2022 Microsoft Product Roadmap

5 Of The Best Money-Saving Apps To Use On IPhone

© Charday Penn/Getty Images People using Apple devices

With things like the recent inflation wave, the economic impacts of the pandemic, and student loans, there has been more focus on saving than in any other recent time, putting the need to budget effectively and maximize savings on more people's minds. Be it for day-to-day expenses such as your daily transport and groceries or long-term commitments such as your insurance premiums, mortgage, or student loan payments, having effective saving and spending plans makes achieving those goals significantly more likely.

To that end, utilizing an app that can track your income and expenses and help you budget, save, and invest can be invaluable. Depending on your financial literacy, confidence, and competence level, you may or may not need various features to suit your needs. These features can range from basic income and expense tracking to budgeting to automated saving and even investment to ensure that you can hit your goals and make it through the month with as little pressure as possible.

Also, since you interact with your phone more often than with your bank, if nothing else, using an effective savings app means you will be more involved with your finances, thus understanding them better.

Oportun © Sdi Productions/Getty Images Person using budgeting app

Put simply, Oportun takes the thinking out of saving by automatically analyzing your income and spending to move portions of your funds to savings. You may have heard this same value proposition from another saving app, Digit, and with good reason -- following its acquisition in December 2021 and a rebrand in March 2023; Digit is now Oportun.

CONSTELLATION BRANDS, INC.

Oportun includes functions that allow you to save, budget, invest, and even access loans when necessary. If you only want to save, the app will achieve this by moving small sums from your linked checking account whenever it believes you can afford to. It decides how much to set aside in savings using several parameters such as your income and expenses (both past and expected), as well as savings goals and daily saving limits you set. If you want to take things a step further and budget using Oportun, you can enter recurring bills and connect your credit cards to the app. This allows it to move funds to a separate Bills account, which you can draw from when paying the actual bills. Following a similar pattern as the Saving function, the app ensures that money is put aside in small amounts so that you aren't shocked by large payments you had not budgeted for.

Oportun is free for your first six months and costs $5 per month thereafter. The app currently has 4.7 stars from 273.7k ratings on the App Store.

Acorns © Tada Images/Shutterstock Acorns app on iPhone

Acorns help users save via three main mechanisms -- investing lump sums manually, programming the app to make regular deposits, and a function known as Round-Ups. The app creates an investment account, a retirement account, and a checking account for each user, to which deposits can be made. While the manual and regular deposit features are pretty common, the Round-Up feature is what makes Acorns stand out.

With Round-Ups, the app allows users to round up the value of every transaction they make to the nearest dollar value, then transfer the difference to their investment account. For instance, if your subway ticket costs $2.75, the app can round that up to $3 and deposit the $0.25 difference into your investment account. Acorns also let you choose between having each transaction be rounded up and deposited automatically and having the power to select which recent transactions you want to round up later. Since these Round-Ups occur with every purchase, a user's investment account can grow much faster than they might expect.

Acorns also has a few other tricks up its sleeve. For instance, it has created partnerships with various outlets to give users cashback deals on their purchases, with the rebates deposited to their investment accounts. It has a Jobs section, where you can look for new opportunities to earn, making it one of the best iPhone apps for earning money.

Acorns charges users $3 a month and has 4.7 stars from 860.2k ratings on the App Store.

Mint © Solstock/Getty Images Person using budgeting app

Mint is primarily a budgeting app owned by Intuit, the parent company of other household names like TurboTax — a mobile tax app to ease your filing season woes — and CreditKarma and QuickBooks. However, it also offers access to features like investments, banking, credit cards, and personal loans from its partners.

When it comes to budgeting and tracking finances, Mint is quite comprehensive. The app lets you connect most, if not all, of your financial accounts, including bank accounts, investment accounts, credit cards, loans, and more, allowing you to track all of your finances in one place. Using this information, the app can then create a budget for you, or you can create your own. Mint will also categorize your spending automatically (though you can still tweak it if it gets something wrong), so you can easily see what you spend and better understand how to change your spending behavior to save.

In addition to its budgeting and payment tracking features, Mint can track your subscription fees and bills, ensuring you never miss a payment. And when it comes to actually paying those bills, the app can even give you a chance at having your bills negotiated down via its partnership with Billshark. Mint users can also access their credit scores and reports via the app for free. 

Mint is free but gives access to extra features for $4.99 a month and has 4.8 stars from 775.1k ratings on the App Store.

You Need A Budget © Sdi Productions/Getty Images Couple using budgeting app

You Need a Budget (YNAB) uses a zero-based budgeting system, wherein every dollar you earn is accounted for when budgeting. Compared to other apps which look at your past expenses and then give you the option of budgeting afterward, YNAB focuses on budgeting as its most crucial function, forcing you to make a plan for all of your money from the get-go. It also foregoes many advanced features and integrations other apps may include.

