One specific type of technology that has made hugely impressive improvements, especially since the introduction of the internet, is our smartphone devices. The mobile phone options today certainly offer up more functionalities and power than the phones of old, which could only house games like Snake and take horrifically grainy images. These days, our smartphone devices offer up an array of sophisticated features alongside the option of downloading a comprehensive selection of apps on both iOS and Android.

Today’s smartphones can house practically anything. There is a selection of art and drawing tools for art lovers; gamers can enjoy free spins bonuses for 2021 on a selection of slot games, then there is the option of conducting banking enquiries using an app, maintaining a healthy and balanced diet with the help of an app put together by industry experts, and even finding a soulmate using a dating app also. We’re barely even touching the surface there, too.

With a selection of smartphone apps proving popular in 2021 already, we thought we’d go through some of the best of them.

fuboTV

Popular with movie and sports lovers alike, fuboTV offers an extensive list of sports and entertainment channels that can be accessed on a number of different devices. You can follow the big game, watch a movie on-demand, and even stream a live event too. If you’re keen to watch more content on your smartphone, then fuboTV is a solid option.

Comixology

A must-have app for comic book readers, Comixology offers an extensive library of comic books, all easily accessible via your smartphone or tablet. It’s free, although for $5.99 per month, you can access even more familiar titles from the genre.

Duolingo

(Image via https://twitter.com/duolingo)

Keen to learn a language or brush up on one you already know in 2021? Then download Duolingo. A language learning app with a great reputation, Duolingo is easy to use and gives people the chance of learning a variety of languages. The app supports the likes of Danish, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, German and a whole lot more.

Adidas Running App by Runtastic

A popular app with the running community, Adidas Running App by Runtastic helps track your favourite routes and offers clear and information-rich maps to help you plan future running sessions. The app is also popular with hikers, cyclists, and walkers.

Adobe Lightroom CC

Spruce up your social media images with the help of Adobe Lightroom CC. A powerful photo-editing app, Adobe Lightroom CC offers a selection of helpful tools to elevate your pictures further. You can add colours, add noise reduction, make profile-based lens corrections, and plenty more.

Bitdefender Mobile Security

Only available on Android, Bitdefender Mobile Security will help you keep any hackers at bay. This reliable security app offers superb phishing protection, Android Wear integration, and powerful antitheft tools. It works by scanning your phone in a matter of seconds and then removing anything harmful.

Cookpad

With its vibrant array of recipes, Cookpad is a popular app at the moment. Giving people inspiration in the kitchen, Cookpad also offers users the option of adding favourite recipes, managing shopping lists, and it recommends new recipes based on what the app thinks you might like too.

The music industry is constantly releasing new albums at a ridiculous rate, making it easy to miss a few gems in a sea of new music. Spotify is rolling out another curated playlist that might help with some of those new release blues, introducing the world to a relaunch of its service Radar today.

Radar seems to be a companion playlist to the already-existing New Music Friday. Whereas New Music Friday is meant to introduce you to new artists you may have never heard of,  Radar is a playlist that will populate with new songs from artists you listen to the most.

Radar doesn’t just include new music from your most followed artists, as Spotify will also use your listening habits to find a handful of tracks you may not have heard before and drop them into the mix. Spotify says that Radar will evolve as you listen more, presumably becoming better at predicting which artists you’re most interested in. You’ll also be able to share your version of Release Radar with friends or download it for offline listening.

If it hasn’t already appeared yet, Radar should soon be available in the “New Releases for You” section of the “Discover” menu when you access Spotify on desktop or mobile. Radar is just the latest curated playlist Spotify is offering up to users, and between it and New Music Friday, it sounds like the company is trying to make sure its users have enough new music as they head off into the weekend – something we’re sure at least a few of the service’s more than 100 million active listeners will like.

Launched in February this year, the Under Armour HOVR Machina comes standard with UA’s Real-Time Form Coaching technology, allowing you to track distance, duration, and even the path you take as you run and even gain unprecedented insight into your running form. So if you’re in the market for a fitness tracker, you should definitely consider these high-tech and digitally connected shoes.

A Fitbit, Apple Watch, or Garmin smartwatch can help you track your fitness, but not quite in the same way as these shoes. These digitally connected sneakers can gather data on your run with or without your smartphone on hand. The sensor inside the shoe allows for some powerful tracking tools that provide key metrics and even suggestions to help you improve. All you need to do is download the UA MapMyRun app, add your shoe, and get full access to data tracking and gait coaching based on your movements.

