The week is over and that means that a fresh app overview is waiting for you. As far as we are concerned, you should not miss these new apps, games and updates to existing apps. You can find the best iOS apps from week 8 here.
The best iOS apps from week 8 at a glance
The App Store works overtime every week to handle the never-ending stream of new apps and updates. You don’t notice that much, however, because only a fraction of it is worth installing. If your iPhone can use some new apps, you’ve come to the right place.
WhatsApp Status is WhatsApp’s answer to Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The idea is that you can decorate videos, photos or gifs and post them as status. These images will then remain available to your contacts for 24 hours. You can indicate whether you want all your contacts to see the images, or whether you want to exclude certain people from it. Just like your chat messages, these status updates are encrypted end-to-end.
For 9.99 per month you can now take out a membership on Kobo Plus. This gives you access to forty thousand e-books, of which you can read as many as you want. Please note: of the forty thousand books, sixteen thousand are Dutch. In the coming months, the supply will increase, so that the counter will hopefully be eighty thousand digital books by the end of the year. Although Kobo is a popular e-reader brand, you can also read the range of this book service on your iPhone and iPad.
One of the finest podcast apps for iOS has been updated. Especially the design of Overcast has undergone the necessary changes in the third version. The player of the app, the screen you see when you listen to a podcast, is now shown as a map. You slide this from bottom to top and vice versa, with which it will lie over the background. The window no longer fills the entire screen, but looks like the playback screen in Apple Music.
“Kamergotchi, a game for the concerned voter”, is how Zondag met Lubach’s app describes itself. It is no coincidence that the name is very similar to Tamagotchi. In the simple game you are assigned a politician, who you must then take care of. That’s how we got Kees van der Staaij from the SGP who burst out of an egg. A bar at the bottom of the screen that runs from red to green shows how satisfied the politician is with you. You can increase this percentage by giving your Kamergotchi food, attention or knowledge.
Google’s Gboard keyboard for iOS finally supports the Dutch language. Via the Gboard app you can adjust the design of the keyboard. There is a white and black design, but you can also manually adjust the appearance by, for example, choosing a photo as the background. There are several examples of keyboard wallpapers in the Gboard app that you can start using right away. By holding your finger on the screen and swiping the letters, Gboard automatically composes the correct words.
In Nightgate, the free App of the Week, you solve fifty clever puzzles, presented with a minimalist sci-fi style and music to match. At the beginning of the puzzles, you only control a single white sphere, but soon the game world fills with flying geometric shapes that try to thwart you. The stylish look of the puzzle game works well on the iPhone and iPad, but if you have an Apple TV we recommend playing the game here. The video below shows the game in action.
Instagram now lets you upload up to ten different photos and videos at once and put them in one post as a sort of album. Viewers can swipe right through it. To make an album yourself, first go to the familiar place to upload a photo. There you will find a new icon that looks like a stack of photos. Tap this and you can choose from multiple photos from your library. If you are satisfied with your selection, you can adjust the order and add filters in the next screen.
Blin.gy lets you make videos in which you appear in your favorite video clip. For this you can choose from more than 40,000 videos of 15 seconds. These videos include artists such as Drake, Justin Bieber and Beyoncé. So there is a good chance that your favorite artist is also among them. In addition, new videos are added daily. You don’t necessarily need a green screen for the app’s technology to work properly. All you do need is an even background and enough light.