12 Apps That Will Enhance Your Quarantine Time At Home
Quarantine is hard for the extroverted people, I understand that. I’m not extroverted by any stretch of the imagination and thus quite enjoy the social distancing, but even the introverts are getting cabin fever. Here are twelve apps to enhance your quarantine.
1. Uno
‘UNO’ is a colorful card game where players attempt to get their hand to zero while making their friends draw as many cards as possible. The game plays just as you would expect with a simple tap and swipe gestures, and has some entertaining animations when you play cards.
There are various game types with online and offline functionality. If you don’t automatically have friends playing with you or, you know, friends in general, a link to your game can be shared via iMessage (or Messenger for android users). Now, you can get angry at your friends for making you draw twelve cards without being in the same room.
‘UNO’ is free to download for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.
Click or tap here to download now.
2. Discord
Group virtual movie nights have always been a thing, but now they are vital forms of social activity. Among the wide array of apps being used to organize and assemble group movie nights, two major contenders seem to have emerged to fight the quarantine: Discord and Netflix Party. But for right now, we’re talking about Discord.
Many people have been turning to Discord, a popular chat client that allows people to create semi-private, invite-only servers, for mimicking something closer to offline interaction. Discord is similar to Slack and many other chat clients, but Discord has a prominent voice chat feature that can be active all the time. Discord’s voice channels allow users to talk to each other in real-time while they multitask.
Discord also comes with a screen-sharing feature that allows groups of people to watch a movie if one of them is streaming it. While comparable clients like Zoom have features designed primarily for project management and work, Discord is primarily designed around socialization and has a more informal aesthetic.
Click here to download
3. Netflix Party
Enter Netflix Party, a Google Chrome browser extension originally developed by Airbnb engineer Stephan Boyer in 2015. He built the extension, which lets multiple Netflix users sync and watch movies on the platform together, “as a way to hang out and have fun with friends.” Though he exited the project in 2017, he reported a massive surge in use in 2020. “Hundreds of thousands of people have installed Netflix Party since the beginning of the year,” he said. “It now has over a million users.”
Netflix Party’s current development team corroborated the increased use, with a spokesperson telling that it’s “experiencing a huge surge in traffic and it’s all hands on deck.” According to them, “the earliest adopters were college students and military couples in long-distance relationships, but the app has since expanded and now serves friends, parents, and kids, extended families, online dating, as well as local and online communities.”
As word of the extension spread, online communities turned #NetflixParty into a social hashtag, with many people organizing group chats and scheduling events around the feature.
The spokesperson called the extension an “excellent complement to the typical ways we socialize remotely — voice/video calls, social networks, and online/text messaging.” Netflix Party is currently only available through Google Chrome, but the team is looking to expand to other browsers and devices as its popularity grows. Meanwhile, numerous other group streaming and chat clients have been publicizing ways to use their platforms in the time of quarantine.
Of course, there are plenty of other forms of online socialization, from game-playing to group singalongs, for which you might need more than a simple screen-share and a chat window.
Click here to download.
4. Draw Something
Stay connected with friends during self-isolation by playing games that allow you to connect remotely. Draw Something is one of the best apps to download during the quarantine. It facilitates remote connection and is fun, easy and lighthearted. You choose a word to draw for your friends and then watch them try to guess what in the world you’re drawing. It’s a fun back and forth game that’ll make the time pass just a little bit quicker.
In the Draw Something app, players hand-draw pictures using a rudimentary art pad; their opponent then attempts to guess what the drawing is, selecting from a group of letters. If they’re stumped, players can detonate “bombs” to eliminate some of the letters, though that doesn’t always help. Solving puzzles earns players coins, which they can use to buy more bombs. Players can play with the people they know or play with random opponents.
The “with Friends” trend has spawned plenty of imitators, but DRAW SOMETHING is unique. The game takes the basic concepts of Pictionary — drawing something from scratch and having others guess that object — and adds a one-on-one competitive element. It’s utterly addictive and a heck of a lot of fun.
For parents, that could be a problem, though. Since the game is unregulated and you can play random opponents. With the inclusion of a Facebook tie-in, you can always play against someone you know and trust. The hard part will be putting the game down.
Click here to download.
5. Headspace
We’re living in a time of constant hysteria, anxiety, and uncertainty. So, it’s more important than ever to take care of your mental health. Taking time out of your day in self-isolation to journal, meditate or practice gratitude is a great way to ensure you’re taking care of yourself. And, downloading a mindfulness app can help. An app like Headspace will lead you through guided meditations while others will give you prompts to help you think about all of the things you’re grateful for.