While the digital aspect of these shoes is definitely exciting, it’s not the only feature that makes them unique. The UA HOVR technology was built to provide that ‘zero gravity feel’ to help reduce the impact of each step. Inside the Machina, the HOVR technology features a new uncaged UA HOVR midsole—all the benefits of soft HOVR cushioning, without any extra weight. UA developed a precise geometry that doesn’t require as much cage surrounding the UA HOVR midsole. The cage supports UA HOVR underneath the midsole, while the sides are now uncaged, saving weight while still providing responsive cushion.

The UA HOVR Machina are available in Under Armour Brand Houses around South Africa at a retail price of R2999.

The service enables Vodacom customers to load any bank card into a secure digital wallet downloaded as an app on their smartphone. Once loaded, these cards and the secure credentials associated with them are safely stored, enabling the customer to start transacting immediately without the hassle of entering these details each time they make a purchase. The app will support NFC, QR codes, and tags on a number of mobile devices at the checkout line in stores.

Of course, this is essentially Vodacom’s answer to  OEM owned payment services such as Samsung Pay, PayPal and the likes. The ability to display QR codes makes it easier for more smartphones to act as a digital wallet, even devices that don’t have NFC on board.

Apps that send information to Facebook are telling Facebook that you’re using an app. If you’re using an app that’s specifically about one sort of activity or another, Facebook can surmise what you’re doing, and adjust your advertisements served, accordingly.

iOS Apps

The most recent report from MobilSicher tested the latest versions of iOS apps. This list was last updated on the 6th of January, 2019. As such, it’s POSSIBLE some of these apps have stopped using the Facebook software package, but pretty unlikely.

The app simply called “Bible” uses Facebook’s SDK, as does Muslim Pro. The app For Diabetes, the diabetes diary – uses it too. OK Cupid sends info to Facebook when you start your app, and the following apps do, too:

iOS apps that use the Facebook SDK:
• Bible
• Muslim Pro
• For Diabetes
• OKCupid
• Curvy
• Grindr
• Tinder
• Your SPD
• Migraine Buddy
• Kwit

If you wish to continue the search, head over to MobilSicher and join the team! Searching for Android apps that share with Facebook is done vigilantly by organizations like AppCensus – now, if only someone would make a network of rated apps like that for iOS!

Android Apps

An updated Privacy International study first run in December, now again in late February 2019, showed a collection of Android apps that ran the Facebook SDK. These apps, too, share your advertiser ID and app name (each time you use the app, timed, sent to Facebook), as of March 5th, 2019.

Android apps that use the Facebook SDK:
• Calorie Counter MyFitnessPal
• Duolingo
• Family Locator GPS Tracker
• Indeed Job Search
• Instant Heart Rate
• KAYAK Flights, Hotels, and Cars
• King James Bible (KJV) Free
• Muslim Pro
• My Talking Tom
• My Talking Hank, etc
• Period Tracker Clue
• Qibla Connect
• Shazam
• Skyscanner
• Spotify
• Super-Bright LED Flashlight
• Yelp
• TripAdvisor

Have no idea what I’m talking about? CBC’s mobile software (app) allows you to share your beertastic images while following with what and where your friends are drinking theirs. The app uses location-tagged photographs to track the total distance CBC fans collectively travel with their can. On top of that the app has a load of new features. First, fans can see the total distance the CBC’s new can has travelled, view, say ‘cheers’ to, and comment on others’ pictures in a live feed, and see a map of all the places the can has travelled to on the app’s accompanying Love the Journey microsite. Users will also earn badges for travelling with CBC’s new can. Currently, badges can be earned for travelling all the way from 50 km up to 15,000 km. Another set of badges will be be awarded for posts which reach at least 10 ‘Cheers’’ from friends and followers.

The app, and truckload of features is only available in the iOS and Android app for now, but CBC says the features are accessible thorough their micro site as well.

The brewing company promised to deliver new features and updates on the regular. Today’s news is certainly a nice introduction to the digital space.

More than anything, a good messaging app should be fast. Refreshing your inbox, loading messages — none of these things should take more than a second or two. It should also give you plenty of different ways to deal with the daily SMS deluge. That means letting you do things like reply, archive, delete, or schedule messages with swipes or taps, while also giving you easy access to other services like your gallery for attaching files for multimedia messages (yes, people still send those).

