With our annual OS reviews out of the way, Federico and I will be covering our favorite indie apps that take advantage of Apple’s latest OS features. We have hundreds to draw from and instead of one big sweeping roundup, we’re going to do a bunch of smaller ones as we work our way through our lists.

To start with, we have six excellent apps that make use of Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, extra-large widgets, and more. There’s a lot of innovation packed into this group, so let’s dive into the details, and check back soon for more roundups.

Federico

Things

Cultured Code’s beautiful task manager is no stranger to supporting major Apple OS releases: while the company is keeping quiet on their plans for a possible Things 4 (Things 3 was released in May 2017), for the past nine years Things has regularly received support for new versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS on day one. The app’s iOS 27 update is no exception, and it makes for a great demo of some of the new features of Siri AI as well as XL widgets for iPhone. It also serves as an example of the limitations of Siri AI – and not because of Cultured Code.

The updated Things app integrates with Siri AI and Spotlight, allowing you to retrieve and open tasks from anywhere on iOS and iPadOS, as well as manage tasks with the assistant using its several input methods. In my tests, Cultured Code’s integration worked well, but Apple’s slow on-device indexing was the problem. Soon after installing the app, I was able to ask Siri to create a reminder, and it prompted me to pick a destination app again because I’d installed a few more task managers since I last confirmed my previous choice. After picking Things, I was able to create a task, which landed in the inbox, and then follow-up with Siri AI by saying “make it due at 3 PM”, and it worked.

The issues I ran into, which are outside of Cultured Code’s control, are due to how long it takes iOS 27 and Siri AI to build an index of the app’s capabilities and data structure. For instance, I created an ‘iOS 27 Review’ list in Things, but, after three hours, Siri AI still can’t find it. As I noted in my review, I believe this is going to be a major challenge for most third-party apps in the short term as users download them, expect them to work with Siri, but the indexing isn’t going quickly enough.

Regardless of Apple’s technical problems, Things’ integration with Siri AI shows the path forward for third-party task managers on iOS. I also recommend reading the developers’ guide on how to prompt Siri AI for the app.

Locally AI

I covered the differences between Apple’s two flavors of local Foundation models (AFM 3 Core and 3 Core Advanced) in yesterday’s review, but there’s no better way to actually take the model for a spin than Locally AI.

The app, which is now part of the LM Studio family of products and can connect to a remote Mac using LM Link, now offers an ‘Apple Foundation Advanced’ model that, assuming you have a compatible device, lets you prompt Apple’s new on-device model.

A good way to prompt this model is to give it an image: for the first time, a local Foundation model comes with vision capabilities, and I’ve found Core Advanced to be surprisingly strong at describing things like iPhone screenshots, selfies with different facial expressions, and more. Obviously, it comes with limits: Locally AI’s harness doesn’t expose tools to the model, which means it can’t fetch web content and, say, summarize articles for you in the app. Its knowledge and creativity are also quite limited, as you can see from the non-joke it created in the screenshot above.

Still, despite the limitations of the model itself, Locally AI is an excellent utility for running local models on iPhone and iPad, and if you’re curious to see what Apple’s bigger models feels like outside of Siri AI with your own prompts, I recommend checking it out.

Dark Noise

Charlie Chapman’s Dark Noise has long been my favorite utility to play white noise and other sound effects to relax or focus, and the app has received a substantial update for iOS 27 worth checking out.

First, there’s a good-looking new Liquid Glass player that fluidly morphs on-screen from a mini-player docked at the bottom of the app into a full-screen view that lets you control playback, volume, and set a sleep timer. On the Home Screen, there’s a (customizable) XL portrait widget for iPhone that lets you configure any combination of up to 24 distinct sounds and mixes that you can play with a single tap without opening the app.

As you can imagine, the app also integrates with Siri AI now. Using Apple’s assistant, you can ask to play specific sounds from the app (make sure to add “…from Dark Noise” to your request) and you can also leverage on-screen awareness inside the app itself. While looking at your list of favorites and mixes, for instance, you can say something like “play the second mix”, and since Chapman has properly annotated the app’s views, Siri AI and Dark Noise will know what you mean.

