When you think of apps, you probably think of things that help you get done what you need to get done.
There are organizational apps and photo editing apps.
There are apps for tracking your expenses and apps for letting you know that you’re not meeting your fitness goals for the fourth week in a row.
Apps can also be a ton of fun; the following aims to explore a few of the applications that can bring more joy and inspiration to your days. Special attention has been paid to apps that have a social component.
Duolingo
Duolingo is a fantastic app designed to help people learn languages through a game-like interface.
There are a ton of different language options, including Klingon and High Valyrian, for those who want to take their love of science fiction and fantasy to the next level.
The application offers both an unpaid and paid option, with the unpaid option being functional enough and filled with enough features to meet your language learning needs. In the unpaid version, you have a certain amount of health (hearts) that get used up when you get questions wrong.
Your health bar gradually recovers itself, but you may need to wait a little to try again.
Learning languages on Duolingo can be a lot of fun, but it can also be incredibly healthy. Learning new languages helps keep your brain sharp and reduces the risk of neurodegenerative diseases.
The benefits to your mind will be perceivable in all aspects of your life, not just language learning, and this might help contribute to more fun overall in your life.
Bubble Wrap
Do you remember being a kid and getting really excited about a sleeve of bubble wrap that your parents were just about to throw away?
Do you remember the joy that came from popping all those little bubbles? Well, now there’s an app for that. You can pop as many bubble-wrap bubbles as you want without feeling guilty about plastic waste because there is none.
It’s a wonderful way to relax and, according to softmany.com, the game app is free to download. This is a particularly good choice for people who don’t want competitive games on their phones.
Mood Mission
It’s hard to have fun when you’re feeling really down, and Mood Mission helps with that.
Rates of depression and anxiety are at an all-time high (and two years in lockdown certainly didn’t help people who rely on the support of others as part of their mental health maintenance approaches). This app was built around research and tested in randomized-controlled trials.
Based on how you’re feeling, the application will recommend missions for you to undertake. Some of the missions are emotion-based, some are behavior-based, some are physical activities, and some are thought-based activities that can teach you how to reframe invasive thoughts. First, you enter into your emotional state. They also have selections like: I can’t stop thinking about something, or I can’t quite put my finger on it if you’re struggling to categorize it.
Then you’re presenting with five different missions. Accept a mission, complete it, and then rate how distressed you feel.
YouVersion
While not the right app for everybody, YouVersion has been bringing joy to a lot of users as of late. The app is, at first glance, a Bible-study app that lets you compare different versions of the Bible side-by-side. But it’s also a lot more than this.
The app contains thousands upon thousands of plans focused on all sorts of topics, including stress, anxiety, depression, guilt, addiction, marriage, parenting, friendships, embracing joy, and finding the piece.
Plans provide you with a short Bible excerpt on the topic each day, along with a breakdown of how this verse could be applied in your daily life. For people who want to get into Bible study but struggle to keep the habit, or for people who read the Bible but don’t feel the text pertains to their daily struggles, this app is an absolute must. Plans can last from a few days to a full month.
Shazam
There’s great pain in hearing a song that you don’t know but desperately want to hear again. You can try catching on to some of the lyrics and entering those into a search engine, but the results are often mixed, particularly because many romantic sentiments have been repeated through the ages in multiple songs.
Shazam is a simple app where, with the press of a single button, your phone listens to the song you’re listening to and scours the database for the song title, performer(s), and version (if applicable). It also saves the names of the songs you’ve searched for so you can find them later.
Forest
Forest is a productivity app, but it’s a fun one. When opened, the application takes over your whole screen showing a seed sprouting in the soil.
The longer you go without using your phone, the bigger the plant grows. The image is a nice little incentive to avoid checking your phone while you work, as every time you glance over to see if you have notifications, you get a visual representation of how long you’ve been working. This positive reinforcement has some pretty cool effects on your productivity as well as your mood while you’re working.
Wattpad
Wattpad is a social media site designed to help people share long-form writing, including full novels. The app has well over 80 million users. Some are avid writers. Some are avid readers.
There’s everything imaginable on this app: fanfiction, epic 20-book fantasy series, romance novels, mysteries, crime thrillers—you name a genre, and Wattpad has it.
You can read thousands upon thousands of books for free written by users and interact with the people who wrote them. There are also in-app tokens you can buy to pay to read any books in the paid section.
There’s a Watty’s Award section as well where you can see which books were most beloved by other users.
The above list should give you an idea of the myriad of applications that are available for you to enjoy. It’s important to find a healthy balance between social application use and real-life social interactions.