Apps on Apps: Top 3 Must-Have iPhone Applications – And the Snapchat Hall of Fame.

Our generation’s main means of communication switched from talking on the phone to strictly texting when wireless services made texting free. However bizarre I may find this concept to be, watching my 15-year-old brother and his friends sit there and text a friend for an hour versus simply calling them to chat, it is what our first world has come to and we are all forced to accept it (first world problems, lolz). Among the many frustrations with texting, I found the most difficult feat to be truly expressing my emotions. One simply cannot express one’s feelings via iMessage using written words only. The act of texting excludes tone of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, and most importantly, interpretive dances— UNTIL NOW. Emojis have brought texting to whole new level. “Emoji Free” is obvs free and can be found in the App Store. It is stored on your phone as an alternate keyboard, and while texting one can click a button on their keyboard and the whole Emoji dictionary pops up. Emojis are little emoticons and pictures invented by the anime loving Asians. They are categorized under folders using symbols that you can click and scroll through, including recently used, humans, nature, objects, travel, and characters. There is an Emoji for almost anything you need to communicate. Texting is in fact sometimes more effective when only Emojis are used, without words. Once you have the app, it’s hard to send a text without including at least one Emoji.

GroupMe is an app that allows you to create group messages with your friends. It’s dope for sharing pictures, links, YouTube videos, etc. with a group of people. For each group, there is a “creator” who starts the group, then anyone in the group can add whoever else. GroupMe allows you to set it to where messages pop up on your phone like a text, or you can hide the notifications so you can check your messages at your own leisure. It also has a “like” feature next to each person’s messages that is a picture of a heart you can click on to show your love for that post. I’m a notorious liker. Shoutout to SAL’s Group, an eclectic mix of friends who all post hilarious messages every day. This is my most active “group” on GroupMe. People who didn’t know each other before SAL’s and people who are best friends come together on SAL’s, and now we are one big family, making each other laugh every day. It’s a beautiful thing. I can’t stop clicking the like button.

Please refer to my previous post dedicated entirely to Snapchat if you aren’t familiar with this app. View some of my favorite snappics of the summer below.

Snapchat Hall of Fame: