Lifehacker's 22 Favorite Apps of 2022

“There’s an app for that” is as true in 2022 as it was in 2009. Every day, we dive through tech news, forums, and digital stores looking for the best apps to make your phone and computer even better. As the year draws to a close, we’ve highlighted 22 of our favorite apps we came across in 2022, including social media platforms, privacy solutions, and productivity hacks. Not all launched in 2022, but each is still fun or useful, and will continue to be into 2023 and beyond.

Unlike most of the apps on this list, BeReal is a viral sensation. If there’s one app that defined 2022, it’s the one that got us all to take a photo at the same time each and every day. The best part? It’s the same app it was when it blew up: No frills, no new features, just a simple concept that makes it fun to use whenever the notification goes off.

For the uninitiated, here’s how BeReal works: The app sends a notification warning users they have two minutes to BeReal. To BeReal, you take a photo of where you are and what you’re doing, both through the front camera and the rear camera. Then, you see what all your other friends are up to. You don’t have to BeReal within the two minute window, but it will mark your post as late (though it’s no big deal).

You can BeReal on iPhone and Android.

The DuckDuckGo app has been around for a while, but the company doubled-down on privacy features in 2022. First, there’s DuckDuckGo’s Hide My Email feature, which shields your personal email from companies and services who want it. You can either use an @duck.com alias, or a randomly generated email address, either of which forwards any incoming emails to your personal email. It’s similar to Apple’s Hide My Email feature, but available on either iOS or Android (or desktop, for that matter, from the DuckDuckGo extension).

Second, DuckDuckGo’s app rolled out an app-tracking blocker for Android. With it, DuckDuckGo will stop apps from tracking Android users as they use their phone, including activity across other apps and sites. Again, this is a counterpart to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, but now available on Android.

You can download DuckDuckGo for iPhone and Android.

If you frequently use your iPhone’s Reminders app, Remind Me Faster is the perfect companion. It’s designed to let you set reminders as quickly as possible, ideally in as little as one tap. Rather than tap through different menus to build your reminder, Remind Me Faster has everything on screen ready to go when you boot up the app. That way, when you do get a good idea, you can add it to Reminders without losing a second.

You can download Remind Me Faster for iPhone.

Juicebox, formally known as Anthem, brings a TikTok-like discovery tool to Spotify. Link your Spotify account to Juicebox, and you can swipe through new songs based on your previous listening history. It’s a fun way to find fresh music to spruce up your Spotify library, especially if you’re as hopelessly addicted to TikTok as I am.

You can download Juicebox for iPhone and Android.

Speaking of Spotify and Apple Music, the former is the clear winner when it comes to playlists. While Apple Music has plenty of great options, Spotify is famous for its playlists, which can leave us Apple listeners out of the loop. Playlisty can help, allowing you to import Spotify playlists directly to Apple Music, assuming the tracks are available on both platforms.

You can download Playlisty for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

The two big teams in music streaming are Spotify and Apple Music. If you subscribe to the former, but want to switch to the latter, you might be discouraged, since you can’t take your carefully curated library with you. That is, unless you use SongShift. SongShift allows you to transfer your Spotify library over to Apple Music, giving you a seamless transition between platforms.

SongShift is an iOS exclusive, but you can also try other apps like TuneMyMusic (web only) or FreeMyMusic (virtually all platforms) to switch streaming services.

If you frequently present on video calls, and hate looking away from the middle of the screen to check your notes, Transparent Note is for you. It places a translucent note over your computer screen, allowing you to reference any text you like without needing to move your eyes from your colleagues.

Sure, you could put your notes on one half of the screen, and your video call on the other, as one commenter pointed out. But Transparent Note is much cooler, and that’s a win in my book.

You can download Transparent Note for Mac and Windows.

At this point, most of us know about Duolingo—the app that makes learning a language fun with quick, engaging lessons. Zest is just like Duolingo, only instead of learning French or Spanish, you’re learning how to cook sauces and dishes. Recipes are clear and descriptive, and offer video walkthroughs to help with more complicated maneuvers. According to the developers, the recipes used are developed by two “expert chefs,” so you should be in good hands.

You can try Zest for iPhone and Android.

If you’re tired of boring board games explanations, give Dized a roll. Dized offers hand-made video walkthroughs for popular board games, so everyone at game night can watch and follow along. No longer will you be subjected to one person’s monotonous lecture of the rules, not one of which actually sticks in your head.

You can download Dized on iPhone and Android.

It’s true that Locket is yet another photo-sharing social media app, but it has a fun twist. Instead of simply hosting the images on its own platform, Locket lets you send and view photos from a widget on your phone’s Home Screen. It’s a unique take, passively letting you check in on your friends whenever you unlock your phone. Of course, it requires some strict setup, since both you and your friends need to have Locket installed on your phones, and the Locket widget installed on your Home Screens.

You can try Locket on iPhone and Android.

Even if Twitter wasn’t 15 years old, it still wouldn’t make this list. The site is a dumpster fire right now, and people are looking for alternatives. Mastodon is one new option that gained a lot of steam this year, and for good reason: It’s a small, tight-knit social media organization with good regulation and a community who cares about the platform.

