50 GREAT FREE APPS!

for Mac, iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch

Written by Carrie Marshall

Image credits: Apple Inc, Affinity/Canva Pty Ltd, Running with Crayons Ltd, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licence/Mozilla Public Licence v2.0, Plex, Google LLC, FreeMacSoft,Blackmagic Design Pty Ltd, VideoLAN Non-Profit Org, Gumroad/Georgi Gerganov, The HandBrake Team, Raycast Technologies Ltd, Tracktion Software Corp, Flipboard, Brent Simmons, TLA Systems Ltd/James Thomson, Sketchbook Inc, WhatsApp LLC, iCandi Apps Ltd, Alphablocks Ltd, Xe Corp Inc Image credits: Apple Inc, Ton Roosendaal/Blender Foundation, Kagi Inc, Alan Yan, Letterboxd Ltd, Flexibits Inc, Agile Tortoise Inc, AllTrails LLC, Gentler Stories LLC, Atlas Obscura Inc, Nike Inc, Citymapper Ltd, RetroArch, Flavorish, Grailr LLC, Discog, Overcast Radio LLC, Podcast Media LLC, P2ER GmbH

Santa may have been and gone but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still great gifts to be had – so if you got a new Mac, iPhone or iPad for Christmas, picked up an Apple bargain on Black Friday or just feel like treating yourself, there are many great free apps available to give you a very happy new year.

In this guide, we’re going to highlight some of the very best free apps for Mac, for iPhone, for iPad and for Apple Watch – and by free we mean free, not demos, time-limited trials or apps that are unusable without buying in-app purchases. While some of the apps here do have paid versions that unlock additional features or just banish adverts, the ones we’ve selected deliver the goods without requiring payment.

Over the next 11 pages, we’ll discover apps of every kind: apps for drawing and writing, music and movies; apps that are great outdoors, and apps that are perfect for when you’re sat on the sofa. As we’ll discover, the best things in life really are free.

Free apps for your Mac

Sensational software that doesn’t cost a thing

Image credits: Apple Inc, Affinity/Canva Pty Ltd

Affinity

FROM affinity.studio Available for both Intel and Apple silicon Macs, Canva’s Affinity is a direct rival to Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign apps. It’s a heavyweight photo editor, vector illustration and page layout app that’s perfect for beginners and pros alike. For now it’s just for Macs but an iPad version of Affinity is coming soon.

Given the high price of rival apps, there must be a catch – right? Nope: Affinity is free and ad-free, and Canva says it isn’t doing anything sneaky in the background such as using your images to train artificial intelligence. Quite the opposite: Affinity is AI-free unless you subscribe to a premium plan, which unlocks additional tools, enabling you to access AI-powered features, such as generative fills or isolating subjects, as well as generative AI image creation.

Alfred

FROM alfredapp.com If you wish that the Spotlight search feature on your Mac was more flexible and customisable, Alfred is the app you’ve been waiting for. And the app that macOS 26’s Spotlight has apparently been taking some of its inspiration from. It’s a powerful and flexible search tool that’s particularly good for custom web searches; it’s an app launcher; a clipboard manager; a calculator; a keyboard shortcutter; a file previewer; a text expander… you get the picture! The free ad-free version is financed by power users who buy the Powerpack expansion that gives Alfred even more superpowers.

LibreOffice

FROM libreoffice.org Many of today’s office apps run in the cloud and offer all kinds of AI-based assistants and whizzy features. But if you prefer your apps to be more straightforward and less cloud-y then the free and open source LibreOffice is an excellent alternative to Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote. It very closely resembles older versions of Microsoft Office, runs very quickly and is very reliable. Don’t get this one from the Mac App Store, though; the developers have to charge for the app there, but it’s free to download for both Intel and Apple silicon Macs direct from the LibreOffice website.

Plex Media Server

FROM plex.tv ALSO ON iPhone, iPad Plex Media Server is a media organiser for music, photos and videos. It runs on your Mac and makes it easy to access everything from your Apple TV 4K or other Apple devices via your local network. The server software and accompanying apps are free, nice to use and work brilliantly; there is a paid version but you don’t need it to use the core streaming features. And because it’s cross-platform you can use it with non-Apple devices too.