How this
list gets made.

Who writes it

I’m MiaAppLog. I build iOS apps — small, single-purpose ones — and I review other people’s. That is the disclosure and it is also the reason the site exists: shipping in the same store is how you learn which app is doing something real and which one is a subscription with a good icon.

I make short “best app for…” videos — the ones you may have seen on YouTube and X — and this site is the written version, with the links and the prices the videos don’t have room for.

Every list starts from a moment rather than an App Store category: the last half hour of the day, the first week back at school, a pet that isn’t a cat or a dog. That is the whole idea. Category lists are already everywhere and the App Store wins them; nobody is writing down which five apps are worth having for one specific hour of your life.

How an app gets on a list

• Each pick has to do a different job in that moment. Where two apps work the same way, only one of them makes the list.
• Every app is checked against its own App Store listing before it is described. If a feature can’t be verified, it doesn’t get mentioned.
• Apps link to their developer’s own website, not to their App Store page. Prices and ratings are whatever the App Store showed on the day the list was checked, and they go stale.
• The order is the order I would reach for them in, not a ranking.
• Everything here is checked on the iOS App Store and nothing else. Some of these apps also ship on Android; each app’s own site, linked from its card, is the place to find out.
• Where a card says Skip it if, that is the limitation the app’s own App Store reviewers keep coming back to.

About the stars and the laurel

Every app on a list carries four stars, and an app I built carries four and a half. That is my own score for how well it answers the one moment the list is about — it is not the App Store’s average, which you can see, with the number of ratings behind it, on each app’s own page.

The laurel reading Editor’s pick works the same way, and you should read it the same way: it marks the app on that list that I built. It is not an App Store Editors’ Choice — Apple hands those out, I don’t — and it is not the result of a comparison anyone else could check. Knowing the rule is worth more than the mark: where the half star and the laurel are the only things separating two picks, what they are separating is my app from someone else’s.

Apps I make

A few of my own apps are the best answer I know for one of these moments, so they turn up on lists — never in first place, and always named at the foot of the list they are on. I am not a neutral party about my own apps, and those picks should be read that way.

What I don’t do

No affiliate links, no paid placements, no sponsored lists. Nobody can buy a spot, including me. No app on this site knew it was going to be on it.

Corrections

Prices change, apps get pulled, developers move house. If something here is wrong, tell me on YouTube or X and I’ll fix it.