UPDATE: Our latest addition to the list, Instapaper, is a must have for anyone who gets their news from the web (which has to be a lot of us at this point, right?)

It's a well-known fact that iOS users are far more likely to pay for apps than those on the Android platform. Whether it's software for the iPad or the iPhone, spending money through the app store just seems safer to many users.

But even so, buying apps can become an expensive undertaking, especially on the iPad where software comes in at a premium.

Sometimes you just want to get the best possible software without hitting the credit card. And while the bulk of free apps can be a bit rubbish, hidden among the thousands of apps are some real gems that won't cost you a cent.

Of those we unearthed, here's our pick of the best free iPad apps of 2017. Note that apps marked 'universal' will run on your iPad and iPhone, optimising themselves accordingly.

• iPad Air 2 review
• iPad Mini 4 review
• iPad Pro review
• For a mix of free and paid apps, check out our amazing Best iPad apps chart or if you’re more into a smaller form-factor or have your eye on the new iPhone 6S check out our list of the best free iPhone apps.

Instapaper acts as a time-shifting service for the web. You can send pages to it from any browser (PC, Mac or mobile), whereupon Instapaper strips away everything bar the content. When you open the app, it’ll quickly sync your article collection. You can then read anything you’ve stored in a mobile-optimised layout that’s entirely free from cruft.

On an iPhone, Instapaper is handy for commuters wanting to catch up on saved pages while belting along on a train. But on iPad, the larger display transforms Instapaper into a superb lean-back reading experience – your own personal periodical that’s free from the gimmickry and iffy curation found in glossier fare, and that’s instead all about the content.

Although Photoshop started out as a tool for retouching imagery, plenty of people use it for creating art from scratch. It’s presumably that line of thinking that led to Adobe Photoshop Sketch, an iPad app that enables you to draw with virtual takes on ink, paint, pastel and markers.

The tools themselves are broadly impressive and configurable. You can adjust brushes in all kinds of ways, and then utilize blend modes and layers for complex art, and grids/stencils when more precision is needed.

Export feels a bit needlessly restrictive – you’re mostly forced to send drawings to Adobe’s Behance network – even Photos isn’t an option. 

Also, while tools work well individually, they don’t really interact, such as when dragging pen through a glob of paint. Still, for free, Adobe Photoshop Sketch gives you a lot – and even if you don’t use the app for finished art, it works (as its name suggests) as a pretty neat sketchpad.

There are quite a few apps for creating ambient background noise, helping you to focus, relax, and even sleep. White Noise+ is perhaps the best we’ve seen – a really smartly designed mix of sound and interface design that is extremely intuitive yet thoroughly modern.

It works through you adding sounds to an on-screen grid. Those placed towards the right become more complex, and those towards the top are louder. Personalized mixes can be saved, or you can play several that are pre-loaded.

For free, you do get an ad across the bottom of the screen, only five sounds, and no access to timers and alarms. But even with such restrictions, White Noise+ is pretty great. Throw $4.49 at it for the extra features and noises, and it borders on exceptional.

On the desktop, Adobe Illustrator is more about enabling creative types to work up pin-sharp illustrative fare than freehand drawing. But on iPad, Adobe Illustrator Draw concentrates on doodling. You can experiment with five highly configurable brush tips, which feel great whether drawing with a stylus or a finger.

But dig deeper into the options and the professional sheen of this app becomes apparent. There are perspective grids, a layers system for mixing and matching artwork and imagery for tracing over, and stencils you temporarily overlay when extra precision is needed.

Completed images can be exported to Camera Roll or the clipboard, and Adobe Creative Cloud users can also send art to Photoshop or Illustrator with layers preserved.

A straightforward vector export option would be nice, although that’s perhaps too big an ask for a free app designed to suck you into a larger ecosystem.

Given the acres of space you get on an iPad display, it’s a bit odd that Apple’s own clock only provides a single timer. Fortunately, MultiTimer – as its name suggests – goes somewhat further by offering multiple options.

In fact, depending on the layout you choose, you can have twelve timers all ticking away at once. Each one of them can have its own icon, color and default time assigned, for those people who need to simultaneously exercise, boil eggs, and cook a turkey.

Smartly, the app works in portrait or landscape, and if you want a timer you can see clearly across the room, a single button press zooms it to fill almost the entire screen.

Should you want a bit more flexibility by way of multiple or custom workspaces, there’s a single IAP to unlock those features. 

A halfway house between full-fledged writing tool and capable note-taker, Bear provides a beautiful environment for tapping out words on an iPad.

The sidebar links to notes you’ve grouped by hashtag. Next to that, a notes list enables you to scroll through (or search) everything you’ve written, or notes matching a specific tag. The main workspace – which can be made full-screen – marries sleek minimalism with additional smarts: subtle Markdown syntax next to headings; automated to-do checkboxes when using certain characters; image integration.