If you, like me, struggle to get work done with music in the background but also do not appreciate complete silence, I recommend installing Dark Noise and creating a few mixes of your own.

AskPlay

I first covered Francisco Cantu’s AskPlay when it debuted on the Mac earlier this year in the App Radar for Club members, where I wrote:

Created by indie developer Francisco Cantu (a name that should be familiar to longtime MacStories readers!), AskPlay is one of the best new Mac apps I’ve tried in a long time, and we will properly review it on MacStories in the near future. The idea is simple: AskPlay gives you natural language control over Apple Music to play or queue songs. The app, which lives in the menu bar but can also be invoked with a system-wide hotkey, brings up a Spotlight-like floating search box where you can type or say things like, “Queue some ‘90s hip-hop,” or, “Play something like Oasis,” and have an AI carry out the request.

The app can build mixes for a mood or era, start stations, manage the queue (you can ask to move songs up or down), control playback, and add songs to your library or playlists, and it also answers questions such as, “Who sings this?” You can either type your requests or set a voice hotkey that summons the app already listening, pausing your music while you speak. AskPlay is a bring-your-own-key app, so you’ll need an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, or OpenRouter in addition to an Apple Music subscription (and a subscription to the app itself).

AskPlay is now on iPhone too, and thanks to iOS 27, it’s become one of my favorite showcases of Apple’s Cloud Pro Foundation model running in Private Cloud Compute. Unlike the original version, AskPlay now lets you hand off prompt processing to a reasoning model in the cloud at no cost thanks to Apple’s PCC framework for third-party developers. And not only that, but AskPlay is also the first app I’ve seen that lets you choose between the three reasoning modes supported on PCC: light, moderate, and deep.

In my experience, I’ve had the best results with the PCC model set to “moderate” reasoning. What this means in practice is that with AskPlay for iOS 27, we now have a way to generate Apple Music-based mixes using natural language with a quality that I find superior to Apple Music’s own playlist generation feature.

AskPlay remains one of the best app debuts of the year, and if you want to demo the capabilities of Private Cloud Compute for third-party apps, you should start here.

John

LookUp 13

LookUp 13 from Vidit Bhargava has been released with a wide variety of features that make use of iOS and iPadOS 27. The app, which is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro, makes great use of Siri AI, allowing you to quickly ask Siri things like “Search the word plethora in LookUp,” which opens the app right to that word. Siri can also be used to find LookUp’s word of the day or a random word.

LookUp 13.

Beyond Siri, Vidit has added support for Apple Intelligence in the notes that can be tied to a word and combined Apple’s Foundation Models with the Vision framework and hand-pose tracking to let you scan a printed page for a word. Point at a word and the app’s scan mode uses your device’s camera to see which word you’re pointing at. It took a little practice to figure out the right distance from the camera to the page, but once I got that down, it felt like magic. The same feature can pick out other nearby words that might be difficult for the reader, too.

LookUp 13 also offers a Reading Mode that looks up words you speak as you read. The feature uses a Live Activity that listens to you speak, and returns a definition. Initially I ran into some trouble with Reading Mode, but when I tried again later, it worked every time. Also included in the latest release are interactive flash cards that ask for word definitions that are graded by Private Cloud Compute and new extra-large widgets for the word of the day and a shuffled word of the day.

LookUp is an excellent app. I love how Vidit continues to push the boundaries of Apple’s technologies every year, and while I hit a few rough spots in testing, which struck me as issues with Siri AI, not LookUp, I’m impressed by how much depth LookUp’s new Apple Intelligence features add to the app.

Play

The latest update to Play, the watch-it-later app from Marcos Tanaka that works on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and Apple TV, includes a bunch of great touches. There’s a new Channels Inbox for navigating saved videos by source. Play has also added Siri AI support allowing you to search for and open videos. Onscreen content is made available to Siri, so you can do things like ask it to remind you to finish a video later, and it knows what you mean. In my testing, all three features work well.

