My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 357 👋
Here we are, wrapping up yet another year. While writing this intro section for this newsletter, I was browsing through some of my notes, blog posts, and social media posts from the almost past year. One post 11 months ago on Mastodon stood out to me, as I wished everyone a happy new year, but also pointed out that 2024 has been the worst year of my life, which was the reason I was looking forward to a fresh new start in 2025. Well, I think 2025 took the "Worst …
My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.
Hey and welcome to Creativerly 357 👋
Here we are, wrapping up yet another year. While writing this intro section for this newsletter, I was browsing through some of my notes, blog posts, and social media posts from the almost past year. One post 11 months ago on Mastodon stood out to me, as I wished everyone a happy new year, but also pointed out that 2024 has been the worst year of my life, which was the reason I was looking forward to a fresh new start in 2025. Well, I think 2025 took the "Worst year of my life" spot from 2024, for obvious reasons. Two years in a row means it is time for change. The past couple of months have already been sparked with doing new things, and I am looking forward to keeping that momentum for 2026 (I just published a new post on my personal website reflecting on doing new things).
2026 will be all about doing new things, gaining new experiences, and embrace the change. It is time to set clear my values, and how to organize them. It feels like while I build my morality, my politics, and my identity, I tended to let negativity take over and influence my decisions. In 2026, I am going to start organizing my values around life. I am going to focus on the good, the things I am in control of, the life that is worth pursuing, the activities that fuel my sanity, what is worth building, and simply celebrate life, even in a messy world.
Spending most of your day focusing on the things you are against or hate lead to major frustrations. And in the transformational phase of my life I am currently in, I have no room for those frustrations. I want to affirm life.
I am scared of what is about to come. I am scared of all the change. However, at the same time, I realized that I am in the need of change, since I am not happy where I am right now, and all the new things and experiences I added to my life, helped me moving to a better place, a happier place.
In that sense, I wish you all the best for 2026.
Creativerly’s Favourites Apps of 2025
This is the fifth year of sitting down and reflecting on a bunch of Apps that stood out throughout the past twelve months. In case you want to take a trip to the past, you can check out Creativerly‘s Favorite Apps for 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Readers who have been here since the early days know that writing about apps and tools has been at the core of Creativerly. However, throughout the years, instead of falling for shiny-app-syndrom over and over again, I became more thoughtful about the volume of apps I am featuring and writing about, as well as more selective and mindful about the apps I am using on a daily basis. This means, a couple apps that became my favourites in 2024, are still my favourites in 2025.
What has changed though, are the reasons why they are still my favourites. And this brings me to an important point: new apps are getting launched every day, and with the blazingly fast development of AI, even more (but not necessarily better) apps are popping up everywhere. When you suddenly discover a shiny and fancy new app on your timeline, it is super easy to get hooked, start exploring, and potentially adding yet another app to your tool stack, although you might not need it. Chances are high, the apps you are already using let you achieve the same things, that new app is promising you.
Loads of apps are selling the idea of making you more productive, saving you time, achieving more, and reaching your goals. Combine those things with a flashy and shiny user interfaces, fancy icons and colors, and no-one is surprised anymore, that we abandon apps that were perfectly fine, for new ones we just stumbled across.
So, let us embrace simple and real apps, small and mighty teams, building tools to solve their users’ problems. Let us support those who use their users’ satisfactory as driving force in order to create and build great apps and tools.
And now, enjoy Creativerly’s Favourite Apps of 2025.
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Mental Wealth
❯ Why taste matters more – “Us designers love to talk about tools, processes, and skills. We debate software, trade shortcuts, and show off case studies filled with research frameworks and clever flows. All useful things. But what rarely gets talked about and showcased in portfolios is the one thing that actually makes a designer memorable: taste.”
❯ Just do whatever you like – “You want it. You get a chance to have it. Then you spoil it by making yourself feel like you don’t deserve it. You soak in self-resentment until you kinda forget about it (but also not really).”
❯ The Mystery of Storytelling – “Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture our imagination and speak to our fears and our dreams.”
❯ Beyond the Machine – “I am so tired of hearing about AI. Unfortunately, this is a talk about AI. I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI as a designer without feeling like shit. I am fascinated with what it can do, impressed and repulsed by what it makes, and distrustful of its owners. I am deeply ambivalent about it all. The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over.”
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Appendix
❯ ICYMI
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❯ Quick Bits
- Activists claim to have scraped most of Spotify, planning release (Jon Keegan / Sherwood News)
- Supreme Court tells Trump he can’t use the military to police Chicago (Alex Nguyen / Mother Jones)
- Trump Halts Construction on All Offshore Wind Projects (Alexander C. Kaufman / Heatmap News)
- Saudi Arabia reported to be buying stolen grain shipped by Russia (Séamus Bellamy / Boing Boing)
- OpenAI’s child exploitation reports increased sharply this year (Maddy Varner / Ars Technica)
- US bans former EU Commissioner and others over social media rules (Mariella Moon / Engadget)
- Four bright spots in climate news in 2025 (Casey Crownhart / MIT Technology Review)
- When the AI bubble bursts, humans will finally have their chance to take back control (Rafael Behr / The Guardian)
- Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome (Avram Piltch / The Register)
- Apple fined $116 million over app privacy prompts (Jess Weatherbed / The Verge)
- Pinterest Users Are Tired of All the AI Slop (Niamh Rowe / WIRED)
- Tesla’s EU sales fell nearly 40% in the first 11 months of 2025 (Rani Molla / Sherwood News)
- Trump to Europe: embrace Nazi trash or else (Jason Weisberger / Boing Boing)
- The New Surveillance State Is You (Andrew Couts / WIRED)
- Apple is going to allow third-party app stores in Brazil, too (Jay Peters / The Verge)
- Trump administration seeks to deport hate speech researcher previously sued by X (Anthony Ha / TechCrunch)
- More than $32 billion in U.S. clean energy projects were canceled in 2025 (Adele Peters / Fast Company)
- Why WeTransfer’s co-founder is building another file transfer service (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)
**Till next time! 👋**
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