We’re just coming up to the halfway mark of the year, so I thought it would be a great time to take a look back at some of the best mobile apps and games in 2018 so far.
I’ve included a total of 10 apps that have either launched in 2018 or have been particularly trendy this year. There’s plenty to look forward to in this list, and I’ve also made sure most apps are available for both Android and iOS.
PUBG Mobile
PUBG Mobile has quickly become one of the world’s most popular mobile games. If you haven’t heard about PUBG or Fortnite, I’d be very surprised at this point because both games have been the talking point of nearly every school teacher and parent in the world.
PUBG is a battle royale game - in these types of games you land on an island and must fight it out against a large group of players. Each game can only ever have one winner, so the gameplay can be very tense and exciting.
Despite being on mobile, this version of PUBG has many of the features of the PC and console versions, it runs smoothly, and even has some progression features and unlocks that even the PC version doesn’t have. It’s also completely free.
Fortnite
Fortnite is another battle royale game that has exploded in popularity in 2018. Fortnite is a little different than PUBG. The same one versus all mentality remains, but Fortnite introduces interesting base building features and a range of goofy weapon ideas, such as boogie bombs which send your enemies into an uncontrollable dance when you throw it at them.
Fortnite is also cross platform, which means you can play Fortnite on your phone in a team with your friends that can be on Xbox, PS4, or PC.
Currently, we’re still waiting on the Android version for Fortnite, but it’s coming very soon.
Forest
Forest is a game, but you’re rewarded for not playing it. Sound weird? Here’s how it works. In Forest, you get to grow a plant, but the plant will only grow when you’re not on your phone. It rewards you for staying away from Facebook, YouTube, and any other app on your phone.
The longer you leave your phone on standby, the bigger your plant will grow and the more rewards you will unlock. Come back to your phone and sit on it for too long and your plant will wither away.
If you stay away from your phone for long enough, your plant will spread out and turn into an entire forest.
Each day, you can look back and see how well you performed and how much time you spent away from your smartphone.
Steam Link
If you like playing PC games and have a Steam account, you might be interested in Steam Link. With this app, you are able to stream games from your gaming PC straight to your mobile device.
You can connect up a controller, or just use on-screen controls and get playing in minutes. As long as you have a good WiFi connection, the games you play will look good and will run very smoothly. Essentially, your phone is just restreaming what your PC sees so your PC will be doing all the heavy lifting as far as graphical processing goes.
Currently, Steam Link is only available as a beta on Android, but it should be coming to iOS soon.
LiquidSky
If you don’t have a high-end gaming PC or can’t afford to buy one, you can still have a chance to play PC games on your mobile.
With LiquidSky, you can stream games straight to your mobile, similarly to with Steam Link, but it won’t be your own computer you’ll be streaming from. Instead, you will stream from a gaming PC within LiquidSky’s server room.
You’ll need a good WiFi connection for the games to run smoothly, but if you have that, you’ll be able to run any PC game, or just use any Windows 10 apps and programs from your phone.
Unfortunately, you’ll need to pay a subscription to use LiquidSky, but it’s worth looking into as an alternative. LiquidSky is also still in beta which means no iOS release yet.
Jurassic World Alive
If you remember the hype surrounding Pokemon Go or Snatch, you may be interested in Jurassic World Alive.
Jurassic World Alive is another real world augmented reality game where you can walk around in real life to move your character in the game. In Jurassic World Alive, you are able to explore your own Jurassic park, collect dinosaurs, and battle them with other dinosaurs you see in the wild.
You can even combine dinosaurs to make a variety of unique hybrids. Jurassic World Alive looks and feels very similar to Pokemon Go, although it’s a little more rough around the edges for the time being.
Jurassic World Alive for Android
Replika
Replika is an AI buddy that you can chat to and build a friendship with. It sounds very strange, but it can be a fun way to de-stress, share your thoughts, and create a sort of interactive diary.
You can tell as little or as much as you want to Replika and over time, you'll be able to look back or ask Replika questions about the things you've said to it.
Replika will learn as you tell it more, and over time it'll start to curate the things it says to you based on your previous communications.
Obviously, it seems a little weird treating an AI app as your own personal diary, especially with all of the recent privacy concerns this year, but you're free to say as little or as much as you want about your personal life and it’s a nice way to have somebody to talk to when you don’t actually have somebody to talk to.
We’re fortunate to live in a world where mobile internet is almost everywhere and there are plenty of great mobile data deals all over the place. However, if you end up falling victim to the woes of no-internet-land, you can prepare yourself with an app like Pocket.
With Pocket, it becomes very easy to save articles, blogs, and web pages for offline reading. When using Pocket to save pages, everything gets stored and will be presented to you the same way it was originally shown to you.
Pocket also has unlimited storage for all users so you can store all of the stories and articles you could ever want to.
Google News
Google News has been getting a lot of love from Google recently and their latest app is a work of art in app form. If you care about being up to date with all of the topics you are interested in, Google News will be the app for you.
The app works in the background to provide the kinds of stories you’ll be interested in most through a personalised feed, but it also keeps tracks of the best and latest news through the non-personalised & unbiased top stories feed.
You can download news for offline viewing and do customizing to make sure that your own personal feed only shows the content you’re interested to view.
TickTick
TickTick is a powerful to-do list app for both iOS and Android. We've seen plenty of to-do apps before, but TickTick is a little different. It's for the stats junkies out there that love keeping track of how well they're meeting their tasks.
As you add tasks to your to-do list, you can view your completion rate on a week-by-week basis and quickly go back and forth to see what tasks you have each 7 days.
Adding tasks for your to-do list is also very easy and you can make your tasks categorized. If you use multiple devices, you can sync up your to-do list across all of your devices.
Summary
That wraps up my look at at the best mobile apps and games in 2018 so far. Which apps on this list are you the most interested in trying? Let me know!
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