Also, on an individual video’s detail view, you can use Apple Intelligence to create a summary of a video. There are options ranging from a concise summary to a simple explanation. I ran into a roadblock when I tried to create a summary of a fifteen-year-old YouTube video, but more recent videos all worked well. Apple Intelligence can also suggest tags and icons for videos and lets you ask questions, with the answers drawn from the video’s transcript.

Beyond Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, Play adds an extra large widget, a refreshed Liquid Glass design that I love, and Spotlight search. It’s a fantastic update to my favorite way to save videos for later.

You’ve been paying a tax on being healthy. Four dollars here for hydration, five there for sleep, another subscription for fasting, another for habits, and each one only ever sees its own slice of you. Your Apple Watch is already collecting the whole picture; what’s missing is a set of apps built to work with it, and with each other.

The FunnMedia Premium Plus Bundle Unlock 13 premium apps on your Apple devices for less than $5/month. fixes that with one subscription: 13 premium apps for health, wellness, and productivity, fully unlocked, for $59.99 a year.

What makes it work is that every app comes from the same small indie studio and is built around Apple Health, Apple Watch, and widgets. Because they all read from and write to Health, a log in one app shows up where it should, and the whole set shares one design language instead of feeling like a pile of downloads.

In practice, a day looks like this. SleepMinder scores last night before you’re out of bed. WaterMinder nudges you from your wrist before you’re thirsty. Calory scans your lunch barcode, FastMinder watches your eating window, and Couch to Fit squeezes in a seven-minute workout before dinner. FitnessView pulls all of it into dashboards that show real trends, HabitView keeps your streaks honest, and ZenMinder and RelaxTopia handle the wind-down. When your doctor asks for numbers, HealthExport hands over a PDF. Widgetive, NoteFolio, and ReplyCube cover the productivity side.

This isn’t an unknown lineup. WaterMinder is an Apple Editors’ Choice with more than 10 million downloads!

Bought individually, these subscriptions run past $300 a year. The bundle is $59.99, cancel anytime, and every app FunnMedia releases from here on is added automatically. Subscribe once and the next launch is already yours. Get it at funnmedia.com/bundle.

Dear MacStories reader,

It’s Zac here, the developer of Soulver — a notepad calculator you might have heard of. You type your thinking in plain text, and live answers appear in a column alongside as you go.

I started working on Soulver all the way back in 2005. The reason I’m still improving it 20 years on is the enthusiasm of the people who use it: nearly every day, someone writes to tell me how useful it is in their daily work. For many of them it’s one of those apps that stays open all day — for every budget, quote, and what-if.

This summer I released Soulver’s biggest update in 7 years, with 50+ new features. My favorite is trip planning: write out how many nights you’d like to spend in each destination, and Soulver works out the dates of every leg. Rearrange the itinerary and the dates update. There’s nothing quite like it.

Soulver continues to be a one-time purchase, not a subscription. By popular request, it’s now also a universal purchase: buy it once and it’s yours on Mac, iPad & iPhone. And this week, MacStories readers can get Soulver for $20 off: $39 instead of $59. The offer runs through September 11.

Soulver isn’t for everyone. But if you’re the kind of person who likes to think through problems with numbers step by step, give it a try — there’s a free 60-day trial, so you can see if it clicks for you.

Get Soulver 4 for $39 — $20 off for MacStories readers through September 11

Our thanks to Soulver for sponsoring MacStories this week.

If you read MacStories, you might have caught John’s Finalist 1.0 review a few years back. A lot has changed since: version 4.0 is out this week, its biggest update yet. Finalist is a paper-inspired daily planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch, giving you one place to plan your day, week and month. It wrangles all your stuff into one cohesive system to help you stay on top of it all: Reminders, Calendars, habits, tasks, notes, weather, and lots more.

