As we bid 2016 goodbye and welcome 2017, one thing is almost certain to stay the same in a sea of change: we will still use our smartphones a lot everyday. Google says that an average person looks at his smartphone 150x a day and we feel that the number will go up even more in 2017. That said we would like to recommend a few new applications that you guys might want to try out next year. They’re all in the themes or self-improvement and productivity.

Fitbit

In 2016 I lost over 100 lbs. by switching to a healthy diet and doing regular exercise. My gadget and app of choice for this entire time has been the FitBit Charge (eventually upgraded to Charge 2). The Fitbit app is a great health analytics app which lets you log in your food intake, measure calorie burn, track exercise, and more. It’s a great investment especially if you’re on the same weight loss journey as me.

You can read the full review of the Fitbit Charge 2 here.

DDP Yoga

Gym memberships and special fitness classes are expensive. One way to still enjoy the benefits is to just get a program you can follow at home. That’s what we’ve been doing and so far it’s been working wonders! We downloaded the DDP Yoga (Diamond Dalas Page, he’s a former WWE/WCW star) and just follow the workouts there. He has a lot of great content for beginners which is something that we super appreciate.

If you want a solid testimonial of DDP Yoga, watch this video:

Bear

Without a doubt this is my personal favorite notes application. It’s cleaner and is more versatile compared to Evernote. It syncs across iOS and the Mac which is perfect since that’s the ecosystem I’m on. Here’s a short video on Bear.

Telegram

If you’re sick of Viber and not a fan of Whatsapp, you might want to give Telegram a try. It’s currently my personal favorite messaging service because of the clean user interface and the fact that it’s considered as the most secure messaging platform right now.

How secure? Apparently even ISIS used it before. It’s that secure, lol.

So yeah, if you need an alternative messaging app, check out Telegram.

Prisma

If you’re not too happy with the built-in filters of Instagram, you have got to download Prisma and give it a try. Granted it’s not super fast in rendering images, the output is still pretty amazing. Check out our app review above.