It might be trickier than Twitter to set up, as you learn about joining “instances” and making “toots” (no joke, that’s Mastodon’s version of tweets). But you might find at the end of it all a more wholesome version of Twitter. If you’re interested, check out our guide on Mastodon to get started.

There are many versions of the Mastodon, app, but you can download the main version for iPhone and Android.

Now, Swiftkey is nothing new, but we loved discovering one productivity hack it comes with. If set up correctly, you can use Swiftkey to copy and paste from your Android to your PC. That’s because Microsoft lets you sync your clipboard history with Swiftkey, which mimics Apple’s Universal Clipboard feature. You can read our guide here to learn how to set it up.

You can download Swiftkey for Android. You can download the app for iPhone as well, but the copy and paste feature is Android-only.

Apple’s big design change with the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max is the Dynamic Island, a camera cutout that doubles as a dynamic notification center. No Android phone has a design quite like the 14 Pro’s, even with camera cutouts, but that didn’t stop one app developer from giving Android users the option anyway. With dynamicSpot, you can add a software-based Dynamic Island on your Android screen, complete with active notifications. It’s certainly a novelty, but it’s fun to try.

You can download dynamicSpot for Android.

The Mac’s screenshot tool is pretty solid, but it can be better. Enter Shottr: Shottr builds on what macOS’ screenshot tool can do, and adds great new features for free, like the ability to take scrolling screenshots, edit screenshots with blurs, or erase elements entirely. It also supports OCR, which lets you copy and paste text from images. Your Mac now lets you do this as well, but you need to first go through the added step of opening the screenshot in Preview. With Shottr, you can copy text from the screenshot.

You can download Shottr for Mac.

On the Windows side, we have ShareX, a versatile (if a bit complex) screenshot tool that lets you do everything from assigning screenshot keyboard shortcuts, to setting up a specific location (local or remote) for your screenshots to save, to recording your screen, and more.

Download ShareX for Windows.

Let’s face it: macOS is made for trackpads. Gestures alone increase productivity by so much, which is why MacBooks are so great. Using a trackpad with a desktop Mac is an equally great experience, but, often, we use traditional computer mice here. If so, you can use Mac Mouse Fix to turn your mouse into a trackpad, assigning it different gesture that make mousing on a Mac a much better experience. Learn more from our guide here. We covered another mouse customizer this year as well, known as BetterMouse.

You can download Mac Mouse Fix for, of course, Mac.

If the Files app on your iPhone leaves something to be desired, give Documents by Readdle a try. It has a much more user-friendly design, allows for easy file downloads, offers media playback, and has a file explorer system that just makes sense. Of course, it’s not the only file manager iOS has to offer. We have a full list of our favorite Files alternatives here.

You can download Documents by Readdle for iPhone.

If you have an older, Intel Mac, you probably deal with overheating and battery drain issues on the daily. One of the culprits here is Turbo Boost, an Intel feature that speeds up the CPU during peak performance. While this is a great feature in theory, on older machines, it can end up overheating the system, draining your battery in the process.

Turbo Boost Switcher allows you to disable Turbo Boost, and caps the clock time of the CPU at its standard. That means less overheating, and less battery drain, albeit possibly a slower experience. But when battery is on the line, it’s a worthy trade-off.

You can download Turbo Boost Switcher for Mac.

iPhones are so much more customizable than they used to be, but they aren’t quite Android-level, yet. We still need third-party solutions to some issues, like Lock Launcher, the app that lets you add apps to your iPhone’s Lock Screen. With it, you can add apps to a Live Activities Dock on the Lock Screen, or to your iPhone 14 Pro or 14 Pro Max’s Dynamic Island, so you can access apps like WhatsApp or Instagram without needing to unlock your iPhone first.

You can download Lock Launcher for iPhone.

Want to win at your next trivia night? Well, at least the questions that concern music. NowPlaying is an app doubling as a music encyclopedia. It can listen to songs that are playing and tell you quite a lot about it, including the names of those who worked on the track and when it was recorded. It even gives a backstory to some songs, so you can amaze (or bore) your friends with tales of history’s biggest hits.

NowPlaying is exclusive to iPhone.

If you can’t figure out why your MacBook is dying overnight, download Sleep Aid. It can diagnose battery issues, and walk you through why macOS is draining so much battery over any given time frame. The app is free to start, so it’s a perfect way to quickly give your battery a checkup.

You can download Sleep Aid for Mac.

If you don’t yet use a clipboard manager on your Mac or PC, make that your 2023 resolution. A clipboard manager neatly compiles a history of everything you copy on your computer, which makes copy and paste so much better. Let’s say you need to move multiple lines of text from one place to another. Rather than copy one line, switch to the other document, paste it, go back and copy another, go back to the other document and paste it, and so on, you can copy each line one after another, then go to your final location and paste everything one after another.

Fortunately, you have a lot of options. As a Mac user, I’m partial to CopyClip, but it’s far from the only clipboard manager on the platform. Take a look at our clipboard manager guide to see which one might be right for you.