New in 4.0 are Notes. Write native notes that sync to your iCloud, or point Finalist at a folder of markdown files and it round-trips cleanly with Obsidian vaults, GitHub, or any editor you like. Markdown tasks inside those files show up in your timelines as real tasks, on the right date, with the right tags. There are even timeline swimlanes per tag, to visualize any endeavour.

The Watch app is also new and it extends Finalist to your wrist. Its Now card answers the day’s current question: your first moves in the morning, the running time block with a countdown, an evening wrap-up with streaks to protect. It has some very nifty complications and a Smart Stack widget.

Or take a look at Broadsheet, a newsprint-inspired layout that shines on big screens. It has delightful touches throughout: tap a World Clock and the whole page retunes to another city, with date, weather, tasks, and appointments all in that timezone. The Timeline tab lets you sketch your day in pencil. Perfect for timeblocking, especially with Pencil Pro and its squeeze menu.

Apple has featured Finalist as App of the Day multiple times, and a large Discord community drives it forward. To help you try it, MacStories readers get 50% off their first year with code MACSTORIES40.

Our thanks to Finalist for sponsoring MacStories this week.

You think faster than you can type. Across a day of email, Slack, notes, and chatbot prompts, that gap quietly eats your time.

Cotypist closes that gap. It’s smart autocomplete for your Mac: as you write, it predicts your next few words and shows them inline, right at your cursor. Press Tab to take the next word or the whole line, then carry on. If a suggestion isn’t what you had in mind, keep typing and it catches up within a letter or two. Accept a word here and a line there, and you’ll have to type far less than you used to.

Most AI writing tools try to do too much and don’t sound like you. Cotypist only fills in the words you’d have typed anyway (just faster), and it picks up your vocabulary as you go, so the result still sounds like you. It works almost everywhere you write: Mail, Messages, Slack, Notes, Obsidian, your browser, even the prompt box in ChatGPT. And it all runs on your Mac, so nothing you type ever leaves your Mac.

Cotypist comes from the maker of Timing, the Mac time-tracker many MacStories readers already know, so it’s built to feel native and stay out of your way. Setup takes about a minute: drag it into Applications, launch it, then start typing, no account required.

Cotypist is free to download, with a 30-day Pro trial and no credit card. When the trial ends, you can keep Pro or drop to the free plan. Until the end of August, MacStories readers get 10% off their first bill at cotypist.app/macstories. Give it ten minutes and see if it can keep up with you.

Our thanks to Cotypist for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Staying up to date has never felt more overwhelming.

Between websites, newsletters, podcasts, social media feeds, and specialized publications, valuable information is scattered across countless apps and platforms. The challenge is no longer finding content – it’s keeping up with it without wasting time or missing what matters.

That’s where Inoreader comes in.

Inoreader helps you build your own personalized newsfeed by bringing together the sources you care about in one place. Instead of jumping between websites, inboxes, and apps throughout the day, you can keep up with everything from a single interface designed to help you stay informed while cutting through the noise.

Unlike algorithm-driven feeds, Inoreader puts you in control. Follow the websites and creators you trust and receive their updates directly. No engagement-driven recommendations and endless scrolling, just the content you’ve chosen to follow.

For those who need more than a traditional feed reader, Inoreader offers powerful monitoring tools. Create custom feeds to track keywords, brands, companies, competitors, products, or industry trends across the web and receive updates automatically whenever something new appears.

As your reading list grows, Inoreader helps you organize and revisit important information. Save articles for later, highlight key passages, add notes, and build a searchable archive of knowledge and insights that remains accessible long after you’ve finished reading.

To help you process larger volumes of content, Inoreader’s Intelligence features can summarize articles, extract key insights, and help you make sense of information faster. Whether you’re following daily news, researching a topic, or monitoring developments in your industry, Inoreader helps you stay informed without getting overwhelmed.

Advanced filtering and automation tools can further streamline your workflow by automatically organizing incoming content, surfacing what matters most, and reducing distractions – saving you time while ensuring important updates never slip through the cracks.

Inoreader is available on the web, iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, with offline reading support on mobile, so your newsfeed is always available when you need it.

