to download iTunes U – Free)

TED

Attending the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in the US involves an hour-long application form and a nearly £5,000 membership fee. Thank goodness, then, that the TED app has talks from Stephen Hawking to Steve Jobs for free. It’s not technically new, but seeing as the app includes TED’s entire back catalogue and is constantly being updated with new talks, it remains a must-have. Talks are available for offline viewing, and it supports AirPlay on iOS devices.

(Click here to download TED – Free)

Rightmove

If you’re looking to buy a house the totally redesigned Rightmove companion is a revelation. Whether you’re sat at home with the iPad, scouring a postcode for houses in your price range and eyeing up multiple interior shots, or out and about with your smartphone simply letting the GPS do its job, it effortlessly eliminates an awful lot of wasted viewings and throws up others that would have been a chore to find.

(Click here to download Rightmove – Free)