Headspace is here for you. To help support you through this time of crisis, we’re offering some meditations you can listen to any time. These are part of a larger collection in the Headspace app — free for everyone — called ‘Weathering the Storm.’ It includes meditations, sleep, and movement exercises to help you out, however, you’re feeling. It’s our small way of helping you find some space and kindness for yourself and those around you.
Click here to download.
6. Todoist
Chances are that if you have a job that makes it possible to work from home, you’re already doing so for quarantine. And, that can be a challenge for a lot of people who’ve never done it before. With so many distractions at home, you’ll want to download an app that can help you stay on top of your productivity. It’s the ultimate to-do list app that will help you stay on top of tasks by sending your reminders and monitoring deadlines.
There’s a free version, and it’s very good, though Todoist is better at the Premium level. If you need an app to organize your tasks, either by yourself or with others, Todoist will keep you happy and productive. For the last 5 years, it’s appeared in hundreds of listicles and thousands of times on social media as one of the better ways to manage your tasks. Todoist continues to evolve the application as we speak towards becoming the most used task management application.
Todoist is a strong, powerful task management software that can be used for small teams, individuals and professionals to manage anything from a shopping list to major projects at work. Todoist can be a simple task manager or solid collaborative tool for teams alike.
The flexibility of Todoist allows for many users to bring simple set-ups or advanced and more complex task management with ease. Enjoyable for the light user or the more serious of productivity fans.
7. Webtoon
For mature fans of serial comics, anime, and graphic novels, this is an absolute feast of storytelling and illustration, but it’s not for kids. As with any user-generated content, Line Webtoon – Daily Comics has a range of quality, but there are certainly stories to match a wide range of interests. The platform is easy to use and understand and there’s a lot of community engagement, including users who help translate comics into other languages.
With all that said, this is a platform with mature content intended for mature readers and it behaves accordingly. Moderation relies heavily on user reporting, and there seems to be no one watching to make sure users are being kind to authors or each other unless someone reports otherwise. It’s perfect to pass the time during the quarantine.
Line Webtoon – Daily Comics is the companion app to the website of the same name. It functions as an e-reader for the large collection of user-generated serial comics that are uploaded to the site.
Those who want to share their own comics will need to do so on the website. The app (and site) are Korean, and the content has an overwhelming anime flair with quite a lot of fantasy elements. There’s no automated moderation to go along with the community guidelines; much of the moderation comes from community reporting.
My personal favorites are Siren’s Lament, Saphie the One-Eyed Cat, and Lore Olympus. But there are millions of other comics to pick from.
Click here to download.
8. Audible
Audible gives you access to over 470,000 audiobook titles (and counting!). Although Audible is an Amazon company, it’s not included in a Prime membership and you have to pay separately for it. You also don’t get a discount for having both services and you have to pay the full price for each of them. It’s a drag for sure, but considering all the stuff you get in an Audible membership, it makes sense.
Since everyone is in quarantine, this is an easy way to pass the time. When you first sign up, you’re eligible for a 30-day free trial, so you won’t get charged right away. The Gold membership includes a monthly credit for one audiobook, plus two Audible Originals and access to daily deals and audio-guided wellness programs.
You can also get subscriptions to three leading national U.S. newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. It’s one of the lesser-known benefits and it’s huge, especially since you can get access to all three papers through Audible’s app and there’s no additional charge for it.
Each Audible credit is like an audiobook waiting to be listened to. A single credit is redeemable toward one title—it doesn’t matter the retail price or how long it is—and you can carry that credit over for months and use it whenever you feel like it, although credits do expire after a year.
Once you redeem an Audible credit, that audiobook is immediately added to your account’s personal library, which lists every book you’ve ever purchased, along with the author; audio length; date added to your account; and a rate-and-review section, where you can grade the overall audio recording, performance, and story using a five-star system.
Click here to download.
9. MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is the best calorie counting app due to its massive food database, cross-platform availability, and a long list of compatible apps and devices. It’s not a weight loss program, but it’s a great tool to use in conjunction with one.
We live in a world of temptation, cheap pleasures, stress, and convenience, all of which can affect our diets and health. Managing weight, whether you want to lose, gain, or maintain it, takes diligence as well as a bit of math. You need to know how many calories you consume and how many you burn. MyFitnessPal is the best calorie-counting app on the market.