There’s not enough here for pro writers – they’d need on-screen word counts, customisable note column ordering, and flexibility regarding notes nesting. Also, for iCloud sync, you must buy a $1.99 monthly subscription. But as a free, minimal note-taker for a single device, Bear more than fits the bill.

The App Store's awash with alternate cameras with editing smarts, but MuseCam warrants a place on your iPad's home screen nonetheless. As a camera, it's fine, with an on-screen grid and plenty of manual settings. But on Apple's tablet, it's in editing that MuseCam excels.

Load a photo and you can apply a film-inspired filter preset (based on insight from pro photographers), or fiddle around with tone curves, color tools, and other adjustment settings.

The interface is bold, efficient, and usable, making it accessible to relative newcomers; but there's also enough depth here to please those wanting a bit more control, including the option to save tweaks as custom presets.

IAP comes in the form of additional filters, but what you get for free is generous and of a very high quality, making MuseCam a no-brainer download.  

It’s become apparent that Adobe – creators of photography and graphic design powerhouses Photoshop and Illustrator – don’t see mobile devices as suitable for full projects. However, the company’s been hard at work on a range of satellite apps, of which Photoshop Fix is perhaps the most impressive.

Built on Photoshop technology, this retouching tool boasts a number of high-end features for making considered edits to photographs. The Liquify tool in particular is terrific, enabling you to mangle images like clay, or more subtly adjust facial features using bespoke tools for manipulating mouths and eyes.

Elsewhere, you can smooth, heal, colour and defocus a photo to your heart’s content, before sending it to Photoshop on the desktop for further work, or flattening it for export to your Camera Roll. It’s particularly good when used with the Apple Pencil (still a funny name) and the iPad Pro, such is the power and speed of that device and input method.

Many of us are caught in high-stress environments for much of our lives, and electronic gadgets often do little to help. Apple has recognised this, promising a breathing visualisation tool in iOS 10. In the meantime, Breathe+ brings similar functionality to your iPad.

You define how long breaths in and out should take, and whether you want to hold your breath at any point during the cycle. You then let Breathe+ guide your breathing for a user-defined session length.

The visualisation is reminiscent of a minimalist illustrator’s take on a wave rising and falling on the screen, but you can also close your eyes and have the iPad vibrate for cues. For free, there are some ads, which aren’t pretty, but don’t distract too much. For $1.49, you can be rid of them, along with adding themes and usage history stats.

The social networking giant has gone back-and-forth with its mobile apps, finally settling on this smart, native implementation. Much like the slightly simpler iPhone equivalent, Facebook on iPad is such that you won’t want to use the comparatively clunky website again for seeing which of your friends really shouldn’t have internet access after midnight.

Safari’s embedded in iOS to the extent that there’s not a great deal of point in using any rival browser by default. But that doesn’t mean alternatives shouldn’t be considered at all. Opera Coast is a case in point. The browser’s bookmarks pages house massive icons, and its search is fast and to the point. With an interface that’s helpful and yet stays out of your way, Opera Coast therefore becomes an excellent lean-back browser for key sites you like to spend a lot of time with, leaving Safari for hum-drum day-to-day web browsing.

Beatwave is a simplified Tenori-On-style synth which enables you to rapidly build pleasing melodies by prodding a grid. Multiple layers and various instruments provide scope for complex compositions, and you can save sessions or, handily, store and share compositions via email. You can also buy more instruments via in-app purchases.

It used to boast an eye-searing white-and-orange-on-black colour scheme that was a little like being repeatedly punched in the eyes, but now Bloomberg has grown up, discovered a palette (a subtler, serious ‘things on black’, for the most part), and has subsequently become a much more usable business news and stocks app.

We already have comic readers in this list, but Electricomics is something different. Spearheaded by a wealth of creative talent, including writers Alan and Leah Moore, it’s more akin to a collaborative art project that seeks to find new ways of creating and presenting comics.

The app itself is (for now) a one-off publication, with a small selection of comics to read, playing with the artform’s conventions by way of structure, interaction and navigation. Behind everything lies a self-publishing ecosystem and open source code; if inspired by what you find, add to and improve what’s there, or make and publish your own digital comics that dare to think a bit different.

Although envisaged as a freely open system of communication, the harsh reality is the web has plenty of roadblocks. Often, these are geographical in nature, thrown up by governments or corporations, in order to stop people living in certain places being able to see certain things. VPNs enable you to get around such restrictions and Opera VPN gives you the means to do so for no outlay whatsoever.

The app installs quickly and is simple to use. You can select a region and optionally block adverts and web trackers. When connected, it’ll also tot up how many ads and trackers have been blocked.

In use, we found Opera VPN broadly reliable, stable and fast enough to view all kinds of content, including video within certain popular geo-locked apps. There are some moral questions lurking – Opera reportedly sells anonymised user data, and, bizarrely, is considering adding adverts in the future (despite Opera VPN’s ad-blocking stance). In the meantime, it’s a solid download if you need a VPN for nothing.

