Frogger did it first. Crossy Road just updates the "cross the road without getting smashed" premise for modern times. Using chunky, simple 3D graphics, familiar gameplay, and a variety of pop culture-inspired characters, it's uncommonly addictive, perfect for brief spurts of play, and way more fun that obsessively refreshing your Twitter feed.
You can play FIFA on your phone. But the best mobile games are ones that were developed especially for the platform. Games like Alto's Adventure. This endless runner is endlessly engaging, with crisp visuals, addicting gameplay, and a fun story that sees you and your snowboard crossing an alpine wilderness, rescuing llamas, and outwitting pesky mountain elders. It also boasts original music and audio, and costs only two bucks. Buy it, throw on your headphones, and enjoy.
Somebody should really go to Wacom HQ and make sure everyone's okay. Built by former Apple engineers, Astropad turns your iPad into a Retina-screened drawing tablet. The app supports most styluses and any app, is color-corrected to match what's on your Mac's screen, and offers customizable shortcuts. Thanks to proprietary network technology with less than half the lag of AirPlay, it also works both wirelessly and over USB, giving you the flexibility to setup your work environment however you like.
Long articles are great. But they require time. If you want something to read that doesn't require a drink and a comfortable chair, try Short. This slick reading app connects to apps like Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability, then sorts through your lists to group articles by reading time, letting you select an article that's both interesting and fits into the time frame you have available. Sure beats spending five minutes browsing useless Facebook status updates.
Favorite sketch. Fruitless searches on YouTube. Frustration with all things NBC. No more. The SNL app is here to give you access to the show's 40-year library of sketches and shorts with as little friction as possible. You can search clips, browse by season, episode, or cast member, get recommendations based on your viewing history, and even install an SNL-themed emoji keyboard to remind friends and family just how uncomfortably androgynous Pat really was.
We spend about a third of our time sleeping, so the mattress you sleep on every night is incredibly important. But when you lie on a bed for five minutes in a mattress showroom, it's impossible to judge how you'll sleep through the night - and the commissioned salesperson hovering doesn't help. Casper was designed with the bedroom in mind, not the showroom, and features premium latex foam for cooling and memory foam for comfort and support. In fact, you can avoid the showroom altogether as Casper comes compress-shipped right to your door. Make sleep a priority again with this impeccably designed, outrageously comfortable, and hand-crafted mattress made in the U.S.A.
Presented by Casper.
Think Adidas is the only letting you buy new release kicks on your phone? Think again. Nike Snkrs is a complete sneaker shopping experience, giving you a customized feed of new shoes from your favorite lines, detailed info on every shoe, and notifications on upcoming releases. You can even buy your shoes right from the app, saving your billing info to expedite the process, and thankfully for the rest of the country, you don't have to be in NYC to use it.
Queueing up for a new pair of sneakers can be a pain. Skip the line and get your next pair with minimum hassle using Adidas Confirmed. This simple app lets you create an account, get a push notification when reservations open, reserve your pair of shoes, then simply show up at the store and pick them up. Rumor has it that you'll need to use it to score a pair of Kanye's new Yeezy kicks, but unfortunately for many, the app only works in NYC.
Get your daily dose of weather information with a side of absurdist humor in the Funny Or Die Weather app. It's powered by Weather Underground, so the forecasts and stats like barometric pressure, wind speed, humidity, moon phase, and sunrise and sunset times are no laughing matter. The design is clean, with simple animated backgrounds to give you an at-a-glance feel for the current conditions. But it's all accompanied by a joke, putting a smile on your face even when the forecast calls for brutal cold or hellish heat.
You let your phone manage your contacts, appointments, and even your health, so why not let it manage your relationships, too? Pplkpr uses GPS and a heart rate wristband to determine your emotional state around specific friends. As a result, it can tell you who makes you the most anxious, the most excited, the least bored, and so on, giving you a better idea of which friends you should maximize your time with and which friends you might want to make less frequent appearances in your life.
Our iPhones are smart. Just not when it comes to helping us find them. Now you can locate your iPhone using nothing but the sound of your voice thanks to Marco Polo. This app listens for you to shout "Marco" — or any other input phrase you like — and responds with either "Polo" or another message of your choosing, in one of 30 unique character voices. It works in silent mode, will pop up a notification to let you find your phone in the dark, and can even boost the volume if you've got it set too low to hear. At last, no more tearing apart the couch/bed/house just to check Twitter.