It has a mobile app and website that connect you to the largest database of foods so that you can easily look up what you eat and record it in the app. At the end of each day, MyFitnessPal gives you insightful feedback that you can actually use to help reach your weight goal. While it’s not a diet program, it can help you make changes you make to your diet by providing nutritional information. MyFitnessPal is an Editors’ Choice among apps for health and fitness.
To use MyFitnessPal, you do log everything you eat and drink each day. You can also log activities either manually or by connecting the app to a supported fitness app or fitness tracker. The list of options is long and includes all the top players, like Fitbit, Garmin, Polar, Strava, Misfit, Nokia Health Mate, and so on.
When you look for and log the foods you eat, you can adjust the portion size to a fine degree. If you only put one-third of a banana on your plate, it’s simple enough to record that. You can also adjust the serving size to begin with, so half of a large banana doesn’t count the same as half a small one. Often, you can choose grams, cups, ounces. MyFitnessPal makes it easy to find the right measurement estimations for you.
Click here to download.
10. Tasty
What’s perhaps surprising about so many recipe apps is how unappetizing they are. They somehow manage to make food boring. But not Tasty. Right from the off, this app bombards you with colorful photos of tasty treats, including so many desserts that your arteries will harden just from you looking at the screen. Giving you something to practice on during your time in quarantine.
The really smart bit, though, is when things start to move. Almost every recipe is headed up with a little video that shows the dish being made in super-fast fashion. It feels like an infusion of social media urgency – fitting, given that this app has essentially taken the best ingredients from the popular Tasty website and turned them into a yummy filling for your iOS device.
If you’ve ever visited tasty.co on an Apple device, you might mull that an app is superfluous. But although the content of the app and website are broadly the same, using Tasty on your iPad or iPhone improves the experience in key ways.
There are no ads. The interface is very much a full-screen thing, looking particularly impressive on the iPad. And when you delve into recipe pages, various bits of information don’t fight for attention. Instead, the video that blazes through making the dish fills much of the display. Scroll down a bit and you can then peruse the ingredients list and preparation steps.
If just looking at written instructions doesn’t do it for you, Tasty further improves on the website by providing a second view that augments single steps with properly big text and a relevant video snippet. It’s ideal stuff when your iPad’s propped up in the kitchen and you’re trying to figure out what to do next in quarantine.
Click here to download.
11. Ancestry
You’ve probably seen the ads for Ancestry where users share their stories of discovering long-lost relatives and learning more about their family’s past. While you may not find out that you’re descended from royalty or distantly related to a famous historical figure, Ancestry is a great resource for building a family tree and filling out missing information, such as birthplaces and marriage records of long-lost relatives. This Editors’ Choice-winning genealogy software also lets you collaborate with other family members to build family trees. Best of all, its intuitive interface makes it easy for you to learn all of its features and construct your family history in no time.
It allows you to find your family history whilst you’re stuck in the house for quarantine. You can dip your toe into the water with a 14-day free trial, though I initially had trouble finding that offer on the company’s website. You will have to supply a credit card number for the free trial, though, so be sure to keep on top of that; your account will automatically renew to the paid plan if you do nothing after that period. Helpfully, your trial’s expiration date is displayed on your home screen. You can cancel the trial online or by calling customer service.
If you choose to start from scratch, the easiest way to begin is by creating your own record. Ancestry says most of their records are from before 1930, so it recommends adding someone born before that time to get the ball rolling. As you add more family members, you start to receive hints in the form of little shaking leaves; click on the leaf and you can view available public records such as birth, death, marriage and census information that may match up to your relatives. It’s up to you to confirm whether it’s legit or not.
Click here to download.
12. News Break
Newsbreak is an award-winning online news and current affairs magazine published in the Philippines. It began publication as a weekly magazine on January 24, 2001, and converted to its current format in 2006. Newsbreak is now part of the Rappler service. It’s something that will allow you to keep up with the information on COVID-19 whilst you’re stuck in quarantine.
News Break is your destination for local content. Operating anytime anywhere in the United States, News Break keeps you informed about your local community, town, and city in light speed. Better informed, better life.
News Break, as a geolocation-aware app that always puts you in the center of the local content discovery, is made just for you: who is genuinely curious about what’s going on in your local communities and around the world. From curated local briefing to professionally hand-picked national/world headlines, from emergency alerts to 360 full coverage, NewsBreak is always the must-have news app that gives you insights and value.
Click here to download.
