The 27 best new apps of 2025

As always, many of this year’s best apps are ones you’ve probably never heard of.

Sure, there are some big names on this list, particularly in the buzzy field of artificial intelligence, but the real standouts of 2025 innovated on a smaller scale. They give you better ways to take notes or remember things, write with just your voice, have fun snapping photos, or even indulge in some gaming classics.

For this list, “apps” include desktop and mobile software, along with browser extensions and web tools. Some apps are entirely new, while others received transformative updates that make them worthy of a fresh look. Hopefully, you’ll discover something that quickly becomes a must-have.

Productivity

Raycast: Open Raycast with a keyboard shortcut, and you can quickly find files, search the web, access your clipboard history, paste frequently written text snippets, reposition your windows, look up emojis, ask AI questions, and more. It’s a Swiss Army knife of time-saving tools for power users, and it finally arrived on Windows and iOS this year to complement the long-running Mac version. (Windows, Mac, iOS)

Payload: Cloud storage is great, but sometimes you need a faster way to send files to yourself. Payload checks your Wi-Fi network for any devices where its app is installed, then uses that connection to transfer files almost instantly, without ever leaving your local network. Previously desktop-only, Payload arrived on mobile devices this year and launched an optional online service for remote file sharing. (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android)

Ghost Capture App: This free app streamlines the act of adding items to your to-do list. Just long-press the little ghost icon and say what you’re trying to accomplish, and it will create a task that syncs to either Apple Reminders or Google Tasks with no extra buttons to push. (iOS)

Monotype: Typewriter Simulator: If you miss (or, for that matter, remember) the feel of writing with a typewriter, this app is for you. It provides an on-screen typewriter that produces a satisfying clack with each key press, followed by a ding and the need to hit Enter (or, more appropriately, Return) at the end of each line. When you’re finished, you can copy the text into whatever document editor you normally use. Thankfully, the app allows you to delete without any Wite-Out. (Mac)

Antinote: Apple’s default TextEdit app is too clunky when you’re just trying to jot down some quick thoughts. Antinote speeds things up with a clean, plain-text scratch pad, which you can pop open with a keyboard shortcut (Option+A by default). You can also create to-do lists by typing “todo” at the top of a note, or perform calculations by typing “math” at the top. It’s a $5 onetime purchase after a free trial. (Mac)

Orb: Most internet speed test tools just give you a snapshot of upload and download speeds. Orb instead lets you run persistent speed tests throughout the day, providing a clearer view of overall reliability. You can even set up the app on multiple devices around the house to see where the connection is weakest. (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)

AI

Proton Lumo: While most AI companies keep a record of your chat history and may even share conversations with human reviewers, Proton’s Lumo AI makes a point of being oblivious. Proton doesn’t log users’ chats or use them to train its models, so the company has no way of accessing your chat history. (iOS, Android, web)

Perplexity Comet: Amid a wave of AI web browsers, Perplexity stands out for its ability to navigate the web on your behalf. Try letting it cancel your subscriptions, search across multiple flight deal sites, or even put a single question to multiple AI tools to see how their answers differ. Just be careful about letting it access sensitive data. (Windows, Mac, Android)

Wispr Flow: Your phone or computer’s built-in voice dictation features are fine if you don’t mind doing a lot of manual cleanup. Wispr Flow manages to be a lot more accurate—sometimes eerily so—as it uses AI processing to both clean up your text and learn from your writing tendencies over time. It’s also just convenient to use in short bursts with push-to-talk keyboard shortcuts. (Windows, Mac, iOS)

Superwhisper: Another voice dictation app, Superwhisper stands out by letting you use on-device speech-to-text models with no online processing. This allows for unlimited usage without any privacy concerns while still offering handy shortcuts for push-to-talk mode. (Windows, Mac, iOS)

Google Gemini: Google’s AI assistant isn’t new, but its built-in “Nano Banana” text-to-image model that arrived this year would be a killer app on its own. Start by uploading any image, then ask to render it in a different visual style, remove objects (including chain link fences), zoom and enhance, or add more images to the scene. You can even draw around parts of the image to show where the edits should go. (iOS, Android, web)