Dropbox is a great service for syncing documents across multiple devices. The iPad client works like the iPhone one (hardly surprising, since this is a universal app), enabling you to preview many file types and store those marked as favourites locally.

Like Dropbox, Evernote (a free online service for saving ideas – text documents, images and web clips – that you can then access from multiple devices) works the same way on the iPad as it does on the iPhone. It benefits from the iPad’s larger screen, which enables you to see and navigate your stored snippets more easily.

When the YouTube app presumably became a victim of the ongoing and increasingly tedious Apple/Google spat, there were concerns Google wouldn’t respond. Those turned out to be unfounded, because here’s yet another bespoke, nicely designed Google-created app for iOS. The interface is specifically tuned for the iPad, and AirPlay enables you to fire videos at an Apple TV.

We could all use a bit of brain training from time to time and Elevate is a great way to do it. It aims to improve your writing, reading, speaking, listening and maths skills through a variety of daily challenges, which keep your brain active and test you in entertaining ways. A beautiful interface makes it a joy to use and the core app is free, but extra features can be added with a subscription.

Going head-to-head with Kindle, iBooks is a decent ebook reader, backed by the iBookstore. As you’d expect from Apple, the interface is polished and usable, with handy cross-device bookmark syncing, highlighting, and various display options. It’s also a capable PDF reader, for your digital magazine collection.

Although the iPad enables a certain amount of basic multi-tasking, anyone who constantly juggles a number of instant messaging services will soon be tired of leaping between apps. IM+ is a good solution, enabling you to run a number of IM services in a single app, and there’s also a built-in web browser for checking out links.

Amazon’s Kindle iPad app for reading myriad books available at the Kindle Store is a little workmanlike, and doesn’t match the coherence of iBooks (you buy titles in Safari and ‘sync’ purchases via Kindle). However, Kindle’s fine for reading, and you get options to optimise your experience (including the ability to kill the naff page-turn animation and amend the page background to a pleasant sepia tone).

One for film buffs, Movies figures out where you are and tells you what’s showing in your local cinemas – or you can pick a film and it’ll tell you where and when it’s on. The app is functionally identical on iPad and iPhone, but again the extra screen space improves the experience. If you’ve got yourself any UltraViolet digital files, you can also use Movies by Flixter to watch them on the go.

You might argue that Google Maps is far better suited to a smartphone, but we reckon the king of mapping apps deserves a place on your iPad, too. Apple’s own Maps app has improved, but Google still outsmarts its rival when it comes to public transport, finding local businesses, and virtual tourism by way of Street View. Google’s ‘OS within an OS’ also affords a certain amount of cross-device sync when it comes to searches. We don’t, however, recommend you strap your cellular iPad to your steering wheel and use Google Maps as a sat-nav replacement, unless you want to come across as some kind of nutcase.

PCalc Lite‘s existence means the lack of a built-in iPad calculator doesn’t bother us (in fact, we’d love to replace the iPhone Calculator app with PCalc Lite as well). This app is usable and feature-rich – and if you end up wanting more, in-app purchases enable you to bolt on extras from the full PCalc.

Spurious anti-competition complaints meant the BBC News app took a while to come to the UK; in the meantime, Reuters offered the next best free news app for iPad. It’s a little US-centric, but can be skewed towards UK coverage via the Settings app, and it’s worth downloading for a more international take on news coverage than BBC News provides.

Airbnb makes travel affordable and social, as rather than staying in a hotel you can stay in someone’s house. Options range from crashing on someone’s sofa to renting a private island, or if you have a spare room you could even rent your own space out. The iPad app is one of the best ways to browse it too, letting you search and book using an attractive image-heavy interface.

The Wikipedia website works fine in Safari for iPad, but dedicated apps make navigating the site simpler and faster. Wikipanion is an excellent free app, with a sleek iOS 7-style design, an efficient two-pane landscape view, and excellent bookmarking and history access.

It’s been a long while since we’ve wanted to use a PC or Mac for eBay, because browsing for all kinds of tat you don’t really need is far more pleasant on a touchscreen. With the iPad’s acres, the eBay app is a properly sit-back experience, all about huge images you can swipe, and listings you can effortlessly scroll through.

For some reason, the eBay team messes about with the interface approximately every eleven seconds, but the end result’s usually for the better.

Soundrop is a minimal generative sound toy that offers an endless stream of balls, which make noises when they collide with and bounce off user-drawn lines. The overall result is surprisingly fun and hypnotic. For more advanced features – save, multiple instruments and gravity adjustment – there’s an in-app ‘pro’ purchase option.

After a stint on the iPhone, Kickstarter has now arrived on Apple’s slates and it’s the perfect fit for it, giving you a big window into thousands of projects which you can back with a tap. Browse by categories and sub-categories, select how to sort projects or just search for a specific one. Just be careful. Last time we launched the app we emerged six hours later and hundreds of pounds poorer. We eagerly await delivery of our smart socks.