Depending on your age, you might not even remember a time when taking photos meant hitting the shutter button, getting to the end of the roll, and then waiting for your film to be developed before finding out what you have. WhiteAlbum is trying to bring that same feeling of overwhelming anxiety anticipation to modern times. The app lets you shoot 24 photos per album, and once they're taken, they're uploaded and turned into 4" x 5" prints that are then shipped back to you. The cost is $20 an album, which is probably about what you'd pay for a decent disposable camera and development service, but without the need to actually go anywhere.
Keeping your inbox at zero is hard enough without being bombarded by mailing lists and newsletters (there's only one you really need). Trim away these distractions with ease using Unsubscriber. This clever app works with all your GMail accounts, letting you login and go through your subscriptions in a plain list. Just swipe left to unsubscribe, swipe right to keep a subscription, and before you know it, your inbox will be a whole lot cleaner — and easier to manage, too.
You need that new record you ordered. You need it now, not in a day, or the two days it might take it to arrive if you use Amazon's base Prime shipping. If you're in Manhattan, you're in luck. With Amazon Prime Now, you can get stuff delivered straight to your door in an hour or less. Good for plenty of everyday products like paper towels, toys, headphones, Kindles (of course), books, and batteries, this new service is available from 6 a.m. to midnight, and offers free two-hour delivery for existing Prime members, with an extra $8 charge for one-hour service. While it's limited to select areas of NYC for now, Amazon says it will be "coming soon to a city near you".
Setting the time on your watch is simple enough — after all, your phone is probably showing a pretty close approximation right now. But if your timepiece demands more accuracy or features than your phone offers by default, take a look at Watchville. Designed as a must-download for watch aficionados, this handy app offers a number of time-focused tools, including an atomic clock, a leap year indicator, UTC time, and moon-phase setting tools. In addition, it shows aggregated news from a number of watch blogs, so if you're really into timepiece collecting, it'll keep you up to speed.
Valet parking is great. Now you can get the same experience wherever you are (in San Francisco, at least) with Luxe Valet Parking. This new service and app combination runs $5 an hour up to a maximum of $15 a day, and works like this: A Luxe valet meets you at the time and place you specify. They take your car and park it in a secure lot, and will even fill it up with gas or get it washed if you request. When you're ready to use your car again, they'll return it to you where ever you are — so even if a morning meeting turns into an unexpected dinner ten blocks away, you're covered.
Whether you're setting up an impromptu rap battle or simply want some background beats while you work, Keezy Drummer has you covered. This dead-simple app lets you create a beat in seconds by adding one of 12 percussion sounds to the 16 step measure as you wish, then layering up to 9 of them at a time for more complex sonic backdrops. You can also set the tempo in increments from 0 to 300 bpm, and your beat will continue to play in the background even after you leave the app, until you turn it off.
Just because you're streaming your music doesn't mean it has to sound streamed. Tidal is a new subscription service that delivers lossless audio — over 1,400 kbps — to your devices on demand. Its music library includes over 25 million tracks, so you're likely to find whatever it is you're wanting to listen to at the moment, and thanks to a team of editors that personally select and showcase the best new albums and tracks in each genre every day, finding new favorites is a breeze. And just in case you're feeling visual, the service also offers over 75,000 HD music videos, so you can turn your phone in a modern-day MTV whenever you feel like it.
It's great if you live by the rules of Inbox Zero, but for most of us, our email client is more like Inbox Hell — a jumble of personal messages, important info, and marketing emails on which we should have long ago clicked "Unsubscribe". Gmail Inbox is a new, official Google app that aims to help clean up this mess by ditching traditional email client conventions. The app bundles similar emails together, shows the most important details from messages without the need to open them, lets you set reminders for or snooze emails, and even allows you to do things like check-in for flights and respond to calendar invitations, all from a clean, concise single-page view.
FXX's The Simpsons marathon might be over, but you can still watch every episode ever — on demand and at your own pace — with Simpsons World. Built into the FXNow app, this unique experience not only gives you every episode ever, but also graphs showing popularity, clips showing some of the writers' favorite moments, and more. If you'd rather, you can also access the content through a browser, but with the bonus ability to catch episodes of FX and FXX original series the day after they air, there's little reason not to grab the app.
