I delete a lot of apps. My rule is brutal: if an app hasn’t earned its place after thirty days, it goes. What surprises me, year after year, is which apps survive that test. It’s almost never the big-name apps with Super Bowl-sized marketing budgets. It’s the ones built by one person, or a team small enough to fit in a minivan — apps where you can email the developer and get a reply from an actual human.
Here are ten indie apps that have survived every cleanout on my phone. Prices and features change, so treat the details below as a snapshot, but the reasons I keep them haven’t moved in years.
1. Overcast
Marco Arment built Overcast mostly by himself and has run it that way for over a decade. It’s a podcast player, which sounds boring until you use its two killer features: Smart Speed, which trims silences without making anyone sound like a chipmunk, and Voice Boost, which levels out episodes recorded in echoey closets. The business model is unusual and refreshingly honest — the app is free, and superfans can pay for a patronage tier that adds nothing but warm feelings and some theme colors.
2. CARROT Weather
Brian Mueller’s weather app is the rare utility with a personality. The forecasts are genuinely good — you can pick your data source and customize nearly every pixel of the layout — but the selling point is CARROT herself, a snarky AI that mocks you for getting rained on. Under the jokes is one of the most configurable apps on the App Store. The subscription funds real server costs, which is exactly what subscriptions are for.
3. Drafts
Greg Pierce’s Drafts solves a problem you didn’t know you had: capturing text before you’ve decided what it is. Every note starts life as plain text, and only later do you decide whether it becomes a reminder, an email, a markdown file, or nothing. On the home screen it works as a pressure valve — open, type, close. It’s the fastest way to get a thought out of your head.
4. Halide
Halide, from the two-person team of Ben Sandofsky and Sebastiaan de With at Lux Optics, is what a camera app looks like when the people building it genuinely care about photography. Manual focus and exposure controls that feel like real camera dials, plus computational tricks like depth capture. If the built-in Camera app ever frustrates you, this is the fix.
5. Flighty
Ryan Jones and a small team built Flighty for people who watch flight radars for fun. It tracks your flights with live maps, predicts delays before airlines announce them, and pushes gate changes faster than the airline’s own app. If you fly more than twice a year, it quietly saves hours of airport anxiety.
6. Bear
Bear, from Italy’s Shiny Frog, is a markdown notes app that gets the details right: fast sync, beautiful typography, nested tags instead of folders. It hits the sweet spot between “too simple to be useful” and “too complicated to open.” The free tier is real, and the Pro subscription is mostly for sync and themes.
7. Things 3
Cultured Code’s task manager is a small German team that ships rarely and perfectly. Things has been my to-do app for years because it never lectures me about productivity systems — it’s just a fast, gorgeous inbox for the day ahead. Notably, it’s a one-time purchase with paid major upgrades, proof that the subscription model isn’t the only way to survive.
8. Dark Noise
Charlie Chapman built Dark Noise as a side project while working a full-time job: ambient sounds — rain, cafe, brown noise — in a package so polished Apple featured it repeatedly. It’s a great example of a tiny scope executed extremely well. Thirty-plus sounds, beautiful icons, Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, done.
9. Structured
Structured merges your calendar and to-do list into a single visual timeline of the day, and it comes from a small European team rather than a startup with a growth-hacking department. For people who think in timelines rather than checklists, it clicks immediately.
10. CardPointers
Emmanuel Crouvisier built CardPointers to answer one question: which card should I use for this purchase? It tracks every card’s reward categories and running promotions, and surfaces them automatically when you’re shopping. It’s a one-person company solving a niche problem with real money attached — indie software at its purest.
The pattern worth noticing
Look at the list again: a podcast player, a weather app, a text capture tool, a camera. None of these are “ideas nobody thought of.” They’re ordinary categories where a tiny team out-cared the giants. That’s the thread I’ll keep pulling on in this blog — the apps are good because of who builds them, not despite it.
Want to find more like these before anyone else? Read my guide on how to find under-the-radar indie apps, or see what goes on behind the scenes in what it’s really like to ship an app alone.