Our Top Apps of All Time — shantum's notes

ELI5/TLDR

The Waveform crew — MKBHD, David, Andrew, and Ellis — each bring their top five mobile apps to the table and argue about the rankings. It is mostly a love letter to niche, well-made apps that do one thing properly: flight tracking, weather, file transfer, disc golf scoring, gallery browsing. The recurring theme is that the best apps tend to be simple, opinionated, and often made by small teams. Also, the Taco Bell app is apparently flawless, which is more than can be said for McDonald’s.

The Full Story

The Rules (and Immediate Rule-Breaking)

The premise is simple: each host lists their top five mobile phone apps of all time. Not desktop software, not tablet apps, not progressive web apps — just phone apps. MKBHD kicks things off with honorable mentions that are longer than most people’s actual lists, which sets the tone for the entire segment.

MKBHD’s Picks: The Apple Ecosystem Edition

His honorable mentions include Copilot (the finance tracker, not the Microsoft one), Athlytic for Apple Watch data, Blip for file transfer, Geekbench, and YouTube. His actual top five runs: Relay for Reddit at five, Waze at four, Flighty at three, TickTick at two, and Carrot Weather at number one.

The Carrot Weather pick is interesting. He calls out that it essentially cloned Dark Sky’s layout after Apple killed the app, and nobody else has been bold enough to do the same. The data accuracy plus the radar quality makes it his most-used app by a wide margin. It is, unfortunately, iPhone only — a phrase that comes up a lot in his list.

“Carrot Weather is by such a margin my most often used weather app that it’s not even really close.”

David’s Picks: The Android Loyalist

David goes with Libby at five, Relay for Reddit at four (a rare overlap with MKBHD), Nova Launcher at three, Viewfinder Preview at two, and Pocket Casts at number one.

The Pocket Casts story is a nice artifact of the pre-subscription era: he bought it for $7 in 2012 and got grandfathered into the pro version for life when they switched models. He genuinely does not know what the free version looks like. Nova Launcher gets a nod for being the thing every Android user installed on their TouchWiz Samsung phone for the better part of a decade.

Viewfinder Preview is the sleeper pick — a dead-simple app he uses weekly to frame photos on his 3D-printed cameras that lack actual viewfinders. Six years of weekly use earns you a top-five slot.

Andrew’s Picks: Chaos Energy

Andrew opens with “no honorable mentions — if it’s not on this list, it’s a dog water app” and then proceeds to put the Taco Bell app at number five. His reasoning is oddly compelling: he is too embarrassed to customize his order verbally in the drive-through, and the Taco Bell app handles complex modifications without the upsell pop-ups that plague every other fast food app.

“I ain’t saying all that in the drive-thru because there’s no way it gets it right.”

Old School RuneScape takes number four — an app he does not even use but advocates for because it lets RuneScape players touch grass while grinding woodcutting XP. Blip is at three, Google Tasks at two (he credits it with changing his life), and UDisc — a disc golf scoring app — is his number one.

The Blip Consensus

Blip, a cross-platform file transfer app, shows up on three out of four lists in some capacity. The pitch: it works every time, handles files of any size (someone sends 10GB podcast files through it regularly), runs at 50-60 MB/s across the country, and does not depend on Wi-Fi proximity the way AirDrop does. In a studio with 20 AirDrop devices fighting for attention, reliable file transfer apparently matters a great deal.

The Fourth Host: Fresh Eyes

David Imel (on Android now after switching from iOS) puts KWGT at five, Duolingo at four, Stellarium at three, StoryGraph at two, and Obsidian at number one. StoryGraph gets positioned as “Goodreads but the developer actually remembers it exists,” which is a fair shot at Amazon’s decade of neglect. Obsidian earns the top spot for being a local-first note-taking app that works surprisingly well on mobile, especially in Samsung DeX mode.

Ellis’s Picks: The Newcomer

Ellis only got a new phone in December 2025 — before that, his iPhone 12 mini was too full to install apps. His list is wonderfully eccentric: Discogs at five, Fog of World at four (a location-tracking map app he immediately warns you never to download), Seesaw at three (NYC gallery listings), Moment Pro Camera at two, and the Brooklyn Public Library app at number one.

The Brooklyn Public Library pick might be the most wholesome number-one in the history of app ranking segments. He renewed a library book in ten seconds and was genuinely moved by the experience.

“Why are all apps not as good as the thing that cost zero money? The library.”

The Subscription Problem

A running theme throughout: most of the best apps now require subscriptions. The crew is acutely aware of subscription fatigue. Andrew reveals he only pays for one non-family-plan subscription (the Pokemon TCG app, funded entirely by Google Opinion Rewards surveys). Several picks get bonus points specifically for having generous free tiers.

Key Takeaways

Blip is the standout consensus pick — cross-platform file transfer with no size limits, 50-60 MB/s speeds, and it works locally or over the internet
Carrot Weather cloned Dark Sky’s layout after Apple killed it and is apparently the only weather app worth using on iPhone
Pocket Casts has quietly been one of the best-designed apps for over a decade, now owned by Automattic (WordPress)
StoryGraph is a viable Goodreads replacement with better recommendations, made by an independent developer
Google Opinion Rewards still exists, still pays you for surveys, and can fund your app subscriptions
Flighty gives you flight delay info 45 minutes before the gate announcement — enough time to rebook before the crowd
Nova Launcher is one of the most downloaded Android apps of all time, carried by a decade of bad OEM skins
The best apps tend to do one thing well, have generous free tiers, and work cross-platform
YouTube’s chapter system is still broken and the Waveform team is still mad about it

Claude’s Take

This is a low-stakes, high-comfort conversation between people who use phones for a living. The value here is not analytical depth — it is the specific app recommendations from people who have genuinely stress-tested them. When MKBHD says Carrot Weather is his most-used app, or Andrew says Google Tasks changed his life, those carry weight because these are people who cycle through dozens of apps regularly.

The signal-to-noise ratio is about what you would expect from a 38-minute roundtable format. There is a lot of cross-talk, tangents about RuneScape and Taco Bell customization anxiety, and a spirited debate about whether utility apps should count. But the actual recommendations are solid and specific enough to be useful.

I am giving this a 5. It is entertaining and the app picks are genuinely interesting — Blip, StoryGraph, Stellarium, and Viewfinder Preview were all new to me. But it is fundamentally a list episode with no deeper thesis. You get what the title promises: people listing apps they like and ribbing each other about it. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing revelatory either.