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Buying an iPad for Christmas? Here are 5 must-have apps to get started

Pabio December 25, 2024

Staring at the big, empty home screen of a new iPad is like waking up and seeing that a blanket of fresh snow covers the world: it’s a land of opportunity and fun, that you are on the point of turning into a cluttered mess. And that’s what’s fun!

So you just received a new iPad; do you leave it beautiful and intact, with only the Apple apps? No, of course not: over the lifespan of this tablet, you’re going to fill its pages with random apps, some of which you barely use and some of which you use daily. But where to start?

I’ve been using iPads for years, partly as a tester and partly as a chronic app downloader and then never user. So I know what you need on your iPad, and what you need NOW.

To help you quickly fill your iPad with a few apps you’ll use, I’ve created this quick cheat sheet of a few key apps or app categories you’ll need.

1. Kindle

I cheat on my To light up by… barely removing dust from my Kindle and just using my iPad as a giant LED-powered e-reader all the time. All thanks to the Kindle app.

The Kindle app can let you read books related to your Amazon account, and you don’t actually need to own one of Amazon’s e-readers to do so – you can just use the app on an iOS or Android device. Additionally, the Night Shift display feature (in the Settings app, under Display & Brightness) can make your screen a little warmer, like a Kindle itself.

While not as physically convenient for reading as a Kindle, the iPad’s Kindle app removes the need to purchase an entire additional device for reading. I’ve been using my iPad Pro for years now to slowly read Edward Gibbon’s book. The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empirebecause my Kindle doesn’t care how little dent I’ve made in it (it’s over 5,000 pages, I could read for hours and barely get 1% out of it!).

2. Your chosen streaming app

The Matrix playing on an iPad Pro.

I took the easy way out at the start of this list, by not choosing A application but rather multiple apps – but you probably have one or two video streaming services that you enjoy, so I highly recommend downloading them all.

iPads have very good screens, considering the dire state of most tablet screens, and that makes them fun for watching videos on the go. The sound is also often fantastic, as the stereo speakers will be naturally distributed.

Watching on your iPad isn’t just useful when you’re traveling; sometimes it can be nice to curl up in bed and watch a movie at home, rather than sitting in a living room watching with people.

I don’t have one or two streaming apps on my iPad: I have three paid ones and a host of free streaming apps, which between them have plenty of movies and TV shows. This makes the iPad a true entertainment center.

3. A game on the big screen

iPad Pro 12.9

(Image credit: Future)

This one isn’t as big a loophole as it seems. I’m not telling you to download just any game, but rather a game that really justifies the large screen size offered by the iPad. Mobiles can play some games just fine, but when you have a big screen you want a big game.

Maybe it’s a complex game, requiring you to perform complex digital procedures to command troops, or scanning tons of information at once in a city you’re building.

This may be a graphically beautiful game, in which a wider field of view on a larger screen helps immerse you in an alien world.

Or, more likely, it’s a bit of both. I have some Total war And XCOM games on my iPad as well as Minecraft, Lego Star Wars And Old-School RuneScapeand everyone uses the big screen in different ways.

4. Scenarios

My secret weapon for productivity on my iPad is Scriptation, an app that is apparently intended to be used for film and television, but I only discovered it while researching this article, which proves that it is multifunctional . As I write this, I realize I probably should have guessed from the title…

Scriptation is a simple but powerful PDF editor, and it’s my favorite of all the ones I’ve tried on iPad. It’s incredibly easy to import a document, scribble and annotate it, and then export the document with or without those annotations.

There’s plenty more that makes it useful, with different tools for annotating, adding text, drawing shapes, and doing various other things. It goes without saying that you need an Apple Pencil (or other handy stylus) to get the most out of this app, although I imagine you could use it without.

5. Paprika Recipe Manager

When I first considered adding Paprika Recipe Manger to this list of must-have apps, I quickly assumed it would be too niche to include. But that same evening, I noticed my roommate using it and realized that, for those who love cooking, it’s just too useful not to mention.

Paprika is a recipe management app (worth mentioning, as you wouldn’t guess from the title), which means you can add recipes to it that you find on the internet, storing them in a useful place.

You can share these recipes across your devices and also make shopping lists out of them, saving you a lot of time in the process. If that’s not all, it has interactive elements to help you cook, like checklists and timers, plus a meal planner so you can design your own month-long menu.

If you enjoy cooking or baking, the small upfront cost of this app is worth it, as is the ability to see your recipes on the big screen while you cook. It might even inspire you to cook or bake more!