50 GREAT FREE APPS! for Mac, iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch

Santa may have been and gone but that doesn't mean there aren't still great gifts to be had - so if you got a new Mac, iPhone or iPad for Christmas, picked up an Apple bargain on Black Friday or just feel like treating yourself, there are many great free apps available to give you a very happy new year.

- Written by Carrie Marshall

In this guide, we're going to highlight some of the very best free apps for Mac, for iPhone, for iPad and for Apple Watch - and by free we mean free, not demos, time-limited trials or apps that are unusable without buying in-app purchases. While some of the apps here do have paid versions that unlock additional features or just banish adverts, the ones we've selected deliver the goods without requiring payment.

Over the next 11 pages, we'll discover apps of every kind: apps for drawing and writing, music and movies; apps that are great outdoors, and apps that are perfect for when you're sat on the sofa. As we'll discover, the best things in life really are free.

Free apps for your Mac

Sensational software that doesn't cost a thing

Affinity

> FROM affinity.studio

Available for both Intel and Apple silicon Macs, Canva's Affinity is a direct rival to Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign apps. It's a heavyweight photo editor, vector illustration and page layout app that's perfect for beginners and pros alike. For now it's just for Macs but an iPad version of Affinity is coming soon.

Given the high price of rival apps, there must be a catch - right? Nope: Affinity is free and ad-free, and Canva says it isn't doing anything sneaky in the background such as using your images to train artificial intelligence. Quite the opposite: Affinity is AI-free unless you subscribe to a premium plan, which unlocks additional tools, enabling you to access AI-powered features, such as generative fills or isolating subjects, as well as generative AI image creation.

Alfred

FROM alfredann.​com