The very best general Windows Phone 8.1 applications

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With another update for the start of 2018, here's our directory of the very best of the Windows Phone world, now split into two for logistics reasons. On this page are general, news, productivity, travel, time, and more. See this page for anything related to imaging or consuming media of any kind. Note that Windows 10 UWP applications are now hosted in their own directory.

See below the table for some helpful notes and background.

Directory updated 16th February 2018

General

General

Productivity

Productivity/Office

Travel

Travel and Movie Booking

IM

Communications and IM

News

News and Web

Reference

Reference

Shopping and banking

Shopping/Banking

Social

Social

Navigation

Navigation/Travel

Tech

Settings/Internals/Utilities

Runner

Sports/Exercise/Health

Secret

Privacy/Secrecy/Security

Weather

Weather-related

Watch

Time related 

calculators

Calculators and (numeric) Converters

Money

Finance (tracking/analysis)

See also the companion apps directory, covering music, media, reading, imaging, and more.

This is a bookmarkable page of the top 500 or so applications that should be a useful aide-memoire after a hard reset if rebuilding a phone from scratch or, perhaps more appropriately, a great place for a new Windows Phone 8.1 user to start.

Some notes:

  • FAQ: I don't mark new entries as 'new' in any way because there's no point - you already know what they are as we've featured them on the front pages of AAWP over the last month. These reference pages are just that - for reference. For newcomers and for people looking up recommendations.
  • Thanks to the AAWP community for suggestions so far (e.g. in the comments below), this is a crowd-sourced project!
  • Not included (obviously) are games. They're here. Also not included are applications which come with every phone, such as the core Windows and Lumia apps.
  • Yes, I know that a couple of entries are in two categories. Just trying to be helpful!
  • Implemented as a table, I've kept the width right down, now with just two columns, in order to be phone-friendly. In other words, you can view this article on your phone and, depending on the link and the item, dive right into an app, its page and then download it. In theory!
  • I've broken down our recommendations into categories, to be helpful. No doubt things may get tweaked in time!
  • See also our directory for Windows 10 Mobile (UWP) applications

 

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