Twelve apps we absolutely cannot live without

Not to brag, but I can remember a time when apps meant appetizers and they were a good thing. Not anymore, though, and that’s a disaster for multiple reasons.

The obvious, of course, is the labyrinth of clutter created by 200 apps we’ve already downloaded, clogging our screens and draining our batteries as they sell our personal information to anyone with two tenths of a cent to spare.

Pretty much every app on our phones is the property of some company that won’t allow us to give them our money unless we download their software, use our phone’s memory to store it, read the 20 texts they send us each day, and give them permission track our movements, record our conversations, read our messages, sell our data, and perform the lobotomy we agreed to in the terms of service.

Even worse, though, is the gap between the apps we have and those we absolutely need. It can seem like there’s an app for everything, but there’s so much that has been overlooked. Until now.

Almost free (See our Terms of Stealing, section MMMMCMVI, paragraph 274) for any app developer who’s just been replaced by AI, we offer the most essential apps (applications, not appetizers) for 2026-7. These are the critical bits of software that will:

1. Auto-detect surveillance pricing systems and advise that we are so poor we can only afford items offered at 50% off.
2. Use surveillance technology to find out who we’re talking to at the family reunion/business meeting/gentlemen’s club and text us their names.
3. Use surveillance technology, yet again, to send extremely crude photos into the text stream of the guy who’s fixated on his screen after the light turned green, and then share that text with his contact list.
4. Warn us when we’re staring at our phones while walking into a brick wall. (Or a white picket fence, but that will be in the $premium upgrade.)
5. Tell us when we can ignore one of the 348 alerts from the motion/braking/crash/UFO detectors in our cars.
6. Let us know which of our home electronics systems is beeping so we can ignore it and go back to binging Friends.
7. Compile a list of every politician in America, every political party, and every political action committee, and immediately delete any text from any of them.
8. Allow only one calendar reminder from our doctor, dentist, restaurant, airline, delivery service, etc., and delete any reminders that follow.
9. Prevent us from re-posting or forwarding any video for three days, which is enough time to find out if it was a fake, a deep fake or a really, really deep fake. (Hint: It wasn’t real.)
10. Send a high-pitched squeal to the dog in the restaurant who’s begging for food at our table.
11. Use location services to find out where the Door Dash guy actually left our pizza.
12. Turn off location services automatically, so all our other apps can’t rat us out to every tech bro in the world.

The app pandemic is real, but every challenge creates new opportunities for the bold innovators who want to steal my best ideas and get filthy rich for their efforts. Just be sure to obey the Rights and Royalties section (MMMCMMMXXVII, paragraph 842) of our Terms of Stealing and nobody gets hurt.
 
 

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