11 iOS Apps to Actually Hit Your Goals This Year 🎯
Big ambitions need a solid system. Here's a curated list of iOS apps to kickstart your focus, creativity, and personal growth this year. Some are free, some you'll need to pay for. Worth it.
FoodLlama 🦙
Instead of guessing whether you've hit your protein goals or fighting with a barcode scanner, just take a photo of your meal. Within seconds, FoodLlama tells you exactly what's in it, gives you a health benefit score, and tracks it automatically.
It uses AI to break down your macros and can build you a custom plan to lose or maintain weight based on your activity and age. The first time food tracking hasn't felt like a chore.
Opal 🔒
If your goal is reclaiming your attention, Opal is probably the best app blocking focus tool out there.
Give it access to your screen time data and it tracks your usage while actively helping you block distractions. You can set focus timers for specific durations, or schedule focus time in advance, which is far more effective than relying on manual timers alone.
The standout feature is deep focus mode. Start a session and you literally can't bypass or cancel it. A proper digital lock box for your brain. The onboarding is brilliant too, with some genuinely stark warnings about your screen time habits.
Strukt 📊
Strukt is a productivity hub combining habits, goals, journaling, note taking, and tasks into one dashboard. Think four or five apps in one place, plus a dedicated focus timer.
It's a newer app, so each feature stays fairly basic and streamlined. The note taking and task management aren't complex, but that's the point. Even with a lot packed in, it never feels overwhelming.
The dedicated short and long term goal section is a real highlight, with two goal types: quantity based and step based. Finally somewhere to pull yearly objectives out of Notion and actually track them properly.
Balance 🧘
If you're looking to improve your mental state, Balance is the top recommendation here. It acts as your personal meditation coach rather than just handing you a library of tracks.
It asks you questions daily about your goals and experience, then assembles a meditation suited to that exact moment. There are 10-day plans teaching actual skills like increasing focus or finding relaxation during stress.
The real game changer is the singles. Bite-sized meditations for on the go, including ones built specifically for a less chaotic morning commute. Struggling with sleep? There's a wind-down activity using bilateral stimulation and breathing. There are also immersive meditations using vibration and sound effects to help you properly zone out.
Everything logs directly to Apple Health. Right now you can get a full year free trial.
Abacus AI 🤖
Abacus AI is a super assistant giving you a single interface to access all of the top AI models. GPT, Sonnet, Gemini, Grok, and more. Over 20 models in total on the first tier plan at $10 a month.
It's genuinely extensive as a tool. You can give it custom instructions to tailor results based on who you are and your communication preferences, turn memories on or off, and edit what it remembers about you. You can also organise chats into project folders with their own custom instructions applying across everything inside.
The basic tier covers image and video generation across multiple models, document uploads, and voice chat. Upgrade to Pro at around $20 a month and you get Deep Agent, a genuinely impressive experience that's faster, gives richer results, and comes with 25% more credits. Worth paying for if you've got no strong preference for a specific AI model already.
Joy Daily Planner 🗓️
Tired of jumping between a calendar, a to-do list, and a habit tracker? Joy combines all three into one visual timeline.
It's particularly well suited to people who need clear structure, like students or those with ADHD, since it displays meetings, personal events, and daily habits all in one place. You can quickly adjust tasks, set reminders, and it syncs seamlessly with your existing calendars.
The interface is simple and fluid, and you can see habit streaks right within the timeline, a genuinely nice touch. Most of the basics are available on the free tier.
Kino 🎥
For the creators: Kino is the video app I'm currently obsessed with. It gives you instant grade presets, so you can shoot cinematic video with professional colour grading baked in. No editing later required, it just looks like a film straight out of the camera.
The main reason to use it though is how efficiently it records log video. Shooting log natively can eat up to 6GB per minute in ProRes. Kino shoots in HEVC instead, keeping file sizes far smaller while preserving the dynamic range you need for colour grading, without destroying your iPhone's storage. Worth the one-off cost for that alone.
A Few Quick Mentions
Matter 📖 – A read it later app that's stepped into the gap left by Pocket. Clean, modern, and simple. Bookmark a video, document, or website, then read it in a clutter-free reader view.
FocusPomo ⏱️ – A minimalist Pomodoro timer app, great if procrastination is your issue. Deeply integrated into the Apple ecosystem with live activities, Dynamic Island, standby mode, and Apple Health syncing. You can also whitelist apps to stop yourself opening distracting ones mid-session.
Transit 🚇 – The best real-time transport app going, covering over a thousand cities worldwide. Search your destination and see transport options, departure times, and platforms, often before the station itself updates. Especially handy travelling somewhere unfamiliar.
Apple Reminders ✅ – Genuinely improved over the years and worth a proper look if you haven't revisited it recently.