18 Amazing Mobile Apps to Inspire Your Next Design Project

As an app designer, one of the best ways to hone your craft is by studying the work of others. Seeing how the pros solve tricky UX challenges, push the boundaries of mobile interfaces, and delight users can spark new ideas and sharpen your own creative instincts.

That‘s why we‘ve rounded up 18 of the most impressive and innovative mobile app designs across iOS and Android. From sleek productivity tools to immersive wellness apps to playful education platforms, these apps showcase the art of the possible when it comes to mobile design.

For each selection, we‘ll dive deep into what makes the app‘s design so special, highlight key lessons you can apply to your own projects, and explain how it exemplifies the traits of truly great app design.

Whether you‘re a seasoned pro looking to level up or a newbie seeking inspiration, this post will give you a rich source of insight and food for thought. By the end, you‘ll have a fresh appreciation for the power of thoughtful, user-centric app design—and plenty of tactical ideas for your next project.

1. Headspace: Delightful, Accessible Meditation

Headspace has a tricky mission: make the esoteric practice of meditation appealing to a mainstream audience. Its solution? Approachable, quirky design that makes mindfulness feel more fun than intimidating.

The app‘s illustrations strike a perfect balance of being playful but not childish. Cute characters guide you through the basics of meditation without feeling silly. And subtle animations add moments of whimsy, like a pulsing background as you breathe.

Headspace also excels at progressive disclosure, giving you just enough information to get started before revealing more depth as you explore. The minimalist Player screen surfaces only the essential controls. And the Library organizes its 500+ meditations into beginner-friendly courses that gradually ramp up in skill level.

The copywriting is equally disarming, with cheeky lines like "Put your feet up, metaphorically speaking." By taking an informal, human tone, the app makes an ancient practice feel relevant to modern life.

Key takeaway: Thoughtful characters, bite-sized content, and a dash of humor can make a complex topic more accessible without compromising substance.

2. Lifesum: Vibrant, Engaging Health Tracking

Lifesum is a comprehensive health app that manages to make the hard work of building better habits feel almost effortless. Its interface bursts with bright colors, bold typography, and full-width photos, creating an energizing vibe.

Lifesum builds in near-constant positive reinforcement as you track your meals and workouts. Confetti showers reward you for logging your food, while rich graphs surface your progress at a glance. These dopamine hits make it genuinely satisfying to stick with your health plan.

The onboarding flow is a UX gem, balancing the need to gather key data with a light, conversational tone. Cute icons and a cheery color palette offset its more clinical questions.

Lifesum also personalizes its tracking and advice based on your goals, whether you‘re looking to build muscle or reduce stress. This customization makes the app feel tailored to you, not just a generic database.

Key takeaway: Upbeat visual design, gamified rewards, and personalized recommendations can make a "serious" health tool feel engaging and fun to use.

3. Things 3: Elegant, Efficient Task Management

At first glance, Things 3 looks like another minimalist to-do list. But its magic lies in how it combines thoughtful simplicity with power-user features to create the smoothest task-tracking experience around.

The app‘s aesthetics are pristine without feeling stark, thanks to warm colors and subtle depth effects that add a softness. Gentle animations give the illusion that you‘re moving physical task cards around.

But Things 3 truly shines in the details. It uses natural language parsing so you can type out a task like "Publish blog post tomorrow at 9am #work" and it will automatically set the due date, time, and tag.

The magic plus button adapts based on where you are, smartly offering to add a task to a relevant project or area. And the Today and Upcoming views auto-arrange your tasks in the optimal order based on your calendar events for the day.

Within projects, Things 3 supports checklists, headings, and notes to add structure to complex workflows. A nifty progress pie chart keeps you motivated. And deeply customizable keyboard shortcuts and Quick Find bar cater to the most demanding power users.

Key takeaway: Simple doesn‘t have to mean basic. The best productivity apps combine an uncluttered UI with advanced features that stay out of the way until you need them.

4. Forest: Ingenious Gamification of Focus

Most Pomodoro-style focus timers are, frankly, boring. A generic ticking clock, maybe a white noise soundscape. But Forest takes the ingenious approach of letting you grow a lush, digital garden as a reward for staying focused.

