Gearburn’s top iPhone apps of 2011

December. That time of the year where we all make lists. Lists of what we enjoyed, what we hated, what we achieved, what went wrong and what we are going to do in future to make sure that we keep growing as people. Top 10’s, Top 50’s, Most Promising, the list goes on. As you would’ve picked up over the last few months of reading my articles, I love lists…so without further ado: my Top iPhone Apps of 2011.

Apple App of the Year: Instagram

A no brainer really. If you have an iPhone and don’t yet have Instagram, leave now and only come back once you’ve downloaded it. Seriously now, it’s free.

For the uninformed: Instagram is photography/social networking app that lets you take photos, apply well-designed filters and then share them on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. You can geo-tag your pictures, add titles and even throw in a bit of tilt-shift if you’re feeling arty. The real beauty of this app however, is in the clever social networking aspect that comes built into the beautiful UI. Much like Twitter, you can follow and be followed by friends and users all over the world and share your creations. Currently sitting at around 14.5 million iOS users, I believe they’ll see a significant jump now that they’ve been awarded this prestigious title.

Runners up: VidRythm, Band Of The Day

Apple Game of the Year: Tiny Tower

I must admit, when looking at the finalists and runners up for this category, I would never have put my money on Tiny Tower. I suppose that’s why I’m not a betting man. Nevertheless, Apple thought it worthy of the title and this is why I’m writing about it now.

Tiny Tower is a SimCity-like game that allows you to build a tower consisting of businesses, apartments and people. Like a mini Donald Trump, you earn money by selling products and renting out the rooms that you’ve built to the various ‘bitizens’ that visit your tower. You can then use this money to build more and more onto your tower. For me, it was fun for the first ten minutes, but I was over it pretty quickly. Give it a run and see what you think. I would’ve gone with Tiny Wings or Superbrothers: Swords & Sorcery instead.

Runners up: Tiny Wings, Touchgrind BMX

Most Downloaded Paid App of 2011: Angry Birds

The undisputed champion of the App Store really cleaned up this year, taking the top spot for most downloaded app of 2011 on iPhone AND iPad. Again, if you have an iPhone and don’t yet have this in one of your games folders, go and get it now, even if you just try the free version!

Angry Birds is just one of those classic games that will live forever. Like Super Mario on your Golden China, Sonic the Hedgehog on your MegaDrive and Tony Hawk on your PSone, Angry Birds is one of those games that is on every single iDevice that I know of. It is the app that is always open on test devices at electronics stores around the world, a low involvement, highly addictive and deathly simple game that enthrals and entertains players of all ages. You can literally play it for five minutes or five hours, in the queue at the bank or killing time on your couch, but you all know about it so I’m going to stop right here.

Runners up (iPhone): Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds: Seasons
Runners up (iPad): Pages, Angry Birds Seasons

Most Downloaded Free App of 2011: Facebook

Again, another no-brainer. People who are on iPhones all have this app somewhere close, it just makes sense. You see, it’s all about Facebook integration these days. A good percentage of apps all link into Facebook in some way or another: you can share photos from Instagram, exercise logs from RunKeeper and a whole lot more. To be honest though, I do believe that Facebook could do more with the app overall and make it less buggy but I suppose the app is not really where their priorities lie at this point in time. The last few updates have just been bug fixes and minor changes; I’d like to see what they’re going to do next,

Runners up: Pandora Radio, Words With Friends Free