By: Hailey | Last updated January 22, 2020 
The Mac App Store is a magical virtual place, full of interesting, catchy apps you can download on your Mac. From utility programs, to creative apps (photo, video), productivity and so on, the offer is overwhelming. The question is no longer what you can install on your Mac computer, but rather what are the must-have apps every Mac user should have on their device. You need some sort of ranking system to just select the most important ones, otherwise you’ll end up spending all your time on the App Store testing aimlessly.
One way to narrow down your options is to start with the best free apps first and that’s what this article is all about.
Here are the most popular free Mac apps to install on your computer in 2018. Some of them might be familiar to you and you might already have them installed on your computer, but hopefully you’ll get some new ideas, too:
Amphetamine – it is a great utility app that keeps you Mac from entering into sleep mode even when the computer is not doing anything. Amphetamine can also be used to set triggers to keep the computer awake when certain apps are running and more
Alfred 3 – It is a useful productivity app that allows you to do a lot of things, such as perform searches online or on the computer, launch apps quickly, use all kinds of keywords and more
Pocket – is a nice app that lets you save articles and be able to read them later, even if you are offline. Oftentimes, you may stumble upon a text that you want to read but don’t have the time to do it at that moment. This app makes sure you can revisit those articles later and you don’t struggle to find them again. If you have several saved articles, you can easily find a certain one of them by using tags
Simplenote – this is another great productivity/organizational tool that allows you to take and organize notes, and become more efficient. It has a great and user-friendly interface and plenty of useful features
Spark – It is a popular email app for Mac. It has a lot of useful features: you can arrange your emails by category, archive, delete, tag your e-mails, search them based on attachment and more
Franz – Franz allows you to access several chat apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Skype, etc. from just one interface
VLC – You’ve most likely heard about VLC until now, but maybe you weren’t sure whether it’s worth installing. Well, when it comes to media players for Macs, VLC is definitely among the best ones you can find. It can play pretty much any file type, it has a lot of useful plug-ins and extensions and can even help you stream videos to Chromecast
qBittorrent – is an open-source downloading app, just like uTorrent for example. The great thing about is that it doesn’t have any ads and has a user-friendly interface. Another alternative is Deluge, although it doesn’t receive updates that often.
Read about more useful apps for your Mac computer here: http://www.bestreviewguide.com/en/articles/software/mac-utilities/essential-apps-every-mac-user-should-install/
