147258369IN THE
SPOT-
LIGHTThis month’s mobile must-downloads
1 The White Door
£2.49 / Android O £2.99 / iOS
You awake in a white room with
memory loss. Then follows a point-
and-click adventure in a shoebox,
your desire for freedom dovetailing
with unease, suspicious motives
and a sense of creeping horror.
4 FlickType
£1.99 / iOS, watchOS
Fed up yelling at your Apple Watch,
or scribbling letters one at a time?
Go old-school with this surprisingly
usable QWERTY keyboard, with
added alternative word smarts by
way of Digital Crown twiddling.
7 Classic Trek 80
£free (IAPs) / iOS
If Picard has sent you to a happy
place of Trekkie nostalgia, you
might as well go all the way. This
game squirts the ancient Trek-
into your phone, with delightfully
clunky text-based warbird-hunting.
2 Fantastical
£free or £4.99/m / iOS
This calendar uses natural language
for input, integrates weather, adds
sports dates and TV listings, and lets
you propose multiple event times,
after which it sorts your schedule.
It’s more like a PA than an app.5 Unitied
79p / Android O 99p / iOS
What can soko-ban block-sliding
offer mobile gaming in 2020? Quite
a lot, as it turns out – at least if you
concoct 42 deviously designed
levels, each with several blocks
that slide as one.8 Vilmonic
£free (IAPs) / Android, iOS
Life’s almost extinct. It’s your job
to bring it back. No pressure. The
visuals are crude but there’s nuance
and depth here, in what amounts
to a cleverly crafted mash-up of
Spore and Minecraft.3 Nightfall
£free / Android, iOS
There are hints of dungeon-crawling
and Sky co-op in this multiplayer
game where you roam isometric
worlds and battle nightmares.
It’s aimed at kids – there are no
ads/IAP – but fun for adults too.6 Moleskine Journey
£3.99/m / iOS
The fancy notebook people have
made another app that will result in
you buying fewer fancy notebooks.
This one is about bringing balance
to your day with a mixture of
journalling, planning and wellness.9 Giftr
£free or £5.99 monthly / iOS
Gif just won’t die. And if you’re of
the opinion there can never be
enough gifs, this app uses AI to
rifle through your snaps, and helps
you quickly craft jerkily animated
goodies to foist on the world.GOOGLE
DIGITAL
WELLBEING
EXPERIMENTS
£free / Android
Google wants
you to buy
Android
phones... but
not use them,
judging by its
Digital Wellbeing
Experiments.
These free apps
have various
tactics to help
you switch off,
like Screen
Stopwatch’s
guilt-inducing
timer that
counts upwards
whenever you
use your phone.
We Flip is a
game shared
with friends,
where the first
to unlock loses;
Activity Bubbles
gradually fills
your screen as
you faff about;
and Envelope
(for the Pixel 3a
only) has you
put your phone,
erm, in an actual
envelope.
Frankly, Bear
Focus Timer
seems like a lot
less hassle.