Most “best iPad apps” lists read like a sponsored catalog. Forty apps, no opinions, every one of them a 5-star miracle. That’s not useful.
Here are five apps I actually recommend — the ones that justify owning an iPad in the first place. If your iPad mostly sits on the kitchen counter playing YouTube, this is the list that gets it off the counter.
Full disclosure: I make one of the apps on this list. I’ll tell you which one and why I think it belongs here anyway.
1. Planner for iPad — for the people who think better on paper
Best for: Anyone who’s tried digital task managers and bounced back to a paper notebook within a month.
I built Planner for iPad because I kept doing exactly that. Things, Todoist, Notion, TickTick — I tried them all. They’re great apps. But none of them felt like thinking. Typing into a list is filing. Writing on a page is thinking.
Planner for iPad is a handwriting-first planner you use with the Apple Pencil. Daily, weekly, and monthly pages. Stamps and stickers when you want them. Templates when you don’t want to design your own layout. Your Apple Calendar and Google Calendar events show up on the page automatically (read-only — the planner displays them, it doesn’t replace your calendar app).
It’s not trying to replace your task manager or your calendar. It’s the messy thinking layer that sits between them — the place where you draft your week, sketch out a project, or just write down what’s actually on your mind today.
If you’ve never gotten along with digital planners, this might be the one. If you have a paper planner you love, you probably don’t need this. That’s fine.
Why it earns the slot: The iPad is the only mainstream tablet with a pencil this good. An app that actually uses the pencil — not as a finger substitute, but as a pen — is the most iPad-native thing you can install.
2. Procreate — for anyone who wants to draw, even badly
Best for: Hobbyist sketchers, professional illustrators, and everyone in between.
You don’t have to be an artist to enjoy Procreate. You just have to be willing to make ugly drawings for a few weeks. The app is so well designed that “doodling on the couch” turns into a real hobby surprisingly fast.
It’s a one-time purchase, no subscription, no AI gimmicks shoehorned in. The brush engine is genuinely beautiful. Time-lapse export means you can watch yourself improve. And the file size of the app vs. what it does is a small miracle.
If you bought an Apple Pencil and aren’t using it for at least one of (a) drawing or (b) handwriting, you’re leaving the iPad’s best feature on the table.
3. Readwise Reader — for people who read more than they admit
Best for: Long-form readers, researchers, students, anyone with 400 open browser tabs.
Reader is a read-it-later app, an RSS reader, a PDF annotator, an epub reader, a YouTube transcript reader, and a highlight-syncing engine — all in one. If you’ve ever emailed yourself an article, saved a PDF “for later,” or screenshotted a tweet to come back to, this is the app that ends that habit.
The iPad is genuinely the best device for long reading. Bigger than a phone, lighter than a laptop, no notification chaos if you put it in focus mode. Reader is the app that makes that obvious.
It’s a subscription, which I generally don’t love. But the workflow it enables — read on the iPad, highlight with the Pencil, sync those highlights into your notes app — is hard to replicate any other way.
4. GoodLinks — for the people who just want a clean read-it-later app
Best for: Readers who don’t need RSS or PDFs, just a beautiful place to save articles.
If Reader sounds like overkill — and for a lot of people it is — GoodLinks is the calmer alternative. One-time purchase. Beautiful typography. Excellent reader view. Tags, favorites, full-text search. That’s the app.
I include it because not everyone wants a power tool. Sometimes you just want to save an article, read it later, and forget it existed. GoodLinks does that with more taste than anything else on the App Store.
5. Freeform — for the brainstorming you can’t fit in a list
Best for: Anyone who plans projects, runs workshops, or thinks visually.
This one’s free and made by Apple, which usually makes me skeptical. But Freeform is genuinely good. It’s an infinite canvas — drop sticky notes, images, sketches, links, whatever — and arrange them spatially. Mind maps, mood boards, project plans, room layouts.
The reason it earns the slot over Miro or FigJam: it’s free, it works offline, it syncs through iCloud, and it doesn’t try to sell you a team plan. For solo thinking on an iPad, that’s the right set of tradeoffs.
If you’ve never tried spatial thinking, an infinite canvas on a 13-inch iPad with a Pencil is a small revelation.
What didn’t make the list
A few apps I almost included and didn’t:
- Notion / Obsidian — Both excellent. Both better on a desktop. Tablets are the wrong shape for this kind of work.
- LumaFusion — A great mobile video editor, but most people don’t edit video on their iPad.
- Affinity Designer / Photo — Powerful, but a steep enough learning curve that I can’t recommend them universally.
- Apple Notes — Already on your iPad. Use it. But it’s not really a recommendation, is it.
The actual point
The iPad is a strange device. It’s not a laptop and it’s not a phone, and the apps that make it worth owning are the ones that lean into that — pencil-first, reading-first, canvas-first. The apps above all do that in different ways.
If you install one app from this list, install whichever one matches the thing you keep wishing your iPad did better. That’s the one that’ll stick.