From coding to exploring our world, it’s never too late to discover new things – and your iPhone can help. Through Safari alone, your device can be a gateway to a wealth of human knowledge that once would have required countless libraries to house it. However, just having access to information isn’t always enough to encourage people to learn.
This is where great apps for learning come in. We’ve trawled the App Store for those that hit a sweet spot, in being affordable, structured, engaging, entertaining, and mobile-oriented. Whether you’re settling down for a quiet evening, or are traveling home on a bus or train, these apps can help you fill time by filling up your brain with new ideas, facts and knowledge.
Duolingo (from free)
Learn a new language on your iPhone
We’ve spent a lot of time with Duolingo. And although we reckon you need to be immersed in a place to truly learn the language of its people, this app is the next best thing, giving you a friendly and often fun entry point to a wide range of languages.
Lessons vary from prodding pictures that represent words to writing out full sentences. Over time, you’ll gradually burn grammar and vocabulary into your brain. And should you enjoy a social aspect to language-learning, you can team up with friends, build streaks, and take on league tables, all of which reward daily Duolingo sessions.
Encode (from free)
Learn how to code using your iPhone
Being able to speak to other humans is all well and good, but many people believe the most important languages to learn are those that enable you to communicate with computers.
Encode is at the gentler end of the scale, concentrating on tech that forms the building blocks of web pages. By way of approachable, bite-sized exercises, you learn about HTML (the mark-up language that structures the web), CSS (used for styling web page elements), and JavaScript (a scripting language for adding advanced functionality to web pages).
This is a good starting point for anyone with an interest in taking things further. The JavaScript exercises, for example, examine the fundamentals of programming, such as variables, booleans, functions and objects. And if you’re still not sure, you can get started for free, before unlocking further lessons via IAP.
Yousician (from free)
Use your iPhone to learn guitar and piano
These days, you’re as likely to see someone wrestling with a tiny plastic guitar communicating with a games console as an actual instrument. The cunning plan someone at Yousician hit on was to turn learning the real thing into a game.
Hence, install Yousician and your iPhone transforms into something akin to Guitar Hero. The app teaches you notes and chords, represented on screen by colored lozenges in a scrolling 2D landscape. Time your actions well enough and you can try tackling riffs and, eventually, full songs.
If you prefer tinkling ivories rather than strumming strings, pianos are also catered for (through you plugging a USB keyboard into your iPhone). Either way, this is a clever, playful way to learn an instrument.
(Note: Yousician is a free app, but limits playtime per day. An IAP subscription is required for unlimited time.)
Kitchen Stories (free)
Learn how to cook using your iPhone
It says a lot about Kitchen Stories that the very first thing it once showed us on opening the app was: ‘The secret to a perfectly poached egg’. So although this app does house all kinds of recipes for scrumptious meals and desserts, it doesn’t avoid the basics, and nor does it make too many assumptions about your ability.
On that basis, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest it could help you learn to cook. To illustrate this, an included recipe for roast pork with sauerkraut and potatoes would in other apps be a list of steps and perhaps a photo of the final deal. But in Kitchen Stories, you get a list of required utensils, a guide with a photo, ingredients list and oven instructions for every step, and relevant video tutorials to watch, including ‘how to cut up an onion’. Tasty!
Vocabulary Builder by Atlas (from free)
Expand your vocabulary using your iPhone
The first thing this app does is assess your English proficiency with a two-minute quiz. Then you’re hurled headlong into a world of daily vocabulary building. In Learn, you work through increasingly tricky quizzes. If you find something interesting, it can be stashed in Journal.
If all that feels too much like hard work, stick to opening the app every day to check out the Today tab. You’ll get a word of the day with a related link to demonstrate its use in context. The Premium version gives you a deeper feature set. But even for free, this app is a great way to – ahem – augment the profundity of your lexicon.
Download Vocabulary Builder by Atlas
Seterra Geography (free)
Use your iPhone to learn about maps and flags
Start a quiz and this no-nonsense geography app will quickly hand your ego back to you as you attempt to locate countries on a world or regional map. Tap the right place and you move on. Tap wrong and you get a few tries before the app impatiently marks the position in red.
It’s much the same story for flags, and in both cases you can keep challenging your high scores or create custom quizzes to test specific items. Best of all, it’s free and ad-free. So now you’ve no excuse not to know where Togo is or what Pennsylvania’s state flag looks like.
The Elements ($9.99/£9.99)
Learn about life’s building blocks on your iPhone
Something of an App Store darling on its original release for iPad, The Elements also works surprisingly well on the iPhone. It’s effectively an interactive book about the building blocks of life. You can explore the periodic table, delving into the facts and figures of any given element.
But what sets The Elements apart from a paper tome is its photography. Every element is presented on-screen as a sample you can rotate and zoom. If you’ve got some 3D glasses, there’s even an option to split an object into 3D images, which can still be freely manipulated – a kind of virtual reality beyond almost everyone a mere decade ago, but that’s now in the palm of your hand.
Solar Walk 2 ($2.99/£2.99)
This app’s halfway between a digital orrery and a simulation of the solar system squashed into your iPhone. Either way, it provides a visually dazzling and user-friendly way to zip about the planets, or just sit back and watch them orbit the Sun.
When you want to find out more about any particular planetary body, tap on it to open up a selection of facts. There are graphs aplenty, and a neat bit where you crack open the planet to peek at what’s inside. If you’re after words rather than visuals, that’s also catered for by way of Solar Walk’s own miniature space encyclopedia, and embedded Wikipedia articles.
Sky Guide (from free)
Use your iPhone to learn about the stars
Logically, once you’ve happily gorged on learning about Mercury, Jupiter and beyond, you can next set your eyes on the stars. Sky Guide is a swish astronomy app for iPhone, marrying a gorgeous, tasteful, minimal interface with plenty of information for anyone wanting to back the majesty of the heavens with hard facts.
You can navigate Sky Guide by dragging the screen to adjust the viewpoint or by holding the device to the sky, so it matches whatever you’re seeing. Stars, constellations and satellites each have their own information pages you can delve into; and should you want to, you can speed up time, to watch the virtual heavens whirling around on your iPhone’s screen.
WWF Together (free)
Use your iPhone to learn about endangered wildlife
Back down to Earth now, with an app determined to help people understand more about endangered species. Each of the stories is presented as a playful, interactive combination of often unusual facts, gorgeous photography, and amusing games.
When learning about the Monarch Butterfly, you can manically tap the screen, trying in vain to match how quickly it beats its wings. Think you can outrun a jaguar? The app will track your own running speed and give you the bad news.
It’s a disarmingly beautiful app, although bittersweet when you realize many of these creatures may not survive for much longer. Still, if technology can help spread awareness and result in more people demanding change, we’re all for that.