A fun language-learning app
Duolingo
Learn a new language through short, daily lessons.
Buying Options
Designed like a game, Duolingo (iOS and Android) offers daily mini lessons for close to 40 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, and Klingon. Though the jury’s out on how effective it is for mastering another language, it does make building familiarity with a new language fun and rewarding. You’re encouraged to keep up your streak by returning to the app each day—for better or worse, my teenage daughter frequently asks for more screen time just so she doesn’t break hers.
Wordy brain games
NYT Games
Play Wordle, the Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee, and other word and logic games.
Buying Options
We’d be remiss not to include our favorite puzzle app. The NYT Games app (iOS and Android) offers a collection of brain-exercising options, including Sudoku, Connections, and the Crossword. You can also keep track of your stats (such as your solve rate) and compete against your friends in the Mini Crossword.
A picture perfect tool
Snapseed
This free, intuitive app includes typically premium features, such as raw-file editing and selective editing.
Buying Options
Wirecutter’s pick for the best free photo editing app, Snapseed (iOS and Android), comes with a range of easy-to-learn tools that let you sharpen, brighten, and enhance your photos. For those who don’t have Instagram but want to play with their images, Snapseed offers a series of filters as well as other special effects such as “vintage” and “grunge” that can be applied to their photos. The ad-free app is made by Google, but it doesn’t require you to use Google Photos or upload your pictures to Google.
The best de-stressing app
Headspace
This easy-to-navigate app has the largest variety of meditations, including plenty for newbies.
Buying Options
Headspace (iOS and Android), our pick for the best meditation app, comes with a series of guided meditation courses (broadly categorized as Meditation, Sleep, Movement, and Music) that can be soothing and instructive for teens juggling a lot of stress. It also offers sessions that address specific issues, such as “Finding Focus,” “In Pain SOS,” and “Creative Writing.” Headspace offers individual or family annual subscriptions. We also recommend a couple of free options in our guide to meditation apps.
The best free to-do list
TickTick
This free app helps you keep track of all the things you need to do.
Buying Options
As their responsibilities increase, a productivity app like TickTick (iOS and Android) can help tweens and teens manage their growing list of projects, deadlines, and other obligations. Our pick for the best free To-Do List app, TickTick helps them organize and prioritize that list independently by visualizing what’s urgent and important—and what’s not.
A self-care pet
Finch
This cute app encourages you to take care of yourself as you take care of a digital pet.
Buying Options
Part self-care, part productivity, part digital pet, Finch (iOS and Android) lets you jot down daily goals—make your bed, drink water, do your homework—and rewards you when you complete them. As you take care of your tasks, reflect on your feelings, and send positive vibes to your friends (my daughter and her friends send each other preset messages like “high five” or “encouragement”), you collect digital currency that you can spend on decorating your pet’s home and buying them clothes and accessories. Along the way, Finch offers nuggets of encouragement and advice. And don’t worry: You can’t kill your digital pet, even if you neglect it for days (or weeks).
A naturalist in your pocket
PlantNet Plant Identification
Point your camera at a mystery plant, and this ad-free app can help identify it.
Buying Options
Seek by iNaturalist
This free app can identify birds, plants, and other wildlife.
Buying Options
PlantNet Plant Identification (iOS and Android) and Seek by iNaturalist (iOS and Android) are great apps for curious kids as they’re out and about (or just in their own backyard). Using the phone’s camera, the PlantNet app—our pick for the best plant identification app—can quickly and accurately distinguish thousands of species of flora. Similarly, Seek taps into the iNaturalist database to help you pinpoint and learn more about local wildlife, plants, and even poop. Find out the taxonomy of a particular flower, the seasonality of a specific bird, or if others in your neighborhood have also spotted the same species of snake. We also like the iNaturalist app (iOS and Android), which lets budding citizen scientists contribute to projects.
The best homework scanner
Adobe Scan
This free app creates clean PDFs.
Buying Options
Whether for a research project or another homework assignment, Adobe Scan (iOS and Android), our pick for the best mobile scanning app, can be a useful tool for students. The free and easy-to-use app scans, saves, and creates PDFs of important documents, from a page in a book to a permission slip.
A fun way to connect
Wavelength
This fun party game poses intriguing questions for you and your friends to debate.
Buying Options
Wavelength (iOS and Android) isn’t a game you can play by yourself. A mobile version of one of our favorite board games, it requires you to connect and chat with another person (or more) as you weigh questions such as, “Are kangaroos cute?” Senior staff writer Melanie Pinola plays it with her teenage daughter remotely when they have lunch or other breaks at the same time. Each round is short (as little as 15 minutes) and the prompts—interesting and sometimes outrageous—can lead to long conversations even after the game is over.
This article was edited by Kalee Thompson and Catherine Kast.