It’s not the smoothest app in the world, and it lacks some elements from the desktop, but Google Earth is nonetheless a joy on the iPad. Touch gestures are an intuitive means of swooping around the planet, and the optional layers enable you to display as much or as little ancillary information as you wish.

Instagram might be the current online photo-sharing darling, but it’s clear veteran Flickr remains up for a fight. On iPad, it’s a lovely app, with a refined and minimal UI that makes browsing simple and allows photography to shine. Another smart aspect of Flickr is its extremely generous 1 TB of free storage. You can set videos and photos to automatically upload, and they stay private unless you choose to share them.

There are compatibility issues with the most modern Apple toys as Live Photos end up as stills on Flickr. Even so, Flickr makes Apple’s free 5 GB of iCloud storage look pathetic by comparison; and even if you use it only as a belt-and-braces back-up for important images, it’s worth checking out.

SkyView Free is a stargazing app that very much wants you to get off your behind and outside, or at least hold your iPad aloft to explore the heavens. Unlike TechRadar favourite Sky Guide, there’s no means to drag a finger to manually move the sky around – you must always point your iPad’s display where you want to look – but there’s no price-tag either. And for free, this app does the business.

There are minimal ads, a noodly atmospheric soundtrack, an optional augmented reality view (to overlay app graphics on to the actual sky), and a handy search that’ll point you in the direction of Mars, Ursa Major, or the International Space Station.

Although the BBC News website works nicely on the iPad, BBC News is still worth downloading. Rather than trying to provide all of the news, it instead concentrates on the latest stories, with inline video. Categories can be rearranged, stories can be shared and the app’s layout adjusts to portrait and landscape orientations.

Tens of thousands of recipes at your fingertips (as long as you have a web connection) ensure Epicuriousis worth a download for the culinary-inclined. The app even composes a shopping list for recipes; it’s just a pity it doesn’t include measurements for those of us who use that new-fangled metric system.

This official WordPress app has a reputation for being a bit clunky, but it’s fine for authoring the odd blog post on the go, along with making quick edits to existing content and managing comments. It also offers both text-based and visual approaches to crafting posts, so you’re not stuck with HTML.

Australia’s first real catch up TV service, ABC iview, is still the best, with hours of ad-free entertainment at your fingertips. With live streaming of the 24 hour news channel and ABC1, as well as plenty of documentaries, kids programming and local and international drama, there’s plenty to watch and it costs you nothing.

The original Brushes app was one of the most important in the iPhone’s early days. With Jorge Colombo using it to paint a New Yorker cover, it showcased the potential of the technology, and that an iPhone could be used for production, rather than merely consumption. Brushes eventually stopped being updated, but fortunately went open source beforehand. Brushes Redux is the result.

On the iPad, you can take advantage of the much larger screen. But the main benefit of the app is its approachable nature. It’s extremely easy to use, but also has plenty of power for those who need it, not least in the layering system and the superb brush designer.

With weather apps, you’re frequently forced to choose between lashings of data or something that looks lovely. Yahoo Weather combines both, offering a stunning interface that happens to be rich with information. The maps are a touch weak, but other than that, this is an essential weather app, especially considering Apple doesn’t provide an iPad equivalent itself.

Find my iPhone would perhaps be better named ‘Find my Apple stuff’, because it’s not just for figuring out where a missing iPhone is – it can also track iPads, iPods and Macs. The app is simple, elegant and, generally speaking, provides an accurate location for devices. It also enables you to remote-lock or wipe a device.

Initially, Flipboard looked like a gimmick, trying desperately to make online content resemble a magazine. But now it can integrate Flickr and other networks, beautifully laying out their articles, Flipboard’s muscled into the ‘essential’ category – and it’s still free.

While perhaps less practical than on the iPhone, Find My Friends on the iPad nonetheless works well, enabling you to track any pals that are happy with you digitally stalking them. The iPad’s large display improves the app’s usability, simultaneously displaying your friend list and a map.

IMDB might be a wee bit US-focused at times (much like the movie industry), but the app is a great way to browse more movie-related info than you could ever hope to consume in a single lifetime. Settings enable you to define which sites IMDB and Amazon info is taken from, and the show times finder works pretty well.

Choosing between Pocket and Instapaper for your read-it-later service is a bit like trying to figure out which of your equally lovely kids is the best. Like its rival, Pocket makes it simple to stash web pages for later, stripping them of cruft, leaving only images and text.

This content can then be digested in an easy-to-view layout that’s not desperately trying to punch adverts into your eyeballs. Instapaper probably has the lead on minimalism and typography, but Pocket’s colourful interface is a bit more welcoming, and we prefer it when it comes to saving videos.

TED describes itself as “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. The app pretty much does as you’d expect – you get quick access to dozens of inspiring videos. However, it goes the extra mile in enabling you to save any talk for offline viewing, and also for providing hints on what to watch next if you’ve enjoyed a particular talk.

