5 Great iPhone Apps Not Enough People Know About

Finding great apps on the App Store can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. With millions of options, it's easy to stick to the iPhone's most popular free iOS apps, that you already know and love. However, buried beneath all the noise are some truly fantastic hidden gems that are incredibly useful and often innovative.

These aren't just niche tools for a small group of people; they're well-designed, robust apps that solve common problems and offer unique features. The main difference is that they just haven't hit the mainstream radar. Each of these apps brings something unique to the table, proving that the best tools aren't always the ones with the most downloads or the biggest marketing budgets.

Some apps can completely change how you manage your to-do list, how you get fit, how you listen to music, and even how you interact with the natural world around you. What they all have in common is a focus on a great user experience and offering real value, often for free.

If you love spending time in nature, you know that there's a lot of beauty that comes from the plants, trees, and foliage. iNaturalist Classic is a great app that connects people with nature and helps with science and conservation by letting you identify plants and animals and record your encounters with biodiversity.

The iNaturalist Classic app is like a citizen science project where naturalists, biologists, and regular people from all over the world can share and identify species online. It's a super helpful way to keep a personal record of all the things you see while also contributing to a massive global database of scientific data. It also lets you manually add observations to specific projects and learn a ton about the local biodiversity around you.

Unlike the current iNaturalist app, the classic app has a simple, uncluttered interface that avoids a bunch of excessive menus and flashy UI elements. This makes it a quick and easy tool for when you're out on the go and want to record an observation without a fuss thanks to its easy to find Record Observation feature. With the classic app, you can record audio observations fast and with a less cumbersome process than the regular app has for adding a single observation. If you like bringing cool gadgets on hikes, you should consider taking this app too.

nPlayer is a total game changer for anyone who watches a lot of videos or listens to music. It handles everything from common video types like MP4, MOV, MKV, AVI, WMV, and FLV to audio formats like MP3, WAV, WMA, and even FLAC.

Beyond its massive format support, nPlayer has some seriously great streaming capabilities. You can stream media files from remote devices and all sorts of the best cloud storage options like Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Yandex.Disk. It even works with various server types, including WebDAV, FTP, SFTP, HTTP, SMB/CIFS, and UPnP/DLNA. This is huge, especially for those of us with limited storage on our iPhones, since it means you don't have to download those massive video files directly to your device.

If you have an iPhone, you should really consider using nPlayer because it gives you so much more flexibility and control over your media than the standard iOS players. The interface is super intuitive, with gesture controls that let you adjust things like playback position, volume, and brightness with a simple swipe.

The Nike Training Club: Wellness app isn't one of our top-rated health and fitness apps for your iPhone, but that may be because it's overlooked. This has a huge collection of workouts, training plans, and wellness content for all fitness levels. Nike made all its content accessible for free during the COVID-19 pandemic and has kept the price free, making it a top pick if you want a fitness app.

The app has over 180 workouts led by world-class certified trainers, covering different categories like strength training, HIIT, yoga, endurance, and mobility. You can also filter workouts by muscle group, equipment needed (including many bodyweight-only options), duration, intensity, and focus, which lets you have personalized training experiences. Beyond individual sessions, The Nike Training Club also has multi-week structured programs designed to help you get to specific goals, which makes your fitness journey much simpler.

The Nike Training Club app has a user-friendly interface and high production quality to make workouts much more fun and easy to follow, taking the guesswork out of planning and execution. If you get the fitness app on your Apple Watch, you will get real-time tracking of metrics like heart rate and calories burned during workouts, directly on the watch screen. This connectivity makes it easier to keep your motivation high through activity rings and achievement badges that mark milestones.

AnyList: Grocery Shopping List 4+ is designed to help you with grocery shopping, meal planning, and recipes, and is great to have despite not being one of our top rated notetaking apps for iPhone. It lets you create shopping lists with smart suggestions for common items and automatically sorts your groceries into categories like Produce and Dairy.

These categories can be rearranged match the layout of your local store, which is a really helpful feature for anyone trying to be more efficient. You can also create different lists for different stores or occasions, which is super convenient. One of the best parts of the app is how easy it is to share lists. You can instantly share a list with family and friends via email, and any changes made to a shared list show up in real-time across everyone's devices.

Sharing lists is a game changer because it means everyone is always on the same page, and you won't end up with more groceries than you need. The app also has some recipes and meal planning tools. You can organize your own recipes, and if you have the premium version, you can even import them directly from websites. This lets you automatically create a grocery list from your meal plan, which takes a lot of the stress out of planning for the week.

Aiko is an AI-powered audio transcription tool that lets you convert audio, video, and even voice messages into text. This application stands out from the rest because it performs all of its transcriptions locally on your device, meaning you'll have complete privacy. It doesn't even require an internet connection for its core transcription function and is restricted from network access by macOS's own rules. Aiko uses OpenAI's Whisper model for high-quality transcription and supports an impressive 100 different languages, making it a very flexible tool.

This app can also automatically detect the spoken language and even translate non-English content into English. Aiko integrates with Apple's Shortcuts app, so you can streamline opening it whenever it's needed. You can set up shortcuts to quickly record audio, trigger transcription, and then have the results displayed within Aiko or even automatically added to the Notes app. This makes it incredibly convenient for capturing quick voice notes, transcribing lectures, interviews, or meetings on the go.

The app prioritizes accuracy over speed, and while longer transcriptions can be time-consuming, especially on older devices, it performs much faster on newer Apple Silicon devices. Aiko really deserves to be considered one of the best transcription apps to convert audio to text, but it still isn't in the top 10 for productivity apps.

When gathering potential selections for this list, we consulted Reddit threads where users talked about their favorite apps because it's a good place to discover lesser-known apps and items. If anything appeared on the various top 20 lists on Apple's App Store, we disregarded it. The goal was to find the less popular options that may not have the right marketing but have great reviews.

The focus was mainly on apps that have high ratings and recommendations from others. This means any that had three stars or less were not worth considering. If an app was mentioned but no one followed up with feedback, it wouldn't be worth considering. The quality of the app is based on how it worked with others and if it stood out enough to get a recommendation.

These apps were selected because they are likely to be popular to many iPhone users. We intentionally avoided choosing apps that cater only to specific interests or niche markets. There were birdwatching, airplane, and delivery apps, but those wouldn't be good for a wide variety of people.