We simply can’t believe that the year is coming to a close! As we finish up our projects, buy gifts for the special people in our lives, and get ready to spend time with family—we simply couldn’t resist making one more roundup of the best mobile app designs for you. This month we have some long awaited entrants to the app market and redesigned mainstays that are sure to spark some new and creative ideas.
Let’s get right into the apps that caught our attention this December.
1. craigslist by craigslist
If you’ve ever tried to sell something on Craigslist while on the go, you might have found the experience lacking. While the platform has been a great forum to buy and sell things for 25 years, the company just introduced an app this month! The app stays true to Craigslist’s humble and utilitarian design. While users of letgo or OfferUp might expect a similar user experience from Craigslist, instead they get an incredibly on-brand and very simplistic mobile app experience from the online marketplace. Not all good designs have to be beautiful, as long as they help users accomplish their goals. Craigslist’s first foray into the app economy may not have bells or whistles, but it certainly gets the job done—now will a mobile friendly interface.
Source: 9to5Mac
2. Spectre Camera by Lux Optics LLC
Photography and editing apps abound, but none of the are quite like Spectre. If you enjoy taking photos with old-school manual cameras, you will enjoy this mobile app design. Manual cameras give you so many more options to play with shutter speed and light, and Spectre brings this to the ever-present smartphone camera. This minimal app with bright green buttons and options helps amateur photographers take long exposure shots and even remove certain things from photos based on shutter speed. But don’t just take our word for it, photographers from all around the world enjoy spicing up their images with Spectre, and this has gained them the distinction of Apple’s Top App of the Year.
Source: Fortune
3. Spark – Email App by Readdle Inc.
Let’s face it: email is useful, but the experience isn’t all that pleasant. With retail newsletters you swear you never signed up for and sales people pitching you things you don’t want, there had to be a better way to do email. That’s where Spark comes in to improve the email experience so that you can swipe and tap your way to inbox zero (or as close as you can possibly get.) This highly customizable approach to email filters out the noise and helps you focus on the important emails from people you actually know. Spark’s mobile app design offers pops of color to bring attention to important features and call to actions, such as email status, and email composition.
Source: Spark
4. Ablo by Ablo
Ablo is a globally-focused app that jets users to a different region to meet new people, regardless of what language they speak. One thing that makes this app so unique is its ability to translate messages and video calls so that there are no communication barriers. The mobile app design is clean with plenty of white space and sea green accents. There are even more pops of color when it comes to the leaderboard. Users are ranked by the number of connections they’ve made around the world, with the ability to toggle to change the time period.
Source: Product Hunt
5. Fabric: Life Insurance & Wills by Fabric Insurance Agency LLC
Ending on a serious note: parents and, really, all adults need to get their finances in order. Fabric makes it easy to see family finances from the weekly budget to insurance policies to a will that can bring clarity during the hardest times for your family. The mobile app design is full of muted pastels that exude personality and youth, while still conveying the seriousness of the financial topics the app handles. Not to mention, the app designers make use of illustrations that remind us of old comics in a newspaper from decades ago that make the sometimes dry financial topics a bit more enjoyable.
Source: CNBC
That wraps up the apps for December, but if you’d like to explore some of our other favorite mobile app designs, check out our November installment.
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