Put your iPad to good use with apps for journaling, discovering art and much more.
Your iPad should make every day easier. Whether you want to build new habits or improve your routines, we've rounded up apps that put the best iPads to work in your daily life.
We found these by digging a bit deeper. These aren't first-party Apple apps or subscription-only Adobe staples. It's free to get started with each, though most charge for extra features, which we've noted where applicable.
Our favorite apps are elegant and well-designed, taking advantage of the entire iPad display. They also keep AI to a bare minimum. There may be machine learning to help with search and transcriptions, but you won't find fake images or bogus text generators here.
If you're a voracious consumer of media, you need Sofa to help keep track of it all. Start with books, TV shows and movies, then add whatever other categories you'd like. Sofa has a clean interface that grabs title images and info to give you an overview of everything you watch (or read).
Sofa's tracking feature is especially useful for remembering which episodes you've seen. Mark them off as you watch them and add notes if you like, or rely on the included summaries. Sofa tracks two different series at once for free, while paid subscribers can track unlimited titles.
Sofa's free tier offers all its best features without advertisements or pop-ups begging for more. If you want to fine-tune your media tracking with custom ratings that you create and smart lists that populate based on your filters, Sofa offers a subscription for $5.99 per month, $49.99 per year or $249.99 for a lifetime membership. Unless you're a professional TV critic, you'll likely be fine with the free features.
Instead of Apple Notes or Google Keep, try Bear, an app for capturing thoughts. Bear has become a productivity favorite by keeping its interface deceptively simple; it's a large notepad app without a glut of buttons and menus. While it's powerful, you don't have to use advanced features you don't need.
Bear is built around smooth Markdown styling and supports tags to organize your thoughts. For example, if you find yourself often complaining about your job, tag that post with #job. You can add links, tags or even to-do tasks that are easily searchable. If that sounds complicated, ignore what you don't need and you're left with an elegant, attractive note-taking and journaling app.
Bear has a reasonably-priced subscription tier ($3/month or $30/year) that offers a few extra features if you're hardcore about your notes. With it, you can sync your Bear notes between devices, as well as publish your notes using HTML or ePub to use the app as a blogging tool.
After a few minutes with Flipboard, you'll wonder why it isn't preloaded on every iPad. This decentralized social experience transforms the touchscreen into a magazine with a clean layout and large images. If you read a lot of news, Flipboard is the best way to stay current.
The app starts by having you select from an endless list of topics to find stories. These can start as general as sports, music or science. Or by dialing down, you might find "UEFA Champions League," "blues music" or "sustainable design."
If any sources arise that you don't want to see, block them. In general, the selection is great; you can follow individual authors and sites the same way you follow topics.
The best part about Flipboard is that it's totally free: it doesn't make you cough up a fee for the best content, and you can sometimes find stories that are normally trapped behind a paywall.
HappySpoon is an (artificially) intelligent meal planner that helps you create a menu for the week ahead following whatever ideas or guidelines you set. The app uses AI to understand plain-language requests that you make, like "I need to use up all my chicken breast, so make a bunch of different chicken recipes." Once you've created your menu, it even generates a handy shopping list sorted by grocery store aisle.
I asked the app to generate "breakfasts that are simple and on-repeat, like a big batch of muffins or oatmeal to eat every day" and it did exactly that. It also understood the rule "no lunches" and left that spot blank on my weekly menu.
HappySpoon automatically resizes your portions and recipes to match your eaters. You can specify adult-sized or kid-sized appetites, and it will conform: the grocery list populates with the right amounts.
You don't need to use HappySpoon's AI features; in fact, they're only free for two weeks. That's enough time to get started and use the AI for help generating a variety of menus. There are plenty of other AI tools that can create recipes, but if you want to stick with HappySpoon, the fee is $5.99 per month or $49.99 per year. I found the AI tools useful at first, but after a couple of weeks, the extra AI benefits didn't seem necessary.
Whatever you need to organize, MindNode is a perfect starting point. Whether it's a meeting agenda, a workout plan or your life's goals, MindNode offers a simple canvas to connect and organize thoughts. You'll find features to enhance, stylize and reorganize your finished maps.
Start with the big idea in the center and then branch out. A map can grow large the more you dig in, but MindNode makes it easy to keep your idea maps looking neat. You also have the option to view your maps as a text outline instead.
If this sort of mental organization appeals to you, the premium subscription may offer enough bonus features to make it worth the asking $2.99 per month or $24.99 per year. With the subscription, you get more editing tools, the ability to add photos and emoji to your nodes and some professional-strength features for teams working together.
It also unlocks real-time collaboration with others so you see edits and additions as they happen. You can set each node as a task with a reminder and checklist. And Apple Intelligence will enhance the experience by offering new ideas, summarizing what it sees and similar. The AI extras aren't necessary, but are available with the premium plan.
Journey is a place to store your memories, including journal entries, calendar appointments , major dates, photos, multimedia and maps of the places you've been. The more you use Journey, the more it rewards your dedication, with features that track your habits later on.
The available templates are Journey's secret weapon. If you're planning a trip, for example, the travel planner template includes fields for details like your hotel address, flight information, car rental details and even a budget planner that tracks your anticipated versus actual spending.
Templates include tons of other categories, from personal goal trackers to a 30-60-90 day plan for starting a new career. Once you've built a journaling habit, you're able to track your progress through Journey's graphs and statistics. If you tag each journal entry with a mood, you'll see how your feelings ebbed and flowed throughout your journaling experience.
By paying $6.99 per month or $49.99 per year (or $199 for the app's lifetime), you get premium features that could be helpful if you share a journal with someone else. There's also a premium AI feature included, though thankfully it doesn't offer to write journal entries for you. Instead, you can ask "how many entries did I write last month?" or tell it to "summarize my summer vacation from 2026."
Libby is your local library in app form, which should be enough to earn an immediate download. Did you know you can borrow ebooks from your library? Just register your library card with Libby — go get one if you don't have one! — and you're ready to download the glut of digital content you might not have even known your library offered.
Libby handles the borrowing and serves you the book in its own ereader interface, or you can put titles on your Kindle. Libraries have limited copies even for ebook titles, and Libby lets you join a waiting list for the latest best-seller if you can't grab it right away.
