It’s true that the latest buzz word in mobility today is Android with over 190 million active devices, but Apple’s iOS runs on more than 250 million devices worldwide. When we featured our list of Android-based productivity apps for our executives on the move, our job was just half done. The Apple App Store boasts of 50 percent more apps than the Google Play Store and over 10 billion downloads.

With due respect to these mind boggling numbers, we bring to you a list of five iOS-based productivity apps that can help executives convert their iPhone and iPad into proficient work warriors and help manage work better.

While this list is nowhere close to being exhaustive, it just begins to describe how a simple app, downloaded on your iPhone or iPad – practically at no additional cost, can enhance work experience, enable efficiency and productivity and make a busy executive’s life a little bit simpler.

Roambi

The app redefines a business user’s experience, aiding him/her in taking intelligent business decisions on the move. With a focus on engaging designs, Roambi is reinventing how people share and communicate information on their iPhones or iPads.

The app features dashboard-style analytics that are intuitive to use, fast to deploy, and easy to integrate with your existing reporting systems. The information can be presented to the end users in the form of pie charts with titles. The reports and comments can be shared in real time with all the concerned stakeholders without any time lapse.

This free app contains fully functional samples of interactive, vivid mobile reports that let you tap, pinch, and swipe information in a rich, animated display.
The app is a little heavy in size and the information management can be a concern in case the end users are using a low storage iPhone/iPad models on the go.

What It Costs You: Free

Expensify

So, you yet again missed out on the deadline for submitting your travel expenses. Expensify is a free app that lets all the business travellers keep track of their expenses on their iOS devices. The good part is all your receipts, expenses and reports are stored on the Expensify.com site so you can access them on your laptop/desktop at work or at home.

You can keep track of all your expenses in the app as well. To start, you open Expensify, tap the “Expenses” tab and enter your expense. From there you can specify details such as the merchant’s name and the category of the expense. The most amazing feature of this app is the ability to let the user input a receipt directly by using the iPhone’s camera to capture the image of the receipt.

This will help you keep a digital copy of your receipts. However, there is a catch; don’t expect that this app will automatically fill in the fields when you take a shot of the receipt. This app is not advanced enough to do that.

What It Costs You: Free

CardMunch

As a busy executive managing the numerous business cards that you exchange on a daily basis, and fumbling through hundreds of them to get to the one you need may seem like a task that gives you a headache.

CardMunch is the perfect app for anyone in the business world. Keeping track of the cards or having the information when you need it is a tedious task and that is exactly where CardMunch’s technology comes in handy.

The app will automatically recognise the card, capture the image, and transcribe the details by creating a new contact on your iPhone. The feature which makes this particular card reader way more productive than the rest is its integration with your LinkedIn account.

Whenever you scan a new card, the app will search for that contact on Linkedin and will send an invite with your permission. All the transcription of your contacts is done manually so it ensures high accuracy for scanned cards. With a newly revamped user interface and visual experience, this surely is a must-have app for any iOS device.

What It Costs You: Free

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is the app for users who want a simple, easy, and a cheap way to manage tasks on all their Mac and iOS devices. Wunderlist is an aesthetically pleasing and easy to use list-based task manager, with a user interface that requires almost no learning curve.

Not only is Wunderlist is simple to use, it also offers some very useful features, including the ability to share lists, add notes to tasks, use stars to designate priority, and emailing tasks.

Wunderlist, however, is not the choice for those wanting full calendar integration, but it is the choice for those looking to put pen and paper to do lists on their iPhone. Another useful feature is its ability to sync with free cloud services. One of my CIO contacts has personally recommended this app.

What It Costs You: Free

GoodReader

For approximately Rs 300, GoodReader transforms your Rs 45,000 iPad into a reader, file manager, and annotator. Apple iBooks, Amazon Kindle, Google Books, etc for iPad do allow customers to browse, buy, and read books on the iOS, but when it comes to seamless integration with files from other sources like Microsoft word docs or plain .txt files, this app works the best.

With a host of synchronisation options, dexterous file support, and Acrobat-compatible annotation capability, GoodReader for iPad is a great buy for any executive who is looking to get the most out their text documents.

The latest version (3.5.0) builds on an already formidable solution by making it a better ambassador to cloud-based services and remote servers.

What It Costs You: Rs. 300