Spencer Schneier
Technology Editor

Now is one of the best times ever to be a user of technology. With app stores and hordes of developers trying to make the best app for your smartphone, it is remarkable the volume of high quality apps that exist. It can also be overwhelming, however, and that is why this article will outline a few apps that every user should download.

Robinhood

For many college students, trading stocks seems a daunting task. Investing a minimum of a few thousand dollars, paying commissions and not knowing much of what’s going on, all stand as pretty major impediments to the average student looking to get into the stock market. Robinhood, born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, is a startup that has built an app that allows anyone with an iPhone or Android phone to trade stocks, with no minimum deposit or added fees. The app consistently wins design awards from Apple, and has proven to be wildly popular among millennials. The app is free to download in the Google Play Store or the App Store.

Sleep Cycle

Sleep is a bit of a foreign concept to many college students, but when students do get sleep they want to make sure they’re maximizing it. Sleep Cycle uses the sensors and data collected on your phone while you sleep to monitor your sleep patterns and the quality of your sleep. It will even wake the user up at an ideal time in your sleep cycle, and do it gradually so that users wake up in a positive mood. The app is free to download, and has s $1.99 per year subscription option that unlocks premium features.

Google Photos

Google Photos is the default photos app for Android phones, so this is mainly directed at iPhone users. If you are one of the poor suckers Apple stuck with a 16GB phone, there is finally a solution other than constantly deleting photos and apps. Google Photos offers free, unlimited high quality storage for photos, and is free to download on iOS. The user can sign in with a Google account and can then access those photos anywhere. It has options to automatically backup photos to the cloud, which means that photos can be removed from the phone once they are saved to Google Photos. Google says they will not be accessing user’s photos at any point to data mine, which of course would be one potential drawback.

The app even has a smart assistant that creates slideshows of things like vacations and events automatically, and can recognize people’s faces and group pictures of them into one album.

Pocket

With so many great media outlets on the web these days, it can be tough to find the time to consume all of the content that is out there. Pocket allows users an option to save articles to their device and download them, so that they can access them at any time. This app is free, and also has a browser extension that allows users to save links and articles from their browser, which will be synced on their phone when they go to read them later.