You can get started with Inoreader for free, or explore everything the Pro plan has to offer with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required. New Pro subscribers can also get 30% off their first year.

Learn more and get started at inoreader.com.

Our thanks to Inoreader for sponsoring MacStories this week.

HomeSnap remembers everything your HomeKit home does, shows you its live status, and tells you the moment something needs attention, right from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. No accounts, no third-party servers, and your data stays private to you.

Your Home, Remembered

Apple’s Home app shows you this instant. HomeSnap shows you the whole story. It quietly captures a snapshot of your entire setup about once a day and tells you exactly what changed, room by room and device by device. A Timeline and a live Event Log let you scroll back through motion, lights, locks, and doors as they happened, so “did the garage really open at 2 a.m.?” finally has an answer.

Your Home Has an API

This is the part power users tend to love. Flip one switch in Settings and HomeSnap serves your home over your own Wi-Fi, off by default, LAN-only, no cloud and no account involved:

• A local web dashboard you can open from any laptop, phone, or tablet on your network: live status tiles, an activity heatmap, charts, and per-room and per-device pages.
• A read-only JSON HTTP API with real endpoints for your home, rooms, accessories, scenes, automations, events, change history, health, and battery and temperature trends. Point a script, a shortcut, or a Home Assistant REST sensor at it and pull structured data out of HomeKit without touching a single Apple framework.
• An MCP server (Model Context Protocol), so you can connect the AI assistant you already use, like Claude, and ask about your home in plain language: “which batteries will die first?”, “what happened in the garage last night?”, “which lights were on longest this week?” The assistant reads your home, read-only, over your own network.
• Markdown and JSON exports of your home and its history, plus live updates over WebSocket for anything you want to build on top.

Everything here is read-only and stays on your network. Nothing about your home is sent to a third party, and you can put a password on it.

Live Status and Smarter Batteries

The My Home tab is your home exactly as it is right now: which lights are on, which doors are open, what every sensor reads. Battery-powered devices are ranked most-urgent-first, and HomeSnap estimates how long each one will last (“about 3 weeks”) from its own history, so a dying sensor never catches you off guard.

Alerts You Actually Want

Build your own notification rules: pick an accessory, pick a trigger (a light turns on, a garage door opens, a fan passes a speed you set), and get told when it happens. Add freeze and overheat temperature alerts, low-battery warnings, and quiet hours so nothing pings you overnight.

Insights Into How Your Home Lives

A native Insights screen shows an activity heatmap of your busiest hours, your most active devices and rooms, each light’s total on-time, and recent door and lock activity. The same numbers power a private web dashboard you can open from any device on your Wi-Fi.

A Vault for Your Setup Codes

HomeSnap saves your HomeKit and Matter pairing codes so you can re-pair a device after a reset. Scan a code or type it in, and it comes back later as a scannable QR or a large, readable number, safely stored in iCloud.

Our thanks to HomeSnap for sponsoring MacStories this week.

If you read MacStories, you’ve likely heard of Halide. For nine years, it’s been the definitive iPhone “pro camera app,” garnering an Apple Design Award, and happy users all over the world. Two years ago, Halide added Process Zero, a feature that lets your iPhone take photos free of AI and algorithms in the spirit of analog photography. Halide Mark III takes that to the next level with its new Looks, Photo Lab, and streamlined design.

Halide Mark III now produces gorgeous photos straight out of camera, thanks to film-inspired Looks developed in partnership with renowned Hollywood colorist Cullen Kelly. For the times you feel like fine-tuning things, Mark III includes a powerful image lab that makes it easy to dial in a perfect look in seconds.

Chip shortages are hitting everyone’s wallets, so we’ve decided to run our first sale in three years, exclusively for MacStories readers. This week only, you can get Halide for 25% off your first year with offer code MACSTORIES2026SUB, or 25% off a one-time-purchase with offer code MACSTORIES2026OTP.

Our thanks to Halide for sponsoring MacStories this week.