Get an iPad for Christmas? Here are 5 must-download apps to get you started

From streaming to reading to cooking and more

Features By Tom Bedford published 25 December 2024

Looking at the big, blank Home Screen of a new iPad is like waking up to see that a blanket of fresh snow covers the world: it’s a land of opportunity and enjoyment, that you’re about to turn into a cluttered mess. And that’s the fun of it!

So you just received a new iPad; do you leave it nice and pristine, with only the built-in Apple apps? No, of course not – over the lifetime of this tablet, you’re going to fill its pages full of random apps, some of which you barely use and others of which you use daily. But where to begin?

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 populate your iPad with a few apps you’ll use, I’ve made this quick cheat-sheet of a few key apps or app categories which you’ll need.

1. Kindle

I cheat on my Kindle by… barely ever brushing the dust off my Kindle, and just using my iPad as a giant LED-powered ereader all the time. This is all thanks to the Kindle app.

The Kindle app can let you read books associated with your Amazon account, and you don’t actually need to own one of Amazon’s ereaders to do it – you can simply use the app on an iOS or Android device. What's more, the Night Shift display feature (in the Settings app, under Display and Brightness) can make your screen a bit warmer, like a Kindle itself.

While it’s not quite as physically convenient for reading as a Kindle, the iPad’s Kindle app removes the need for buying a whole extra device for reading. I’ve been using my iPad Pro for years now to slowly read Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because my Kindle mocks how little of a dent I've made in it (it’s more than 5,000 pages long, I could read for hours and barely get 1% through!).

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