Apps rush: essential downloadables

Yogify

Yogify is a mobile yoga app aimed at beginners and veterans alike, with more than 50 classes and 275 yoga poses to practise. Photos, audio instructions and social features aim to get you bending and stretching just so, with the classes sold as in-app purchases. The publisher may be a surprise too: games firm EA.iPhone

Snoop Lion’s Reincarnated: Track Notes App

This is an advance promotion for the new album from Snoop Lion (formerly Dogg). Aiming to offer the tablet equivalent of liner notes for vinyl albums, it offers songs, videos and notes on Snoop’s inspiration for his career pivot into reggae.iPad

Solitaire Blitz

PopCap Games now a subsidiary of yoga giant EA had big hits with Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled Blitz on the App Store. Solitaire Blitz is cut from the same cloth as the latter, boiling the familiar card game down into 60-second rounds, with Facebook connectivity enabling players to challenge friends. In-app purchases push the action along if desired.iPhone / iPad

The Very Hungry Caterpillar Friends Stickerbook (0.69)

If you missed this week’s annual Very Hungry Caterpillar Day (yes, it’s a real thing) this app may be a good way to belatedly celebrate. Based on Eric Carle’s famous children’s book, it presents kids with five scenes to decorate with 57 digital stickers of characters and items from the book as well as other Carle titles full of creepy-crawlies.iPhone / iPad

Couch Music Player (1.49)

If you’re using your iPad lots to play songs from your iTunes collection, Couch Music Player is well worth a look as an alternative to Apple’s default Music app. Designed for sofa usage, it helps you swipe songs into queues and slider-bar your way through tracks. Good for solo use and house parties alike.iPad

Indiana Stone: The Brave and the Boulder (1.99)

As concepts go, this one’s rather marvellous: an endless runner game starring a pixelly Indiana Jones clone but where you play as the boulder rolling after him. Or, as developer TwinSky puts it, a “roll reversal”. Ouch. But yes, the game’s retro graphics, “metric ton of unlockables” and four modes should provide plenty of fun.iPhone / iPad

Monster World

Monster World may just be the most well-known game in this roundup: publisher Wooga says 50m people are already playing it on Facebook. This is a completely separate game though the two don’t synchronise but the gameplay is similar. Your job is to grow a garden, complete quests and visit friends, with in-app purchases available to speed things up.iPhone / iPad

Nitro

Free-to-play driving games are big business judging by CSR Racing and Real Racing 3, even if they can also be controversial. Nitro is the latest at the starting line, offering a familiar blend of street-racing and car customisation, including real-time multiplayer racing and yes indeed in-app purchases for keener petrolheads.iPhone / iPad

Glide Instant Video Messaging

There are quite a few startups betting on video messaging being the next big breakout category on the App Store. Glide is the latest with its app that aims to combine “the personality of video chat with the convenience of texting”. The idea being to ping videos to friends, and chat live if they’re online and available. Facebook provides the social connectivity.iPhone

Order Chaos Duels (Free)

Gameloft’s Order Chaos games have found a wide fanbase on iOS and Android alike. Now the company has used its fantasy franchise to leap on board the card-battler bandwagon. This game involves collecting more than 250 cards, sorting them into decks and then fighting other people online. The publisher promises “Accessible gameplay. Deep strategy”. Hopefully it’ll nail both many mobile card battlers, although popular, aren’t as accessible as they might be.iPhone / iPad

Hang w/

More social video, but this is entirely live, and broadcast “from one phone to many, from anywhere at anytime”. The idea being that you follow other people (in the app, not in real life, please) and then get notified when they’re broadcasting live. The App Store listing hints that celebrities, athletes and musicians could use it to broadcast to fans in the future, too.iPhone

AudioBoo 2

Sound platform AudioBoo has been around for a long time now, but it has a brand new iPhone app replacing the previous one rather than simply updating it for browsing and listening to other people’s “Boos”, and recording your own.iPhone

Pixies - Fun With Photos

For many people, the be-all and end-all of having “fun with photos” is Instagram. Still, for those looking for a new photo-editing fix, Pixies may be worth a look. It’s a way to quickly slap text and digital stickers onto your photos then share them to social networks or turn them into physical products (t-shirts, mugs, mousemats etc via a partnership with Zazzle.iPhone

The Trip Little Critter Reading Adventure (2.49)

I get the sense book character Little Critter may be better known in North America than on this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps his appearance in several apps including this new one will boost his fame. It’s a “reading adventure”, which means a mixture of storytelling and puzzles based on letters, numbers, shapes and colours.iPhone / iPad

Drawma: Celeb Gossip Doodle

More photo-editing with this app, which could be subtitled “Do to photos of famous people what Perez Hilton does”. Scribble on them, in other words. It pulls in photos, videos and articles from more than 20 gossip websites, and lets you doodle on the pics before sharing them with friends. iPhone

The Jump: Escape The City

If 3D racing games are your bag, The Jump may be the latest to flex your fingers. One nice touch: it’s designed around “bitesize” play as you try to escape a series of challenges in five minutes or less. There’s also music from DJ Poet a Grammy award-winner, no less.iPhone / iPad

Mrs. Potato Head Create Play (Free)

This new app from Callaway Digital Arts follows a similar Mr. Potato Head app earlier in the year. The idea is the same: create and tweak the chippy character with more than 200 parts, capture snapshots of her and assuming you’re happy to pay to remove the ads or get extra playsets.iPhone / iPad

Doodle Learning Times Table

Another children’s app, this time with a pure educational focus. This is all about multiplication, as children match questions with answers, and create their own scenes with digital stickers as a reward.iPad

Mini Golf MatchUp

This social mini-golf game shot past 1m downloads in its first day of release. It sees you playing 70 holes over five courses, negotiating dinosaurs, pyramids and sharks along the way, while challenging Facebook friends and bragging on Twitter.iPhone / iPad

Guardian News and Media 2013