Fender Play

Fender is on a mission to save the guitar. According to Fender's CEO Andy Mooney, 90% of people who get a guitar quit playing in their first year. With the rise of electronic-based music, the guitar hero has become a bit of an anachronism, and this trend worries companies like Fender. But they're fighting back. The best way to retain players is to teach them to play and keep them picking, and that's exactly what Fender Play is all about. The subscription service offers simple beginner lessons up through advanced courses with accomplished musicians in a variety of genres. The guitar isn't dead yet, and Fender wants to bring it an infusion of fresh blood.

Sega Forever

Relive past gaming glories on your phone with Sega Forever. This free collection includes tons of classic games from every console they ever released, including the Genesis, Dreamcast, and even the Master System. The games have complete support for Bluetooth controllers for a more authentic experience, and unlike some of the old cartridges, they also save your progress, so you won't lose your place due to an incoming text.

Halide

Crafted by two friends with a passion for design, Halide is a nearly perfect still photography app. It has numerous noteworthy features, including Raw support, focus peaking, manual ISO, shutter, and focus controls, and a live histogram. But it's the app itself, with its intuitive, gestural interface and gorgeous custom typography, that stands apart, and has the potential to transform how you make photos with your phone.

Tentrr

It sounds cliché to call Tentrr "Airbnb for camping." But it's also pretty accurate. This app/service lets you find and book thoroughly vetted campsites within just hours of major cities. Each site offers amenities like hand-sewn expedition tents, air mattresses with featherbed toppers, Adirondack chairs, fire pits, and grills. In other words, it provides a happy medium between "glamping" and roughing it, and will be expanding its reach beyond the U.S. Northeast in the coming months.

WOD

Finding time to hit the gym can be difficult. WOD is a simple app that lets you get in a quick, high-intensity workout wherever you might be. Its bodyweight only routines don't require any equipment, so it's ideal for frequent travelers, and with hundreds to choose from, they won't get stale. You can also compare your reps and time to prior workouts, save your favorites for later, and quickly share your progress with others.

Elk

Keeping track of how much things really cost can be difficult when you're dealing with a different currency. Elk makes it simple. Using your location, it automatically selects the correct currency, then displays a table of common values and their USD equivalents. On the Watch, it lets you use the digital crown to get a conversion for a specific amount quickly. It's also free to download, with a one-time Pro upgrade available after two weeks.

Forest

Smartphones are amazing machines. They're also horribly distracting. Forest is a new app that, somewhat contradictorily, helps you stay focused on the world around you. When you need to get your attention off your phone and onto your surroundings, open the app and plant a tree. The tree will grow over a set period, and if you try to leave the app while it's growing, the tree dies. Over time, you're able to cultivate an entire forest, and the app also gives you detailed stats, giving you greater insight into just how much time you are (or aren't) spending on your pocketable slab of glass and metal.

Minibar Delivery

Shopping at your local liquor store is becoming a much tougher task. You not only have to get there but figuring out what you want in a sea of choices with no chance to research leads to exhaustion. Minibar Delivery on the other hand, allows you to order that bottle of wine or spirits from the comfort of your home, or even on-the-go thanks to their app. They provide deliveries straight to your door in as little as 30-60 minutes, and you can even schedule your order in advance or set it to be recurring, so your favorite brand is always available. Minibar Delivery is available in most major cities, and there aren't any hidden fees or markups to your selections.

Presented by Minibar Delivery.

Sway

Mindfulness and meditation techniques are a proven way to improve your mental wellbeing and ability to concentrate. Many of those require solitude. Sway was developed in collaboration with Danish mental wellness company PauseAble to let you practice "interactive meditation" in a variety of environments. Using a combination of soothing visuals, peaceful music, on-screen instructions, and audio cues, it encourages you to focus on slow, continuous body movements to help you focus and relax. There are multiple "levels" to work through, ensuring that the experience doesn't get stale as you progress, and since it's designed to work with headphones, you can use it anywhere you have enough room to move.

Privacy

Security breaches happen despite the best efforts of even the biggest merchants. Keep yourself protected with Privacy. This smart app creates a new custom Visa card for every online store you frequent and locks the card to that merchant — so you're protected even if they're hacked. You can also set spending limits on each card, close any card with a single swipe, and even setup single-use cards that are perfect for free trials.

Rumuki

Making private videos with your lover isn't unusual. Nor is it unusual for your phone to be the most convenient recording device around. Rumuki is a brilliant app that removes all kinds of potential concerns and lets you get down to having fun. First of all, you need to pair it with a copy of the app running on your partner's phone. Record away. When it's time to play it back, you both have to agree to it, and should one party delete their key, it's gone forever. So whether you're worried about being hacked or an ex posting your private bits online, you're covered.

Hater

Most dating apps look for things you and potential mates both like. Hater is a new dating app that takes the opposite approach, basing your raw matches on lists of things you both hate, from important topics like politics to simple annoyances like social etiquette and fashion. Like Tinder, you'll still get to anonymously swipe left or right on potential matches, but unlike Tinder, you'll have a built-in list of things to bitch about together if/when you finally meet face-to-face.

Attenborough Story of Life

Sir David Attenborough has spent decades of his life putting animals and other natural phenomena to film. Attenborough Story of Life is a new app that lets you peruse his work on a subject-by-subject basis. Included in the app are segments from such esteemed shows as Planet Earth, Blue Planet, and Life, covering everything from the tiniest insects to the largest creatures on Earth. A perfect warmup before Planet Earth II comes to the States.

