If you have an iPhone, then you already know how difficult it can be to find the best iPhone apps. Sorting through the more than 100,000 options in the App Store can be a daunting task — to say the least!
That’s why we’ve done the research for you. The staff at GreeenWorld365.com found and tested five “green” apps that will get you on your way to living a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Who said technology can’t be green?
Don’t have an iPhone. No problem, all of these apps, will also work on your iPod touch.
The Green Lemur: Of all the apps offering green tips, The Green Lemur is our favorite. The tips and trivia are really well-organized making this app easy to navigate. Users can browse by topic, search using keywords or “ask the lemur” to get a tip of the day.
A lot of the tips are simple and might even seem like common sense to those that have been in the green scene for awhile. You’ll find tips such as, choose cards made from recycled paper or buy ebooks instead of paper books. Intermediate users might find a few tips as well, such as Strategically plant deciduous trees to keep your house cool in the summer while letting in sun in the winter.
The Green Lemur had a few bugs — some of the tips were titled incorrectly — but overall it’s the best guide new greenies.
Green Tips: Powered by GreenNexxus, Green Tips is simple and straightforward — and so are the tips. Users are presented with one tip at time, no searching or sorting in this app. You can get a new tip by tapping the refresh button in the upper left corner.
The best feature in this iPhone app is the ability to email a green tip to a friend. Tap the email link in the upper right corner and you’ll be taken to an email page pre-populated with the text for the tip and a link to the GreenNexxus website.
Go Green Free: We like statistics and numbers. That’s pretty much the only reason that Go Green Free makes our list of environmental iPhone apps. This app has a few tips that include nice stats: Eliminate 2 pounds of CO2 by washing your clothes in cold water. Or, if every U.S. home replaced one light bulb with an Energy Star bulb, we’d save enough energy to light 3 million homes for a year.
The downside with Go Green Free is that none of the stats have attribution, so it’s impossible to investigate how accurate or up-to-date they are. Also, you receive ONE tip each time the app is opened. It’s kind of a drag to open and close the app to see new tips.
Get Green: This is another app that offers one tip at a time — in fact, it’s one tip per day! Get Green uses a simple date-based system to provide one eco-friendly tip each day. You can choose to save a tip to your favorites section for viewing later, but you can’t skip ahead. Get Green also offers the option to email a tip to a friend.
Despite the limitations, Get Green has some of the best eco-tips of the bunch. Using statistics — with attribution — Get Green provides the most informative tips with a slightly more in-depth description than most of the other apps.
Good Guide: Unlike the other apps in this category, Good Guide doesn’t offer tips. However, it’s a useful tool for making greener decisions on-the-go. The Good Guide app is a mobile version of the Good Guide website which provides ratings and recommendations for thousands of natural, green and sustainable products. The goal is to offer consumers enough information that they are able to make responsible decisions and vote with their dollars to support the environment.
In addition to writing for GreenWorld365, Barbara Holbrook also writes about the best iPhone apps on the popular iPhone app review site AppCraver.com.