Dia: The most thoughtful of the AI browsers, Dia lets you @ mention your open tabs to synthesize information from them, ask questions about your browser history, and take action in web apps like Gmail and Google Calendar. Its smartest feature, though, is its search box, which automatically routes your queries to AI or web search, based on what you write. (Mac)

Sora: What if there was a social network where you didn’t need to stop and wonder if something was generated by AI—because everything was generated by AI? That’s the premise behind OpenAI’s Sora. You can even create an AI doppelgänger of yourself and control who can use it in their videos (just you, just your friends, or everyone). Yes, deceptive Sora deepfakes leaking onto the rest of the internet with their watermarks removed is an issue. But at its best, the app itself is silly, fun, and not at all misleading. (iOS, Android)

Photo and video

Affinity: Serif’s image editing suite is a popular subscription-free alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and Designer, so users got nervous last year when the company was acquired by Canva—itself a subscription-driven business. This year, Canva didn’t just honor its promise to offer Affinity without a subscription, it released the entire desktop suite for free. The only catch is that you need a Canva account—and a subscription if you want to use some AI tools. (Windows, Mac)

Not Boring Camera: This iPhone app offers a more fun way to take photos, with skeuomorphic buttons and knobs for zoom, exposure, focus, and more. The two-second preview of snapped photos that appears in the viewfinder is an especially nice touch, allowing you to quickly discard a bad picture while staying in photography mode. (iOS)

Cassette: The self-proclaimed “Home Video Player” app offers a fun way to revisit all the footage you’ve captured on your iPhone. The app groups your videos by year, presenting them as VHS tapes on a shelf. Tapping on a cassette gives you a stream of auto-playing videos, which you can either swipe through TikTok-style or advance through with the fast-forward and rewind buttons. (iPhone, iPad)

Google Vids: Google’s foray into multitrack video editing lets you combine multiple video and audio clips with transitions, voice-overs, and subtitles. Of course, there’s an AI angle, with an option to generate video clips using Google’s Veo 3 model, but otherwise it’s just an easy way to edit videos online for free. (Web)

Detail: Apple’s winner for “Best iPad App of the Year,” Detail is a handy tool for professional (or aspiring) content creators. It helps record video in a variety of ways, including making reaction videos and reading script from an on-screen teleprompter, and its AI editor can help trim out unwanted bits. The real power, though, comes from being able to combine multiple iPhones and iPads for things like split-screen video podcasts, live monitoring on an iPad while shooting on your phone, and recording top-down iPhone footage while speaking into an iPad. (iOS, Mac)

Camo Streamlight: The free Windows app makes you look better on Zoom calls by surrounding the outer edges of your screen in bright white. It takes inspiration from those ring lights you can attach to your screen, and while the effect is subtle in a well-lit room, it can make a big difference when the room lightning isn’t great. (Windows)

Shutter Declutter: If your Apple Photos library is swimming in tens of thousands of images you couldn’t care less about, you’re not alone. Shutter Declutter can help you finally make progress at pruning them. It lets you efficiently swipe to delete the detritus, and reminds you each day to review pictures you took on today’s date in previous years. The fewer fuzzy and/or accidental shots that remain, the more you can enjoy the photos worth preserving. (iOS, iPadOS)

Security and privacy

UBlock Origin Lite: Apple’s Safari browser finally has the free, open-source, customizable ad-and-tracker blocker it’s been missing. This offshoot of the venerable uBlock Origin does a great job decluttering web pages, and you can dig into its settings menu to tailor the filtering rules to your liking—for instance, to hide cookie notices or social media widgets. The same extension is also available for Chrome. (iOS, Mac)

Have I Been Pwned?: For more than a decade, Have I Been Pwned? has been invaluable for checking whether your email and passwords have been exposed in data breaches. (The answer is almost certainly “yes.”) This year, the site added a personal dashboard with a full history of breaches for your email address, the types of data exposed, and optional email addresses for the next time your email is compromised. (Web)

Proton Authenticator: Proton’s two-factor authentication app is what Authy used to be before it discontinued its desktop apps. It allows you to set up 2FA codes that add an extra layer of protection to your online accounts, then back up and sync them to your other devices. This makes 2FA more convenient while reducing the odds of getting locked out. (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android)