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The best free iPhone apps of 2020

Jarvis

January 31, 2020

You’ve got an iPhone, and have ventured into the melee of Apple’s App Store, which has well over a million apps.

Great news! Many of them are free. Not so great news! You’ve got to sift through them to work out the very best. Fortunately, that’s what we’re here for, listing them here.

Our selection’s sorted into handy categories, so whether you need a no-cost photo editor, translation app, sat-nav or anything else, you can just jump straight to the relevant category.

Click through to the following pages for each category, but first check out our free iPhone app of the last two weeks below, and make sure you give this page a cheeky bookmark so you can keep up with our latest free iPhone app pick every fourteen days.

Free iPhone app of the week: Documents by Readdle

Documents by Readdle gives you an alternative to Apple’s Files on your iPhone. With its new Plus button, you can quickly import documents from a range of networked and cloud services, and subsequently manage them within the app. Many formats can be previewed, and ZIP archives can be created and sent elsewhere. There’s a built-in browser as well, which has standard and private tabs, and proves effective and responsive in operation.

With the improvements that came to Apple’s Files app in iOS 12 and iOS 13, Documents is perhaps now less essential, but we reckon it’s still handy. Many actions within the app are faster and more user-friendly than in Apple’s, and it offers secure file storage and browsing if you otherwise want to keep Files and Safari unlocked. Given the lack of a price tag, it’s well worth checking out, in case you might find it useful too.

The best free iPhone video editors and animation apps

These are our favorite free iPhone apps for quickly editing videos, GIFs and Live Photos, and for creating stop-motion animation.

Plays: animation design kit

Plays claims it can “elevate your self-expression” and “make your content beautiful”. In reality, it’s a free iPhone app that lets you type in a tiny missive (140 characters or fewer, like old-school Twitter), and then hurl the letters about the place.

This isn’t freeform animation – you don’t need to know anything about keyframes and paths. Instead, you select a font, an animation style, a background pattern (which also animates), and an image to sit underneath everything. By default, you get an Instagram-friendly square composition, but a button lets you cycle through a range of alternatives.

Quite a few of the animation styles result in questionable legibility. But work with some of the subtler options – and the rather nice backgrounds – and you can end up with a visually arresting video to share online.