Darkr

This isn't your normal filter app. The hint's right there in the icon. Instead, Darkr tries to recreate the process of using a real-life darkroom to develop your photos. For starters, your camera roll appears as a bin of negatives. Select one, and it gives you a digital test strip to find the correct look, then takes you into an editor where you can crop, rotate, dodge, burn, blur, and tone the image. It has several built-in camera modes, including one that mimics a large-format camera, and as you might expect with a past-obsessed app, it only produces results in black and white.

Firefox Focus

Your phone's browser most likely has a "private" mode built in, but a lot of times it doesn't do enough to completely protect your privacy. That's where Firefox Focus comes in. Backed by Mozilla, it automatically blocks a wide range of tracking tools, keeping you from being followed by advertisers and potentially unsavory suspects. It makes it extremely easy to erase your history, passwords, and cookies, and since many of the trackers it blocks are advertising-related, it might just speed up your browsing experience while cutting your data usage.

PhotoScan

If you're over the age of, say, 20, odds are you have some old analog photo prints laying around. Instead of buying a scanner to digitize them, use the highly capable camera in your phone and the PhotoScan app from Google. It uses specialized algorithms to detect edges, correct perspective, rotate as needed, and stitch multiple exposures together to get rid of glare. It also integrates seamlessly with Google Photos, and as with nearly all software from Mountain View, it's completely free.

Grammar Snob

Like it or not, iMessage stickers are here to stay. Instead of bombarding your friends with animated characters that make their messages illegible, annoy them by fixing up their poorly-written texts with Grammar Snob. This smart sticker pack gives you a host of handwritten, red-inked annotations to let your friends and family know when they've made a typo or missed a common spelling, instantly sending them back to grade school in the most 21st century way possible.

One Night

Some people are hardcore planners, scheduling every trip down to the minute. The rest of us enjoy a bit of spontaneity, which often means finding a place to stay on short notice. One:Night is perfect for such outings. Built by The Standard, this new app gives you a choice of carefully-curated hotels offering single night stays in New York and LA beginning at 3:00 pm, with a selection that changes daily and rates that are guaranteed to be the lowest available. And since a place to sleep is only part of the equation, it also offers up suggested timelines that will help you enjoy both your accommodations and the surrounding neighborhood to the fullest.

Pablo

Light painting is nothing new, but until now it took a lot of planning to do it with your iPhone. Pablo makes it easy. Likely named after Picasso, who did a whole series of light paintings, this app lets you capture both still photos and brief HD videos using nothing but your phone, a light, and, perhaps, a tripod. Most notably, it uses patent-pending tech to let you see the painting as it comes together, and has a built-in community to let you share your works and find new inspiration in the snaps of others.

Super Mario Run

After years of anticipation, everyone's favorite plumber is finally coming to the iPhone. Just not how you'd expect. Super Mario Run mixes endless runner gameplay with elements of traditional platformers, and offers three different game modes: traditional, battle, where you challenge a friend's best score, and a third where you create your own "kingdom" using coins you gain in the other modes. Unlike past Mario adventures, it's playable one-handed, and judging by the screenshots — it doesn't launch until later this year — it might be the best-looking Mario ever made.

Fender Tune

It's not the first guitar tuning app. It's just the first from a company that actually makes guitars. Fender Tune is designed to let everyone from the beginner to the touring musician get the most of their guitar. It uses the company's proven DSP technology to ensure tuning accuracy, and adaptive feedback to help you along. There's also a section of tone tips that can help you get your amp and guitar sounding their best, a section of tips for beginners, and a variety of pre-set tuning options, with the ability to save your own custom tunings and upload them to Fender Connect for access across all your devices.

Pantone Studio

A must-have tool for designers since its first set of fan decks hit the market. Now you can enjoy all the color management and organization of the traditional set in a digital environment with Pantone Studio. This new app gives you access to their complete library of over 10,000 colors, with the ability to use your own photos to create and customizes palettes and mood boards. The app is free for basic use, while professionals can sign up for full acces for $8/mo or $60/year.

Google Arts & Culture

Art inspires. It teaches. It enriches our lives. Now you can explore a vast collection of works without a trip to the museum with a download of Google Arts & Culture. Created using artworks, artifacts, and essays from over 1,000 museums and archives, this sleek app showcases a different work and its history every day, lets you zoom in to see the brushstrokes of your favorite artists, gives you VR tours of culturally important locations, and can even provide design inspiration by letting you filter by color.

Soon

We all have things we want to do, places we want to go, movies we want to watch, books we want to read. Keeping track of all those things can be a chore. Soon makes it easy. This slick app lets you keep tabs on all sorts of things you plan on doing, and brings in content like photos, posters, previews, and more automatically to remind you why you wanted to do it in the first place. Even better, it's social, so you can organize trips with your friends, or, if you're just bored and looking for something to do, see what they've got planned.

Gboard

We've all done it — left the conversation we were in to switch apps and do a Google search. Gboard lets you do the same thing right from your keyboard. Addresses, flight info, maps, images, and more all appear right below where you're typing, ready to share with a single tap. It also handles typical replacement keyboard duties like glide typing and emojis with ease, and, yes, it has a dedicated GIF section, too. Surprisingly iPhone-only.