The official Twitter app might lack some of the features found in certain third-party clients, but it does provide a sleek and simple means of using the service. It also rapidly rolls in new features from the website, such as the Connect and Discover views, along with expandable tweets that contain photos and videos.

Adult colouring books are all the rage, proponents claiming bringing colour to intricate abstract shapes helps reduce stress – at least until you realise you’ve got pen on your shirt and ground oil pastels into the sofa.

You’d think the process of colouring would be ideal for iPad, but most relevant apps are awful, some even forcing tap-to-fill. That is to colouring what using a motorbike is to running a marathon – a big cheat. Pigment is an exception, marrying a love for colouring with serious digital smarts.

On selecting an illustration, there’s a range of palettes and tools to explore. You can use pencils and markers, adjusting opacity and brush sizes, and work with subtle gradients. Colouring can be ‘freestyle’, or you can tap to select an area and ensure you don’t go over the lines while furiously scribbling. With a finger, Pigment works well, but it’s better with a stylus; with an iPad Pro and a Pencil, you’ll lob your real books in the bin.

The one niggle: printing and accessing the larger library requires a subscription in-app purchase. It’s a pity there’s no one-off payment for individual books, but you do get plenty of free illustrations, and so it’s hard to grumble.

Canva is graphic design made easy. By combining simple templates and eye-catching fonts with the iPad’s intuitive user interface, the app allows even the most talentless hack create a striking image. The best part is that the app is free, with in-app purchases to license stock photography for users wanting to get a little bit more from their design efforts.

Safari for iPad is a great mobile browser, but if you hanker for more features, Dolphin is a decent alternative. The browser has an Opera-like ‘speed dial’ that provides one-touch access to favourites, and you can create personalised action gestures. There’s also a distraction-free full-screen mode for when you really want to get into a website.

Skyscanner‘s website is pretty good, but the iPad app’s another great example of how an app’s focus can really help you speed through a task. You use the app to search over a thousand airlines, and it provides straightforward competitive journey lists and comparison graphs. If you’re planning a flight, it’s an indispensable download.

Every now and again, we get a little bit twitchy at global marketplaces. Certain online stores are getting too big, to the point they’ll probably soon attempt to embed a ‘buy now’ button inside your brain. Etsy feels like little guys fighting back. It’s a storefront for handmade, vintage and creative goods. Instead of polished iPad stands fresh from Jony Ive’s pencil, you’re more likely to find something beautiful made out of driftwood. The app’s interface is clean and simple, making browsing a treat; and you can of course flag shops and items as favourites, and receive notifications when an order ships.

It’s not the most efficient weather forecasting app around, but MeteoEarth for iPad is perhaps the most fun to fiddle around with. You can spin and explore the Earth with a fingertip, and add overlays for meteorological data you’re interested in, such as temperature, precipitation and wind.

Tap-hold anywhere on the map to get the current conditions, or switch to the climate view for averages. Google ads pop up every now and again, periodically obliterating the geekery, but are easily dismissed.

For a free app, Status Board is rather canny. The idea is to use a dormant iPad for displaying interesting and useful information: a clock, weather reports, calendar entries, unread email subjects, Twitter replies, and RSS feeds. These can be arranged by dragging widgets about on a grid. Status Board works in landscape or portrait, and there’s an alternate HD layout if you want to output to, for example, a wall-mounted telly.

There’s also a single expansion pack IAP ($14.99), which gives you access to more widgets: graphs, tables, custom HTML, countdowns, text, and photos. The last of those in particular might convince you to open your wallet; but even if you don’t, get Status Board to make your iPad actually useful during its downtime.

We tend to quickly shift children from finger-painting to using much finer tools, but the iPad shows there’s plenty of power in your digits — if you’re using the right app.

Autodesk SketchBook provides all the tools you need for digital sketching, from basic doodles through to intricate and painterly masterpieces; and if you’re wanting to share your technique, you can even time-lapse record to save drawing sessions to your camera roll. The core app is free, but it will cost you $5.99 to unlock the pro features.

The description for Cove is rather noodly — all about self-expression and creating soundtracks to capture your mood. In reality, it’s a somewhat controllable instrument for creating ambient music loops. You start with a mood (which determines the scale), ‘base’, ‘melody’ and a filter (effect). You can then play your creation, or save it alongside a kind of diary entry, noting how you feel. Unlike many simple iPad music apps, Cove does enable you to create discordant output, but beyond the hippy vibe, there is the potential here to fashion great beauty.

It’s as ugly as they come, but XE Currency is the best free currency app you’ll find. You define which currencies you want to see, along with the number of decimals to show. Double-tap a currency and you can set it as the base currency by tapping 1.0 in the calculator, or do bespoke conversions by typing any other value.

