Our mobile phones keep us connected. However, we also use them for entertainment; they provide a welcome distraction from the pressures of our busy lives. From celebrity podcasts to plant identifiers, we share eight apps to keep you entertained in 2022.
1. Earwolf
Earwolf was created with the mission of producing the funniest, most entertaining podcast shows in existence. The platform’s roster includes Storytime with Seth Rogen, Comedy Bang! Bang!, How Did This Get Made?, and other top-ranking favorites.
The brainchild of Jeff Ulrich and Scott Aukerman, Earwolf recently raised its profile even further, welcoming Conan O’Brien into the fold with Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend long-form interview show. With 35 shows that are collectively downloaded more than 14 million times every month, Earwolf is America’s leading comedy podcast network.
2. 9GAG
A curated repository of videos, memes, jokes, GIFs and more, 9GAG outweighs many contemporary apps in terms of finding and sharing content. For example, although Facebook and other social media sites provide users with a huge number of GIFs to choose from, 9GAG’s enhanced searchability makes them much easier to find. It categorizes content into genres such as animals, anime, cars, comic and webtoon, etc.
3. Pictoword
Pictoword is a word game app where players are presented with two images that, combined, create a word or phrase. The game can be played alone or turned into a competition among friends to see who guesses the answer first. Suitable for players of all ages, Pictoword is a novel concept that even experienced wordsmiths should find interesting.
4. BuzzFeed
Offering formats including everything from political jokes, to YouTube videos, to breaking news, BuzzFeed allows users to share whole stories or snippets via Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, emails, or messages. Covering food, pop culture, news, and commerce, the platform was launched in 2006 with the goal of making internet content more inclusive, creative, and empathetic.
Founded by John S. Johnson III and Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s headquarters are in New York City. The platform employs a workforce of 1,700 today, generating a revenue of $421 million in 2020.
5. eko
With eko, you control the story. Geared towards the teen market, the app gamifies television. Viewers choose from a selection of shows, including dramas and comedies, deciding what characters do at key points, changing how the story plays out.
Each episode is relatively short, at under 10 minutes, but since the viewer is calling the shots, there is plenty of replay value. The app is not limited to fiction, incorporating a travel show that enables users to choose the destinations they want to see.
6. Ablo
Named Google’s Best App of 2019, Ablo app connects users from all over the world, ensuring that distance and language are no longer barriers in terms of making new friends. Users create their own profile, add friends and, once they have used the app for a while, unlock the ability to choose the countries they want to connect to.
Randomly linking users in text conversations, Ablo auto-translates communications, enabling people who speak different languages to understand one another. TechRadar reported that interactions it had via Ablo generally read as though the other person spoke English fluently, albeit perhaps not as their first language. There is also the option of switching to live video chat, with live subtitles translating conversations.
7. Letterboxd
Targeted at film afficionados, Letterboxd helps users to keep track of movies they have watched. Users can add movies to their list with a tap, give them a star rating, and add a review, if they want to.
Thanks to the platform’s comprehensive movie database, the app enables users to track films they want to watch too. It also provides movie suggestions, highlighting what is currently trending and offering thousands of lists compiled with other Letterboxd users. Also a social network of sorts, Letterboxd allows users to follow other users and comment on their lists.
8. PlantSnap
With a basic version available as well as a premium, paid upgrade, PlantSnap enables you to identify plants from over 600,000 species with a tap of the screen. Simply take a photo of the leaf, flower, cacti, succulent, or mushroom, and PlantSnap’s identifier will tell you what the species is, providing you with information about it. You can keep a log of your favorite plants on the platform, as well as accessing plant snaps from users all over the world.
Touted as the most high-tech, accurate, and comprehensive plant identification app ever created, PlantSnap’s creators state on their website that the app can currently recognize 90 percent of all known plant and tree species. This covers most of the species encountered in every country worldwide today.
With more than 475 million snaps identified to date at a rate of more than a million snaps per day, PlantSnap has been downloaded over 42 million times. Partnering with Snapchat, the platform recently announced the ambitious goal of mapping out every plant species on Earth by the end of 2022.