State of the Apps 2022

What was supposed to be a yearly review of the apps that I use clearly is anything but yearly. The last “State of the Apps” post that I made was way back in 2018 – ah yes, the before pandemic times. In this year’s post, I’m splitting the “Productivity” category in two – “productivity” and “security” because most of the apps listed in that section in last post are actually security related apps. I don’t know why I categorized them as productivity. Let’s get right to it!

Productivity

  1. Todoist
    Todoist has been my go-to to do list app for quite a few years now. I love the ’natural language’ syntax for scheduling, the reminder notifications are incredibly useful, and overall it’s just a really pleasing and easy app to use.

  2. Protonmail
    I’ve been using Protonmail for a few years now. I love their focus on privacy, security, and human rights. I’m looking forward to using their ProtonDrive product after they finish working on and release the desktop & mobile apps. It will be nice to be able to ditch Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.

Social & Messaging

  1. Twitter
    Twitter is not only the app where I am the most social but it’s a very quick place to be able to have access to the news to find out what’s going on in the world.

  2. Discord
    As with the last post. Discord still remains pretty much my only non-SMS messaging app. I’m not thrilled with the way they’ve decided to monetize it but it’s still a really convenient and popular messaging app.

Security

  1. Bitwarden
    I switched my password manager last year. I was a long time happy LastPass user but decided to make the switch to Bitwarden for a variety of reasons. Bitwarden is open source. I always like to support open source software when I can. If you pay for the premium version of Bitwarden, they have a very handy integrated two-factor authentication feature. And, probably most important, Bitwarden is just much cheaper than LastPass. LastPass was, if I remember correctly, $36 per year. Bitwarden is $10 per year (or you can use their free plan).

  2. ProtonVPN
    I value security and privacy so of course I understand the value in using a VPN. As a very happy Protonmail user it just makes sense for me to use ProtonVPN. And as an existing Protonmail user, it just seems much more convenient to use my already existing Proton account for a VPN instead of creating a new account at some other VPN provider. ProtonVPN is also the only VPN I trust that offers a free VPN service because their free VPN is not paid for by selling user data. ProtonVPN’s free service is paid for by paying users like myself (you’re welcome!).

FTC Disclosure: some links in this post are referral links.

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