Beside powerful options, a good messaging app should also have a great design — not just so that it’s easy on the eyes, but so it’s easy to use. If an app makes it too hard to glance at your inbox and know what’s important, it’s time to try a different messaging client. Which is more than what I can say for the standard build-in messaging apps we get with our *cough, Samsung* handsets.

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On the brighter side of things, popular call screening app Truecaller has introduced their younger sister, Truemessenger to us earlier this week. Similar to Truecaller, Truemessenger allows users to filter and block spam by tapping into vibrant community of more than 150 million members who help protect one another from annoying intrusions. The app supports Android devices (for now), covering most of the popular devices on the markets. It’s the closest you’ll get to feeling like you have a personal assistant in your hands. All that took for me to get the app was a simple download from the Android Play Store.

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On launch the app will prompt you to customise it according to your use and let you select spammers (numbers or contacts) from those already in your inbox and it cleverly recommends those that other Truemessenger users have flagged. Its up to you whether you select these or not. And you’re done.

Once you’ve attended to the few (read; two) simple setup prompts – and setting it as your native messaging app – you’ll instantly notice how more refined, clean and refreshed Truemessenger’s take on SMS messages is. I installed it on my Huawei Mate 7 and P8 smartphones, I hardly use my Alcatel Pop 7 tablet but I had to try it out here too. At first glance all your wanted texts are starring back at you in a cleaner format while those you’ve marked as spam are stored separate in the ‘Spam Inbox’ as you select this on the bottom right of your device’s screen. You’ll hardly ever notice the Spam Inbox is there; For starters this folder has a rather disturbing, vibrant red colour. Enough to put you off for good. Secondly, there are no notifications or notices that there are new items in your spam folder, you’ll notice new content should you ‘accidentally’ access this folder.

But the best part about Truemessenger is all the stuff it does that other SMS and email apps, such as iOS’s stunted native client or Android’s can’t do, like integrating your inbox with its Truecaller network and scans social networks and databases to assign photos, nicknames, and other contact information to the incoming message without even leaving the app.

Truecaller, by way of Acompli, has really set a high standard here. Truemessenger honestly feels like a next-generation messaging app, something that will force its competitors – if there are ever any – to do a lot of work to catch up. If you want full control over your inbox, who gets to text and call you and all other services that surround it, Truemessenger is your only choice.

While it’s not perfectly clear what this image and text represents, it bears something to do with music, liking it, sharing it and downloading it. MTN’s own website seem to to link to this MTN Music+ site, could this be it? But seeing as how MTN isn’t about to unveil a phone, our money’s on the teaser alluding to a Music sharing service, whether it’s optional or standard service for MTN users and device. Whatever shows up, it’s pretty obvious that April 23rd is going to be a very busy day for MTN — we’ll be sure to attend those events and let you know what MTN, Vodacom and others have to offer.

Whilst not much has been said about the app features, users can easily view movie trailers, book tickets, and access entertainment news as with the Android version of the app.

The app is very sneaky, it will automatically send you run reminders and work out offers even when you’re still suffering from the itis. The Nike+ Running app is free, which is one less thing to worry about this silly season.. besides staying in shape of course, and those last minute Christmas gifts.

MyEdit is a Flipboard-like application which tailors content from South Africa’s top publications to match readers’ interests. Content on MyEdit is aggregated into 20 categories, including news, sport, fashion and entertainment. Majority of this content is gleaned from more than 40 of SA’s most popular magazines, newspapers and websites, such as YOU, DRUM, Fairlady, tvplus, Men’s Health, Finweek, Go!, Move! and True Love.

“The media landscape has undergone a complete overhaul over the past few years,” says Willem Breytenbach, General Manager of Media24 Magazines: Digital. “This is how the idea for MyEdit was born. The vision is to simplify the reading experience in an innovative and accessible manner. Basically, MyEdit allows you to read what you want, when you want it.”

In addition to stories from top magazines, newspapers and carefully selected SA bloggers, users can also contribute to the app by uploading pictures and even their favourite recipes. But what’s the catch? Well, you’ll have to foot R15.99 p/m to have up to two feeds on our MyEdits and R48,99 for Compact up to 5 feeds) bundle. The Select (10 feeds) and Afrikaans (all afrikaans feeds) will cost you R99.99. While the premium, unlimited bundle will set you R199,99 p/month

Lookout for SA Vibe aggregated apps on Myedit.