Here‘s how it works: Whenever you want to focus, you plant a virtual seed in Forest. As long as you stay in the app, your seed gradually grows into a stately tree, giving you a tangible representation of your focus time. If you leave early, your tree withers and dies.

Forest‘s iconic tree illustrations are equal parts adorable and motivating. Who wouldn‘t want to check in on their sapling‘s progress? As you accumulate focused time, you unlock more exotic tree species and cute woodland creatures to beautify your forest.

The app also weaves in social accountability by letting you compete with friends or global leaderboards. Plus, it partners with real-tree-planting organizations to convert your virtual progress into actual reforestation impact.

Forest takes a mundane habit—setting a timer—and makes it feel like a meaningful, rewarding experience. It‘s a masterclass in using game design principles to drive behavior change.

Key takeaway: Creative metaphors, visual feedback, and social accountability can transform a generic utility into an irresistible, sticky experience.

5. Strava: Slick, Social Fitness Tracking

Strava is the gold standard for tracking and sharing your runs, bike rides, and swims. The app‘s core recording screen is a study in restraint, showing just your essential stats and a subtle map trace that draws itself as you move.

But the post-activity pages are where Strava flexes its design muscles. It renders a crisp, color-coded GPS map of your route—red for fastest segments, blue for slowest, gray for neutral. Gorgeous charts plot your pace over time or your heart rate by mile for deeper insight into your performance.

These visualizations automatically adapt to your sport and surface the metrics that matter most, like cadence for cycling or stroke rate for swimming. You can also overlay multiple activities to see your progress over time or compare yourself to past efforts on the same route.

But Strava‘s real genius lies in its social features. Its activity feed strikes the perfect balance of being motivating without feeling spammy or competitive. Seeing your friends‘ impressive workouts is inspiring (I should try that 10K route!), while their kudos on your latest run feel validating and supportive.

Strava is the rare app that combines powerful data, sleek design, and human connection into a seamless experience. It makes even the most solo sports feel like a shared, social pursuit.

Key takeaway: Data visualization and social sharing, when done right, can be a potent combination for driving engagement and retention in a fitness app.

Elevating App Design From Good to Great

As these examples illustrate, a standout mobile app is so much more than a set of features or a means to an end. The best apps become an integral, almost indispensable part of people‘s lives—elevating their health, productivity, creativity, and happiness on a daily basis.

That‘s the power of great app design. The perfect marriage of visuals, flows, copy, and interactions can transform a mundane task like logging your to-dos or tracking your steps into a moment of delight or self-expression.

So how can you elevate your own app designs from merely good to truly great? Here are a few principles to swear by:

• Put users first: Deeply understand your target audience—their goals, pain points, and mental models—and optimize every design decision for their needs. Agonize over usability testing results and user feedback until it‘s clear your app fits like a glove.

• Master the details: Greatness emerges from the sum of countless UX micro-decisions, like the typography, haptics, empty states, error messages, and more. Deeply consider every element and continually refine.

• Add a human touch: The warmest apps feel like they were made by real people with distinct personalities. Use informal copy, emotional design, and thoughtful touches like easter eggs to imbue a friendly vibe.

• Be a ruthless editor: Truly great apps are defined as much by what they leave out as what they include. Cut out every inessential screen, setting, or UI control until only the 20% that drives 80% of the value remains. Simplicity always wins.

To quantify the business case for investing in great app design, consider some of these eye-opening stats:

• According to Forrester Research, every $1 invested in UX yields an average return of $100 (ROI = 9,900%)
• User-friendly companies boost their revenues by 37% on average (Intechnic)
• 90% of users reported having stopped using an app due to poor performance and 86% deleted or uninstalled an app because of difficulty using it (Dimensional Research)

In other words, great app design isn‘t just good for users—it‘s good for the bottom line. It can be the difference between an app that languishes in obscurity and one that rides word-of-mouth virality to become a household name.

Of course, building a world-class app takes more than admiring others‘ work. It requires critical thinking, radical empathy, rigorous process, and a near-obsessive focus on quality and craftsmanship.

But by studying the masters showcased here, you‘ll start to develop the design spidey-senses to know what separates good from great. With enough practice and iteration, soon enough you just might join their ranks.