With apps like Airport Utility, it’s increasingly clear Apple now sees the iPad as an independent unit, not merely an accessory to a PC or Mac. The app provides an overview of your Wi-Fi network, and enables you to view and change settings, restore or restart a base station, and get terribly angry at a flashing orange light that denotes your ISP’s gone belly up.

In theory, we should be cheerleading for FaceTime, what with it being built into iOS devices, but it’s still an Apple-only system. Skype, however, is enjoyed by myriad users who haven’t been bitten by the Apple bug, and it works very nicely on the iPad, including over 3G.

As you launch Kitchen Stories, you catch a glimpse of the app’s mantra: “Anyone can cook”. The problem is, most cooking apps (and indeed, traditional cookery books) make assumptions regarding people’s abilities.

Faced with a list of steps on a stark white page, it’s easy to get halfway through a recipe, look at the mess in front of you, reason something must have gone terribly wrong, and order a takeaway.

Kitchen Stories offers firmer footing. You’re first met with a wall of gorgeous photography. More importantly, the photographs don’t stop.

Every step in a recipe is accompanied by a picture that shows how things should be at that point. Additionally, some recipes provide tutorial videos for potentially tricky skills and techniques. Fancy some Vietnamese pho, but not sure how to peel ginger, prepare a chilli or thinly slice meat? Kitchen Stories has you covered.

Beyond this, there’s a shopping list, handy essentials guide, and some magazine-style articles to peruse. And while you don’t get the sheer range of recipes found in some rival apps, the presentation more than makes up for that — especially on the iPad, which will likely find a new home in your own kitchen soon after Kitchen Stories is installed.

The latest of the major read-it-later systems, Readability brings with it a clean interface and a lovely set of fonts. As with the likes of Instapaper, Readability strips junk from web pages, leaving only the content. As you’d expect, you can also send on anything particularly interesting to Twitter and Facebook.

If you’re still convinced the iPad is only a device for staring brain-dead at TV shows and not a practical tool for education, check out iTunes U. The app enables you to access many thousands of free lectures and courses taught by universities and colleges, thereby learning far more than what bizarre schemes current soap characters are hatching.

Australian real estate keeps getting more and more expensive, which makes it further and further out of reach for young people. That said, browsing real estate via iPad apps has never been simpler thanks to apps like Domain, which let you set search parameters and then browse listings via a map or suburb.

Google might seem redundant – after all, the iPad’s Safari app has a built-in Google search field. However, Google’s own offering provides a superior search experience that’s been specifically designed for iPad. Highlights include a tactile image carousel, visual search history and Google Goggles integration.

Output your iPad’s audio to an amp or a set of portable speakers, fire up TuneIn Radio, select a station and you’ve a set-up to beat any DAB radio. Along with inevitable social sharing, the app also provides an alarm, AirPlay support, pause and rewind, and a ‘shake to switch station’ feature – handy if the current DJ’s annoying and you feel the need to vent.

audioBoom is essentially a podcast app, but as well as letting you listen to podcasts and other spoken-word audio you can also record your own clips, follow other users and send messages to friends. So there’s creation and social networking in there too, making it more of a podcast community than just a player. But even if you stick to listening there’s plenty of content here.

Netflix has been described by some as the perfect way to experience everything a DVD bargain bin has to offer. We do agree there’s a lack of content compared to the US library, but Netflix is cheap and fine for catching up on older shows. And the iPad app includes AirPlay support and a resume function, so you can pick up where you left off on another device. You will need a Netflix subscription to watch anything though.

SoundCloud is a popular service for sharing sounds, and the iPad app enables you to search and play myriad snippets and music tracks hosted on SoundCloud’s servers. If you’re a budding musician or oddball loudmouth, you can also record and upload sounds from your iPad, or record to upload later.

It’s easy enough to ignore a to-do when it’s lurking somewhere in the background on your Mac or PC, but on an iPad, 30/30‘s crystal-clear events (including optional repeating loops for work/break cycles) can’t be so easily dismissed. Fortunately, it looks great and the tactile interface makes creating and removing items a joy.

For a long while, Paper was a freemium iPad take on Moleskine sketchbooks. You made little doodles and then flipped virtual pages to browse them. At some point, it went free, but now it’s been transformed into something different and better. The original tools remain present and correct, but are joined by the means to add text, checklists, and photos. One other newcomer allows geometric shapes you scribble to be tidied up, but without losing their character.

So rather than only being for digital sketches, Paper’s now for all kinds of notes and graphs, too. The sketchbooks, however, are gone; in their place are paper stacks that explode into walls of virtual sticky notes. Some old-hands have grumbled, but we love the new Paper. It’s smarter, simpler, easier to browse, and makes Apple’s own Notes look like a cheap knock-off.

Need to make a newsletter, invitation, or report? Then you need Adobe Slate. The app lets you combine text and images into a visual story that flows like the best digital magazines. It’s simple to use, letting you effortlessly create a professional story and it’s easy to share too, giving you a link which allows your readers to open it on phones, tablets and computers.

