Apple gets more than 1,000 app submissions an hour, making it harder than ever to find something worth your time. The rise of AI-assisted “vibe coding” has only added to the flood, and it’s very much a double-edged sword: while it’s lowered the barrier to entry for people with fresh ideas and the chops to see them through, it’s also buried the App Store in low-effort slop you have to wade through to find the good stuff. So each month I go digging for the gems buried in that slop – under-the-radar apps that haven’t had the attention they deserve yet.
The apps that make this list usually have something in common – they’re built with love, often to scratch an itch the dev is uniquely obsessed with, and they fill the weird niches bigger studios would never attempt. Since last month’s showcase I’ve had over 50 new submissions, so I’m expanding the format from 6 apps to 10. Two lucky winners get a full write-up here on TapSmart and bragging rights among their peers. Congrats to everyone featured, and apologies to those who missed out this time.
Remember that every app here was built by a real person, often in their spare time, and I deliberately hunted for apps with only a handful of reviews. So if something catches your eye, show them some love with a rating or a review on the App Store.
Winners
RAD Weather (free or $2/£2 monthly) looks at first glance like a retro coat of paint on an overcrowded app category. But the deeper I dug, the more it won me over – it covers pretty much every weather data point I could think of, and it’s packed with charm, personality, easter eggs, and features I haven’t seen anywhere else. Most of all, it’s clearly built with “fun” as a core tenet. The app pulls from several forecast models, cross-checks them against historical data, and serves up the result with a “brutality” slider for how much snark you want with your forecast. Read the full review.
COPY (free, $2/£2 each for extra skins) turns your iPhone into a vintage walkie-talkie, complete with themed skins that change the entire look and feel of the app – tactile dials, chunky buttons, and satisfying beeps included. I’m a sucker for skeuomorphism, and it’s nice to see it making something of a comeback lately in the wake of cookie-cutter beige UI becoming the norm. Under its pretty facade isn’t anything much more complex than the voice notes built into Messages, but the theatre of it is the whole point, and the design work is excellent. Read the full review.
Runners-up
DrivePulse (free trial, then $4/£4) started when Volkswagen dropped support for We Connect, the app that shipped with the dev’s car, and took his data with it. “I took it personally, and spent a year writing my own,” he told me, which involved a year of meticulously testing the cars of everyone he knew. The result is a mileage tracker and more that works with any make and model, automatically logging drive data, and optionally pulling real diagnostics straight from the car itself with the help of a $15 dongle.
Binge (free) arrived in the wake of the shutdown of TV Time earlier this year. Binge is one dev’s attempt to rehome the digital nomads now stranded without years of watch history – or bring in new users interested in tracking their TV consumption for the first time. It’s beautifully designed and incorporates tracking, lists, rankings, stats, and more. It will accurately migrate data from TV Time or Netflix history, and amazingly the whole thing is entirely free thanks to the benevolence of its solo dev. Take note, big studios.
ArtDeck ($6/£6) takes the humble mood board and adds the kind of tools designers and artists reach for every day – color, composition, and proportion analysis, plus frame-by-frame video and GIF study. Alex built it to replace his own five-app reference workflow with a single dashboard, and you can really tell each addition was borne from a real-life need.
Groove Number ($2/£2) is a niche idea only a music-nerd-turned-indie-dev would ship: point it at any track and it hands back a single number for how much “swing” it’s got. Previously I relied on my gut for this kind of this, but it’s interesting to see it quantified this way. Groove Number’s dev told me this project was about flexing his creative freedom after years of working for big tech.
Quartz (free… for now!) turns your iPhone into a pocket recording studio, and it shows real industry polish for a solo project – one-tap EQ, neural noise reduction, and fully non-destructive editing that undoes any effect after the fact. This is a serious step up from Voice Memos without the heft of a “bigger” audio workstation. At the time of writing it’s 100% free – the dev says a paid version will come later once he’s established some core users.
Another Page (free or $5/£5 monthly for Premium) mashes together two categories I’ve never seen combined: an e-reader and an app blocker. Open a distracting app and it makes you read a few pages of a book first before letting you through. You can load up literary classics for free, or import your own ebook files from elsewhere. I’ve used plenty of app blockers before, but this is a fresh twist that could turn your worst habit into a positive one.
Dobudex (free or $3/£3 unlock) is the wildlife version of Pokémon Go I’ve wondered about for years – scan a real-life animal and it becomes a card for your collection. You’ll try to log as many species as possible, while each capture turns your photo into a unique pixel-art card of that specific animal. I have reservations about such heavy reliance on generative art, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of the core concept.
Unbothered (free or $3/£3 monthly) is a deadpan antidote to “rise and grind” culture, serving up one blunt reality-check card a day in place of a motivational quote. Those po-faced inspirational posts are endlessly annoying, and although the joke may wear thin after a while, I totally get the appeal of an app built entirely to lampoon them.
More to come
This list is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to interesting indie apps, and I’ll continue to champion small creators in next month’s showcase. In the meantime if you’ve built something you’d like to share, feel free to email it over.