If you’re the sort of person who likes to go out for a Sunday drive or wander off the beaten path from time to time, there are a couple of apps (one seasoned and one newbie) that might help you find your way.

iPhone users have it easy. iMessage comes preinstalled, and it achieves more than even the best messaging apps on Android. iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, it supports SMS and it’s packed with features that range from gimmicky (Animoji) to can’t-live-without-it useful (Memoji).

The experience of one iPhone user messaging another is seamless, secure, and convenient. The same can’t be said for Android users.

Almost everyone loves listening to podcasts. Nobody, however, loves picking out an app to be their podcast listening hub. Since we last got the lay of the podcast-app land in 2015, digital audio has become way more popular and, as a result, there are more podcast managers than ever out there. After testing just under 20 of the most popular podcast listening apps, I have a pair of definitive recommendations for what you should use to manage podcasts on your iPhone and/or iPad.

Mac: Flexibits, creators of Lifehacker's favourite calendar app Fantastical, has released its command-line approach to contacts with Cardhop. This new contacts app is oriented around actions rather than your contacts database; you mainly use it by writing commands, kind of like talking to Siri. It's a potentially compelling interface -- if you can remember to use it.

Android/iOS: Using your phone to scan documents isn't anything new. With apps such as Scanner Pro and Turbo Scan out there, if you own a smartphone there's pretty much no reason you need to break out the ol' flatbed scanner to digitise anything any more. Heck, even just snapping a photo of a document sans app could probably get the job done in most cases. Even if you've already found a favourite scanning app, Adobe's new app, aptly named Abobe Scan, is one you're definitely going to want to try.

Your Mac comes packed with a perfectly fine calendar app, but it's lacking advanced features, multiple ways to view your calendar and external service integration. For all that and more, we like Fantastical.

If you're not tracking your habits, you're missing out on a powerful motivation tool. HabitHub is a fantastic app that can track your habits, remind you to stay on top of them and provide some great charts showing your progress.

Tracking your habits is a great way to keep an eye on your progress for a variety of self-improvement goals, and you have an incredible number of apps for doing so on the iPhone. However, when it comes to performance and ease of use, we like Productive, because it blends simplicity with the statistics you want to see.

Journaling might seem silly on the surface, but a journal is extremely useful as both a permanent record of your thoughts and as a cathartic release. Regardless of how you plan to use a journal, our favourite on the iPhone is Day One.

For whatever reason, the iPhone has tons of different voice recording apps, but very few of them do anything more than Apple's free Voice Memos app. We like Just Press Record because it manages to make itself worth its asking price by offering a different experience and feature set than Apple's offering.

The field of Twitter clients for Windows has been culled over the years, but there are still a few developers working hard on some killer apps. Aeries has stuck out with us as an impressive Twitter client capable of keeping up with professional needs with a Universal Windows app.

At a glance, system monitors might not seem as useful on your iPhone as they are on a desktop computer, but they can pack in a lot of good data. This includes detailed battery life breakdowns, storage space and data speeds. For the average user, our favourite system monitor for the iPhone is Omnistat.

File managers may be a dime a dozen on Android, but Solid Explorer stands out from the pack. With advanced features for managing and browsing your files, both on your phone and remotely, it's our new favourite file manager.

The iPhone doesn't support app launchers in the same way as OS X, but that doesn't mean app developers haven't come up with clever workarounds. Case in point, our pick for the best launcher, Launch Center Pro lets you launch not only apps, but specific actions within apps.

Windows has more antivirus programs than we can count, and none of them are quite perfect. Right now, we recommend Avira for the best balance between protection, ease of use and cost.

If you're emailing recipes to yourself, printing them out or still keeping index cards, there's a better way. Grab your Android phone, there are a ton of great recipe apps out there, but we have one we think is the right blend of features for the right price. Paprika is the app for you.

Managing a vast collection of recipes used to be as simple as pulling out a box of index cards. Now things are a little smarter, but that also means they're a bit more complicated. To wrangle all your recipes into a sensible order on your iPhone, we like Paprika.

The iPhone doesn't have a shortage of video editing apps. In fact, there're so many it's almost impossible to choose among them. But when it comes to the right combination of features and usability on the arguably too-tiny-for-video-editing iPhone screen, we like Splice.

Oh, finally we can write this post. Video editors have sucked on Android for a long time. Too long. But now, Adobe Premiere Clip brings basic, easy-to-use video editing to Android. You can trim clips, mix multiple clips together, and add your own soundtrack. It's not perfect, but it's a good start.