New apps for every platform

JAMES O’CONNOR REVIEWS THE MOST INTERESTING NEW APPS FOR iOS AND ANDROID.

Spotify Stations TUNE IN. Free (premium $11.99 a month) spotify.com

Spotify Stations is a supplement to the main Spotify app, and is sort of like an iPod Shuffle to the regular app’s iPod. It’s a minimalist take on Spotify, with music sorted by stations, so that you can’t just listen to a full album or crank through the entire back catalogue of Fleetwood Mac in order. You pick ‘stations’, which are named after genres, eras and artists, and then enjoy a curated feed of music. If you pick an artist you can choose to just shuffle through their catalogue or play music that is like theirs as well, which is, theoretically, a cool way to find new artists. It’s not as effective, though, as the full suite offered in regular Spotify – Stations is meant to complement, not replace it. It’s going to fill a gap in certain people’s lives, making it easy to immediately start listening to, say, 90s hip-hop, or music that sounds like Arcade Fire. Just know that you’ll need to switch back when the mood to roll through Queens’ Greatest Hits Vol 1 again inevitably hits.

Statue of Liberty AR HUDDLED MASSES. Free | N/A

Writing as someone with no real connection to New York beyond the pop culture it has produced, the latest completely free AR educational experience is still, somehow, a weirdly moving experience. You can view the statue in two different modes – either with the camera focused near the tip of its flame, so that you can rotate around the statue and view its skyline, or you can bring up a smaller AR model and prod at different points on it to learn new facts about the statue. Another mode lets you view a recreation of the statue’s foot, zooming in and out or making it ‘life-sized’ to get a sense of the scale. This is all good fun and gives you a good sense of how impressive the thing is, but it’s the final option on this (entirely free) app that most tugged on my heartstrings. You can view a recreation of the New York skyline from the tip of the statue’s tower, from 1800 until today, which is stunningly realised and captures the city perfectly.

Moodie BREATHE OUT. Free | www.checkonmeapp.com

Moodie is an app that aims to help you with anxiety, a goal the app works towards with a light touch. You create an avatar and begin tracking your mood, setting repeated rituals for yourself, journaling, and generally letting the app know how you’re going. It’s clearly aimed at kids and teenagers more than adults, with its cute aesthetic and the way it steers clear of asking about your sexual well-being, but it’s admirably dedicated to making the process of dealing with anxiety manageable. It’s respectful, right down to the very robust gender selection options when you start and when the app speaks to you, as it regularly does, it takes the difficulty of combating anxiety seriously. There are no microtransactions, no subscriptions, no upfront payments – it’s just an app that is sincerely trying to make things better for you. And while gamification is a bit of a dodgy concept when it’s not employed well, an app that encourages you to meditate, or listen to music, or write down your thoughts to help you combat anxiety and depression is a fundamentally fine idea.

Steam Chat WHEN THE CHAT GETS STEAMY. Free | store.steampowered.com

One of the weird elements of modern friendship is that your ways of communication become fractured between phone calls, text, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DMs, Slack, Whatsapp, and those folks you only ever see in person. One friend exclusively contacts me through Words with Friends DMs, and I have him in mind as I check out Steam Chat, a mobile app that lets you chat with your Steam pals wherever you are. It all works, although the UI is a bit ugly, and in a message I found that I had to exit back out and return to clear the keyboard sometimes, which is a little cumbersome. It also seems to carry no record of previous conversations you’ve had in the computer client. Basically, Steam Chat does what you would expect it to – it lets you take Steam Chat with you wherever you go, and spy on what your friends are playing. Theoretically it should make it easier to send photos from your phone too, but I found that anything I sent failed to open in the Steam client. There are no bells or whistles, but that’s fine.

Vignette NAME TO A FACE. Free ($7.99 to keep updates) | N/A

Vignette scans through the contacts on your phone and finds pictures of them online to replace the grey circles that are usually attached by default on their names. It does this by scanning whichever social media or information you have attached to each contact in your phone, which, I’d wager, is not a thing that many people have – even going through and manually adding details to several of my contacts, I found that the scans tended not to turn up any images. And even if they did, I found myself thinking, just how important is this, really? Adding photos of your contacts manually is not difficult, if that’s a thing you want to do, and while the idea of an app that constantly updates the pictures of your friends and family is neat, needing to enter as much information as you can about them, and then have the app trawl for photos, feels a bit invasive. Vignette isn’t worth the trouble unless you already track your contacts very heavily.

Toffee TOUGH TO CHEW. Free (membership required eventually) http://toffee.datin

As someone who went to a private school, who is now quite poor and yet is still theoretically eligible to use this dating app, which only lets you join once you’ve nominated which private school you went to (although as far as I can tell it’s very easy to lie about this without repercussion as it does not request proof), I’d like to say, in the plainest terms, that Toffee is extremely bad. With app-based dating continually growing, there’s perhaps some comfort in the idea of an app that tries to be a bit more selective in how it guides you – but not like this. During registration it asks if you’re male or female – no options beyond this – and it never asked me for my sexual preferences or anything like that. The app is focused on tailoring very specific dates, too, rather than just letting you get to know a lot of people and see if sparks fly. It’s a classist disaster. Stick with Bumble and Tinder.