Because YNAB puts the onus on you to make your budget and allocate every dollar ahead of time, the app can have more of a learning curve than the competition. However, making the budgeting process very hands-on, instead of automating it and forcing you to actively think about how you want to spend each dollar, should improve your ability to save. This contrasts with most other apps, which show you how much money you have left to spend. YNAB allows you to create as many specific budgeting and saving categories and targets as necessary to personalize your overall budget to your exact spending needs and patterns. This can give you a much clearer understanding of what you spend and where you can make changes to save more.

You Need A Budget is free for a 34-day trial period, after which a subscription will cost either $14.99 a month or $98.99 a year and has 4.8 stars from 44.8k ratings on the App Store.

Qapital © Sdi Productions/Getty Images Person using budgeting iPhone app

Qapital is a savings app with a novel approach -- adding an element of gamification to the usual saving, investing, and budgeting elements many apps have.

The app uses what it calls Rules to give you different ways to save. In addition to the Set and Forget Rule, which acts as a basic automated saving system, more advanced rules which will save a little money when you do specific things like make guilty pleasure purchases, end a set period under budget, hit Apple Health goals, or even browse Twitter. Qapital also has the option to share saving with a partner, allowing you to meet your goals faster and motivate each other while doing it.

Aside from its general saving function, Qapital also supports budgeting and investing. On the budgeting front, an upcoming Payday Divvy feature will split your money up on payday itself, allocating it to different areas you set so you don't accidentally spend it. Meanwhile, Spending Sweet Spot has you set weekly spending goals. On the investing front, the app will let you choose portfolios based on your risk appetite and then automatically transfer funds as instructed, even allowing you to set Rules to trigger investments.

Qapital is free for 30 days, after which you must pay a monthly subscription fee ranging from $3 to $12, depending on how many services you want access to. The app has 4.8 stars from 82k ratings on the App Store.

Read this next: 10 Common Smartphone Apps That Are Killing Your Data

How To Clear The Cache On Your IPhone (5 Ways To Do It)

Even though you can offload a great deal of what's stored on your iPhone to iCloud and other services like Google Photos, there are still many things that need to be kept on your iPhone, such as the apps you use every day.

Apple has designed iOS to do the best it can at managing the space on your iPhone behind the scenes to ensure you always have room to take selfies, download songs, and otherwise use your device normally. But running out of space is still possible, especially if you've opted for an iPhone with only 64GB or 128GB of storage (or you simply prefer to keep everything on your device rather than using cloud storage).

When that happens, you may start seeing warnings and errors pop up encouraging you to free up some more space. Your device may also slow down significantly as iOS shuffles things around to try and work within the limited space it has available.

When this happens, there are several things you can do to free up space on your iPhone, but one of the quickest ways to reclaim storage is to clear out the temporary cached data that's stored by many apps, including browsers like Safari and Chrome.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends What is the cache on your iPhone?

During its normal course of operation, your iPhone stores quite a bit of temporary data under the hood. Much of this data is kept on your device to speed things up and reduce the amount of data that needs to be repeatedly downloaded over your cellular or Wi-Fi data connection. This data is referred to as "cached" data, as it's information from elsewhere that's been copied to an area on your device where it can be reused for faster access.

The most common type of cached data lives in your web browser. Since we often revisit dozens of the same websites every day, browsers like Safari and Chrome store local copies of webpages and their static elements like logos and graphics, so they don't need to download them again every time you go back to the same website. That's not the only way caches are used, though; many third parties also cache other types of data locally for similar reasons. For instance, Facebook and Instagram will cache social media posts you've recently viewed, and Google Docs keeps a cache of anything you've been working on recently — even though the actual docs are saved in the cloud.

Each app does its best to manage how much data gets cached, but even so, some of them can grow pretty large over time. Apple's built-in apps are generally better at this — they'll start discarding unnecessary data when your iPhone gets critically low on space — but third-party browsers like Chrome aren't nearly as diligent, nor are other apps that have their own caches in place.

Christine Romero-Chan / Digital Trends How to clear your browser cache on an iPhone

Most iPhone owners use Safari as their primary browser, making this the place where most of your cached data is stored. Even if your browser of choice is Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or something else, it's still a good idea to check the instructions below, as many third-party apps still use the underlying Safari engine when opening websites.

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 2: Scroll down and select Safari.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 3: Choose Advanced at the bottom of the next screen.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 4: Select Website Data.

This will show you a list of all the sites that store cached information, cookies, and other data in Safari on your iPhone, sorted in descending order by the amount of space each one takes. The number at the top shows the total amount of space taken up by all cached sites.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 5: Select Remove All Website Data and confirm by selecting Remove Now from the pop-up that appears.

