Does anyone use more then one app that does the same thing? For example do you use things and OmniFocus? Do you use notes and good notes? Do you use week cal and google calendar? I’m just asking , curious to see what and why people do this.
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It depends what you mean by “does the same thing”. Lots of folks would say that OmniFocus, Due, and Reminders do the same thing, but I use them for different purposes. Repeating tasks and tasks that have to get done at particular times go in Due, my grocery list goes in Reminders, and most general tasks go into OmniFocus. Similarly, I use both Bear and Ulysses, which have a lot of overlap. Bear is for notes and short pieces of writing. Ulysses is for longer pieces. On iOS I use both Spark and the Mail app for email: Mail for my work email (because it’s that or the Outlook app), Spark for personal email (because I have a choice).
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@ChrisUpchurch thats what I’m looking for , what you typed it’s interesting how people use more then one app for stuff.
I use 4 different iOS email apps…one for each of my email addresses. I like to keep my email words very separate
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Sure. I use bear for notes, iA writer for one off communication/one off items and sometimes Ulysses for stuff like classes. I have use the calendar in spark because I it’s easy to click right over from email and Fantastical for quick entry and menu bar. Dropbox for church files, google drive for teacher collaboration, One Drive because that’s where our school lives, and iCloud personal. Goodnotes for presenting something, Notability for most hand written notes. PDF Expert/Documents 5 is my PDF reader. I’m sure there are more.
Just thought of this one: GarageBand for vocal processing for narration or even live presentation, Logic for recording and writing, and Ableton for composition some and live performance back in the day.
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but on my home screen I keep both Google Maps and Apple Maps side by side. I’ve tried splitting them, thinking “I’ll probably use this one more, and the other one just in case”. However, finding that they are both equally great at their own things, like GMaps for transit and walking directions, streetview and more - while Maps has a much cleaner look in turn-by-turn and also works with the Apple Watch and CarPlay.
I also keep both the airline app and the airport app side by side. Somewhat the same information about upcoming flights in both, but presented differently.
I use Google Maps and Apple Maps. I use Drafts and Notes. There are probably a few others that do the same thing, but I use tnem for different reasons.
I use Safari for personal browsing and Chrome for work. Similarly, I use Mail for personal and Outlook for work. Clearly I like being able to ignore work at times!
I use Reminders and Calendar mostly, but Due for some tasks.
I use Kindle for fiction, Books for non-fiction, which I’d never really thought about before.
I use Apple Podcasts & Overcast because of rave reviews for the latter but not 100% sure it’s better so I kept the original too.
At last count, including note taking apps, word processers etc I had >20 ‘writing’ apps 
I remember the old days wherein I’d ask myself if a project will be faster to work on either Macromedia Freehand or Adobe Illustrator.
For writing, I have Bear and Ulysses. Bear for work notes and research, Ulysses for writing down my thoughts and generally writing long form. Back then, I use both Overcast and Castro. Overcast for it’s smart speed, Castro when I want to queue multiple episodes in a day. I use the built-in camera and Halide. When I want to compose a shot and in RAW, it’s Halide for day to day stuff it’s the built-in camera.
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I use Bear for short notes, Ulysses for short articles (up to 5,000 words) and scrivener for longer articles and books. I finish editing in Word.
I use Scrivener and LibreOffice for writing. Scrivener for larger things and collections of things (blog posts, newsletter articles) LibreOffice for business letters and lists of things (books owned , DVDs owned etc.)
Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and LightRoom for image manipulation. Photoshop least often for heavy duty stuff. Elements for making web friendly sized versions and just starting to replace both with LightRoom for the non-destructive editing feature.
Safari & Firefox. Safari for all my normal browsing, Firefox, rev 56.0.2, with SQLite Manger plug-in to do most of the reporting and lots of database stuff with my LambTracker database and also download a bank statement from one back that does not support Safari.
Valentina Studio and Jaspersoft Studio both for various SQL stuff.
Acrobat Professional and Acrobat Reader depending on what I need to do with PDFs.
And how about hardware duplicates? I have 3 scanners attached to my machine, a ScanSnal S510M used for most paper filing into PDF scanning, an Epson 4870 Photo for most image scanning and the scanner on an Epson ET-2650 for some image scanning at lower resolutions.
Excel & Numbers, Amazon Music & Apple Music, Pixelmator & Photoshop & Affinity Photo, Byword & Ulysses, Pages & Word, Messages & WhatsApp & Slack & Messenger
Hmmm, think I have a problem!
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For me it’s Chrome and Safari just because of compatibility issues. Apple Notes and Evernote. Google maps and Apple map when my car satnav fails me. Apple News app and BBC news when I just want the facts! Apple Photos, Google Photos, iCloud and Amazon Prime photos, Time Machine, CCC x4 and WD MyCloud… cos you can never have enough back ups!
I tend to do what you are talking about with reference to iWork and Office. The rest of my department uses Office, but I prefer the look and feel of iWork (Numbers especially), so I often start everything in iWork apps and then export them to the MS apps for sharing.
I’ve recently been paring down the number of apps that I use on all my devices, sort of a digital minimalism I guess, and eliminating everything redundant.
I’m a regular rail traveller in the UK and have no fewer than four apps to tell me the time and status of my trains, each of which fills a slightly different niche.
- ByTrain lives on my homescreen as it has the nicest UI
- Live Train Times UK offers the richest functionality including a URL scheme that I can call from Launch Center Pro to very quickly get to a specific route
- Nearly Departed has a superb widget that you can check from the lock screen
- UK Live Train Times offers a good Apple Watch app and complication
Appreciate this is a fairly specific use case, but I think it demonstrates the point that it’s sometimes useful having multiple apps offering different perspectives on the same information.
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That reminds me all of the weather apps I have on my phone. I use Carrot as my daily weather app, but we do a lot of stuff outside as a church. Those days I have about 5 different weather apps to play meteorologist.
I often use more than one app to do the same thing as a workaround of iOS’s inability to run multiple instances of a single app.
For example, I install Readdle’s Documents and PDF Expert for viewing two PDFs side by side. I use Overcast as my main podcast player but also keep Pocket Cast as a repository of interesting-but-occationally-listening shows. And don’t forget there were apps that were intended to be redundent, e.g. Sidefari.
I hope one day I no longer need to do this. But until that day comes, iOS multitasking, to me, will remain a baby multitasking.
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I use fantastical on my phone to see all my google calendars and Family iCloud calendars together. Then I use google calendar when I only want to see my work view. Have 12 versus 1 showing is so helpful.