There are loads of iPad apps for reading and annotating PDFs, but LiquidText is different. Rather than purely aping paper, the developers have thought about the advantages of working with virtual documents. So while you still get a typical page view, you can pinch to collapse passages you’re not interested in and also compare those that aren’t adjacent.

There’s a ‘focus’ view that shows only annotated sections, and you can even select chunks of text and drag them to the sidebar. Tap one of those cut-outs at a later point and its location will instantly be displayed in the main text. Smartly, you can save any document in the app’s native format, export it as a PDF with comments, or share just the notes as an RTF.

Although Apple introduced iCloud Keychain in iOS 7, designed to securely store passwords and payment information, 1Password is a more powerful system. It can also hold identities, secure notes, network information and app licence details. Your stored data can then be accessed on more than just Apple’s platforms. The core app is free, but you’ll need to pay $14.99 to get access to all its features.

Social network Pinterest is one of the very few to challenge the big guns in the industry. It provides a means to find and share inspiration, working as a place to collect and organise the things you love. The iPad app has an elegant interface that pushes inspirational imagery to the fore, just as it should.

After years of waiting for Netflix in Australia, the US streamer’s arrival also drove the launch of local competitor Stan. With an impressive library that’s larger than the Australian Netflix, plus some solid local productions on its books, Stan is a great option for both movie and TV content. You do need a $10 a month subscription to take advantage of the app though.

One for the graphic designers out there, desktop publishing giant Quark’s DesignPad is an astonishingly useful app for figuring out layouts on the move, or knocking about ideas in meetings. Plenty of ready-made documents can give you a head-start, and your finished work can be exported as a PNG or emailed for use in a QuarkXPress document.

Because of its single-app nature and big screen, the iPad’s become a tool many people prefer to a PC or Mac for email. However, if you’re reliant on Gmail, Apple’s own Mail is insufficient, not providing access to your entire archive nor Gmail’s features. Google’s own app deals with such shortcomings and looks as good as Apple’s client.

We’re not sure whether Slack is an amazing aid to productivity or some kind of time vampire. Probably a bit of both. What we do know is that the real-time messaging system is excellent in a work environment for chatting with colleagues (publicly and privately), sharing and previewing files, and organising discussions by topic.

There’s smart integration with online services, and support for both the iPad Pro and the iPad’s Split View function. Note that although Slack is clearly designed with businesses in mind, it also works perfectly well as a means of communicating with friends if you don’t fancy lobbing all your worldly wisdom into Facebook’s maw.

If you’re into electronic music creation you need to get into SynthMaster Player. The core app is free and comes with 100 factory presets plus 100 more once you register.

But that’s just a starting point, as you can edit the presets to create your own sounds, gradually building electronic soundscapes using the included 2 octave keyboard. If you get really into it there are in-app purchases to unlock even more features, but there’s plenty here to be getting started with.

If you ever have one of those conversations where a friend swears blind they did reply, you say you didn’t get the email, and they sheepishly mutter “on Facebook”, Cloze is for you. It bungs all your social communications (email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) into a single inbox and also prioritises people who you most often deal with. It’s a great time-saver.

If we’re honest, we rather liked the original version of Haiku Deck, which stripped back presentations, only enabling you to add to each slide a single image, a heading and a sub-heading. The minimalism’s gone (Haiku Deck now includes charts, graphs, bulleted lists and other ‘improvements’), but it’s still fun and easy to use, which is the main thing.

Tumblr has a perfectly serviceable mobile presence, but the Tumblr iPad app gives you a more tablet-oriented interface for using the site. It’s therefore a cinch to manage your blogs, post new entries and reply to messages on your iPad. Additionally, there’s also offline support, enabling you to queue posts, likes, replies and reblogs without a web connection.

In the professional world, Autodesk is best known for high-end 3D products: Maya, 3ds Max, AutoCAD. On the iPad, the company’s been using its 3D smarts to churn out interesting consumer-focussed 3D tools. Homestyler enables you to photograph a room, then paint colours on the walls and add furniture, light fittings and accessories.

Podcasts are mostly associated with small portable devices – after all, the very name is a mash-up of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore your favourite shows when armed with an iPad rather than an iPhone.

We’re big fans of Overcast on Apple’s smaller devices, but the app makes good use of the iPad’s extra screen space, with a smart two-column display. On the left, episodes are listed, and the current podcast loads into the larger space on the right.

The big plusses with Overcast, though, remain playback and podcast management. It’s the one podcast app we’ve used that retains plenty of clarity when playback is sped up; and there are clever effects for removing dead air and boosting vocals in podcasts with lower production values.

Playlists can be straightforward in nature, or quite intricate, automatically boosting favourites to the top of the list, and excluding specific episodes. And if you do mostly use an iPhone for listening, Overcast automatically syncs your podcasts and progress, so you can always pick up where you left off.

