Vinegar. It’s a safari extension that changes the YT player into the stock iPhone one and skips ads. Well worth the one time purchase!

Seek by iNaturalist

The app uses AI to identify the species of plants, animals, insects and fungi. In video mode you scan around something you want to ID as the AI narrows it down to the species. Then you can take a pic. The app keeps track of each unique species you’ve found (along with your photo of it). There’s also badges and achievements for identifying different numbers of species, if you want to gamify your nature sightseeing.

It’s basically real life Pokémon. Oh and it’s completely free.

Paprika. It downloads saves and organizes recipes from just about any website, bypassing annoying ad floaters and, magically, paywalls. I use it constantly. It’s a one time purchase for all your devices. Does shopping lists too, if that’s your thing.

As a student of life I have to mention Anki. At its core it’s a flashcard app out of the box but it’s almost infinitely more powerful than that if you dig deep.

I paid 35 CAD for it in 2019 and I’ve used it every single day since. The amount of knowledge I’ve committed to memory is truly priceless, and I’ve even gifted this app to several friends.

NB: AnkiMobile, not the free knockoff AnkiApp. It’s open-source and actually free for computers and android devices, and iOS/iPadOS app purchases are the only way the developer makes money.

The original Angry Birds still holds up perfectly imo

AnyList.

My wife and I have subscribed for years now because it literally never fails to sync and is easy to use. We have a ton of lists including grocery, hardware, trips, camping, and so on. It’s also our meal planner and recipe library.

Kiwix: Download Wikipedia for offline reading.

As someone who watches a fairly wide variety of tv shows, “next episode” has been the most useful app on my phone for me. It helps so much for knowing what to subscribe to and when. Only sub when my favorite shows come out and catch up on the rest then. I’ve also discovered some new shows through their upcoming and trending lists (which is more of just a bonus and not why I got the app to begin with). It’s probably the only app I would give my full recommendation for anyway.

VoiceDream and SpeechCentral are amazing text to speech apps that turn your documents (PDF, txt, ePub, Mobi, AZW3 into audiobooks that let you read by highlighting and adjusting the speed etc.

I don't know if VoiceDream can still be bought on iOS but I know SpeechCentral is almost as good and it can be bought one-time.

Glazba. It's a music player that allows for playing files in various formats, including FLAC. Song files can be uploaded to the phone through the app via web browser over Wi-Fi, or it can play music files stored on any of several cloud-storage services. Considering that I've ripped my entire 1000+ CD collection to FLAC, and considering that my collection contains a number of albums not available through streaming services, this app has been quite useful.

YNAB - it’s subscription based but is the best budgeting app I’ve found. Keeps me honest with my money, and when I was married was amazing for keeping us synced on our shared spending budgets.

Memmy

This community might be a better place for this question.

https://lemmy.world/c/apple_enthusiast

Dice by PCalc - For when you need to roll some dice

Blackbox - It got some hype when it released but if anyone still hasn’t tried it, it is highly recommended. You will need to learn everything your iPhone can do and think outside the box to solve these puzzles.

I’ve got three.

1. For those that like reading articles the built in news app is actually quite good and even has daily crosswords with more puzzles to follow. I used up the free trial and went to paid because I liked the app so much.

2. Less of an unknown, but if you like OSRS the mobile app is actually pretty great and since OSRS could run on a potato it doesn’t lag at all.

3. For people wanting to learn Asian languages the hello apps are really good. I’ve been using HelloChinese for awhile now and it’s built and populated with native speakers. Duolingo is weird with its syntax for Asian languages so this one is much better imo.