Wired.com Readers’ Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009

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Post: Wired.com Readers’ Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009 /December 11th, 2009


Wired.com Readers’ Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009


Earlier this week we asked Wired.com readers to submit and vote on their favorite iPhone apps of 2009, and the winners have been chosen.

The voting process was simple: Add your favorite app(s) using our Reddit widget, then vote up or down on each other’s submissions. Surprisingly, the list of your favorites is fairly short. So many of you adored one particular app that rather than vote on the existing submission, you decided to submit it over and over and over. That led to about 80 redundant submissions of the app, giving it a resounding victory.

In the end, only five iPhone apps accrued enough votes to be deemed your favorites of 2009. That’s OK — quality over quantity, right? Here they are.

1. Words With Friends

Yes, the iPhone game that readers loved so much they nominated it again and again was Words With Friends. It’s an iPhone version of Scrabble, which is hardly original, but the social integration of the game is done beautifully. You can invite and play with multiple iPhone users at the same time; you can chat within the app; and you can also set up Words With Friends to send you a push notification whenever it’s your turn to make a move. All very Web 2.0 savvy.

My favorite feature is a pair of eyeballs that pop up in the corner of the screen, signifying when your opponent is looking at the board. That’s just darn cute. There’s a free version, Words With Friends Free, which is ad-supported, and the version, Words With Friends, is ad-free.

2. The Moron Test



Apparently a lot of you enjoy gauging your intelligence (or lack thereof), because The Moron Test received a lot of votes. The app is a series of tests evaluating your ability to understand and follow directions. Touch the ducks from biggest to smallest, for example, or tap the green button twice, then the red button and the blue button. Whenever you mess up, the screen reads “FAIL!” and you can either choose to start over or use a continue. Fun stuff, albeit a jokey method to test one’s smarts. Moron Test is in the App Store.

3. Pocket God



When you’re sitting around bored at work, do you ever fantasize about torturing small creatures for fun? Clearly, a lot of Wired.com readers do, and fortunately their outlet is not their pets or younger siblings, it’s an iPhone app called Pocket God. It’s a free-form scenario of sorts where you assume the role of a sadistic god and you can abuse the living hell out of a group of islanders, known as Pygmies. You can control the environment in countless ways to kill the Pygmies: throw lighting bolts, feed them to the sharks, harpoon them underwater and so on. Politically correct it is not. Pocket God is in the App Store.

4. Adobe Photoshop.com Mobile


Taking good photos with the iPhone is a challenge, thanks to the gadget’s shoddy camera. Even the superior autofocusing camera on the iPhone 3GS only goes part way to fixing the problem. That’s why Adobe’s Photoshop.com app is a huge help, because it can make you look like a less crummy photographer. The app features very basic editing tools that are extremely easy to apply, such as setting exposure, adding soft focus and adjusting tint. That’s pretty nifty, and the best part is it’s free.

5. Thirty One

311A sizable number of you voted on the card game Thirty One. In the game, each player gets dealt three cards, and the goal is to get a hand with an added value of 31 (or closer to it than your opponents) by only counting cards in the same suit. Fun stuff, and it’s a buck in the App Store.