The iPhone version of Calorie Counter is a great way of ensuring you’re not eating for several, but the HD iPad release takes things to a whole new level. The extra space enables the interface to breathe, providing plenty of room for charts, calorie breakdowns and interaction with fellow dieters.

It’s curious to think how rapidly Microsoft made Office irrelevant to so many. Most people just want a simple app for documents and spreadsheets, and that (along with a storage repository) is precisely what Google Drive provides. Like Dropbox, it’s also possible to store documents locally, for when you’ve no web connection.

Modern life is full of interesting contraptions but beyond phones and tablets the workings of many of them are a mystery to us. That’s where HowStuffWorks comes in, doing exactly what it says on the tin through an attractive interface.

As well as explaining how various machines work though it also goes further, with interesting nuggets of history and culture as well as podcasts, videos and quizzes.

The iPhone incarnation of PlainText 2 is good for the odd bit of note-taking, but on the iPad PlainText 2 is transformed into a minimal but highly usable writing tool with Dropbox sync. The lack of clutter provides a real sense of focus – even the single iAd is hidden from view once the on-screen keyboard appears.

There’s no traditional file system in iOS, but the likes of Box can act as a close equivalent, along with enabling cross-device/platform sync. Here, you get 10 GB of free storage, albeit less direct integration with iOS apps than rival Dropbox provides. Still, files are easily shared and opened, and there’s a photo-upload option from the iOS Camera Roll, handy for getting snaps from your shiny new iPhone 7 (when it launches) to your iPad.

Been only really does one thing but it does it well, presenting you with a map of the world and allowing you to shade in the countries you’ve been to, so you can see at a glance how much of a globetrotter you are, or share the map with friends.

You can also go deeper and see what percentage of the world or each continent you’ve been to, to truly quantify your travels.

You obviously love using iPad apps, but have you ever thought about making one? Swifty is an interactive tutorial app that will teach you how to code using Apple’s Swift programming language. There’s a heap of free tutorials to get you started in the core app, and you can unlock everything for just $4.49.

The prospect of drawing can fill people with terror, and so the idea of animation probably sends such folks fleeing for the hills. Animatic might calm their nerves, being the friendly face of iPad animation.

Start a new project and you get a small canvas and a bunch of effective and broadly realistic tools – markers, crayons, pencils, biros – for scribbling with. Once you’ve composed a frame, Animatic makes use of traditional ‘onion skinning’ techniques to help you produce smooth motion thereafter: up to three previous frames are shown in translucent fashion behind the one you’re currently drawing. Tap ‘Next’ and you’ll see your animation looping. Its speed can be adjusted, and you can export to video or GIF.

Beyond Animatic’s approachable nature, we’re big fans of its flexibility. You simply return to the main ‘My Animations’ screen to save (which we recommend doing often with lengthy projects, because a crash can take work with it), and can later edit any frame from any animation – nothing’s fixed forever. And while, as the bundled examples suggest, you’re more likely to end up with Roobarb and Custard than Pixar’s finest, Animatic is a superb way to explore making drawings move – entirely for free.

There’s no shortage of word processors available for iOS, but few as unique as Hanx Writer, as it aims to emulate a typewriter and it’s surprisingly successful, getting the look and sounds right while adding modern conveniences like a delete key.

It’s not as full-featured as some word processors, but you can save and share documents and there’s just something compelling about writing on a typewriter, even if it is a virtual one.

It may be ABC iview’s younger, foreign cousin, but SBS On Demand is equally worthy of inclusion in this list. With free, unlimited access to SBS programming, from feature films to news, and documentaries to local comedies (plus SBS’s collection of World Movies), there’s an abundance of free content to be found in this accessible, intuitive app.

We’ve elsewhere mentioned Comics, but Sequential has a slightly different take on the medium. It’s an altogether more upmarket affair, aimed at graphic novels and collections of sequential art that are supposed to be taken seriously. Therefore, this isn’t so much everything but the kitchen sink, but a repository for a carefully curated selection of some of the best comics ever created.

Apple’s Photos app has editing capabilities, but they’re not terribly exciting — especially when compared to Snapseed. Here, you select from a number of effect types and proceed to pinch and swipe your way to a transformed image. It’s a fun tool, but there’s plenty of control for anyone determined to get their photos just so.

Anyone can be a digital artist with the help of an iPad, but while there are numerous drawing apps focused on art there isn’t such a selection for technical drawings of the type carried out by architects and engineers.

But thanks to Concepts there’s at least one. With vector brushes, size guides, graph paper, the ability to adjust and fine-tune anything and easily export your finished design there’s a lot here and the core app is free.

Annoyingly, some free iPad weather apps refuse to believe that the UK has any weather (or that the country exists), so AccuWeather gets props for merely working.

Happily, AccuWeather also proves to be a decent – if quirky – weather app. The interface is odd (but fun) and there’s a ‘lifestyle’ page that determines how your current local conditions might affect over 20 activities, including dog-walking and stargazing.

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