Note that this will remove all cached data and cookies for all sites. This includes any sites where you've saved your login status, so you'll need to sign in to those again the next time you visit them.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 6: Instead of removing everything, you can also choose to remove the data for only specific websites. To do this, swipe from right to left on a website you would like to remove until the Delete button appears, and either tap that button or continue swiping to delete the data for the selected website.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 7: You may have noticed a Clear History and Website Data option in the Safari settings. This option can also be used to remove all website data; however, it's a more drastic approach as it will also remove your browsing history from your iPhone and every other device signed in using the same iCloud account — such as your Mac or iPad. Since browsing history doesn't take up much space, there's no reason to do this for performance reasons; it's more of a privacy feature.

How to offload apps on your iPhone

While they aren't "cached data" in the strictest sense of the term, apps that are installed on your iPhone that you aren't using use regularly take up space in the same way. Each app is a copy of something that's available elsewhere — on the App Store in this case — which means there's no need to keep it on your iPhone if you seldom open it. For example, you may only use apps for seasonal shopping and vacations once or twice a year, yet they'll take up space on your device year-round.

Of course, if you don't use an app at all, you can simply delete it, but the downside is that removes all of the app's data from your device. Fortunately, Apple provides a way to "offload" your apps to free up space without affecting any of their data or even taking it away from its place on your home screen. This is especially handy for games, which are often large apps with relatively small amounts of stored data; offloading these frees up a lot of space without affecting your in-game progress.

Step 1: Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 2: Select General.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 3: Select iPhone Storage.

A list of all the apps installed on your device will appear, with the total storage being taken up by each one. This includes the app itself as well as all the data that are stored with it.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 4: Select an app from the list that you would like to offload. This will show you a detailed view breaking down how much storage is being used by the app itself (App Size) and how much is being used by the data stored by it (Documents & Data).

Note that only the storage listed beside App Size will be freed up by offloading an app.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 5: Select Offload App and confirm by choosing Offload App again when the pop-up appears. Alternatively, you can choose Delete App if you want to completely remove the app and all of its data from your iPhone. Note that some of Apple's built-in apps, like Photos and Messages, cannot be offloaded or deleted.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 6: You can also set your iPhone to offload apps automatically if you haven't used them in a while. You may be shown a recommendation to enable this when you go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage, which will also show how much space you'll save by doing so. You can find the setting under App Store in the iPhone Settings app.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 7: A few words of caution about offloading apps: Firstly, when you want to use the app again, it's automatically downloaded from the App Store. This means you need to have a data connection, which will need cellular data if you're not on Wi-Fi. You may want to think twice about offloading apps that you think you may need to use in a pinch.

Secondly, there's a small chance that the app could be removed from the App Store, in which case you may not be able to re-download it. This is quite rare and usually only happens when Apple turfs an app for violating the App Store's rules or a developer deliberately pulls their app from the App Store. That second case isn't common, but it does happen occasionally.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends Primakov/Shutterstock How to clear your cache in Chrome

Like most third-party apps, clearing your cache in Chrome is accomplished through the settings within the app.

Step 1: Open Chrome on your iPhone.

Step 2: Select the three-dot icon located in the bottom right corner.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 3: Select Clear Browsing Data.

Step 4: Choose Time Range if you'd prefer to clear only recent browsing data, or leave it set to All Time to clear everything.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 5: Deselect any items you don't want cleared. For example, if you're simply trying to free up space, you probably don't need to remove browsing history, saved passwords, or autofill data.

Step 6: Select Clear Browsing Data again located at the bottom, and then select it again from the pop-up to confirm.

Photo by Alan Truly How to clear your cache in Edge

If Microsoft Edge is your preferred browser, you can clear your cache there in much the same way as in Chrome.

Step 1: Open Edge on your iPhone.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 2: Select the three-dot icon located in the bottom center.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 3: Select Settings.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 4: Choose Privacy and Security.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 5: Select Clear Browsing Data.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 6: Choose Time Range to select how much browsing data you want to clear. This defaults to just the last hour, but you'll probably want to set it to All Time to free up as much storage as possible.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 7: Select or deselect the items you want to be cleared.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 8: Choose Clear now from the bottom of the screen and select it again from the pop-up to confirm.

Primakov How to clear your cache in Firefox

The steps for clearing your cache in Firefox on your iPhone are a bit different, but they'll ultimately accomplish the same thing.

Step 1: Open Firefox on your iPhone.

Step 2: Select the three-line menu button in the bottom right corner.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 3: Choose Settings from the pop-up menu.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 4: Scroll down and select Data Management.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 5: Ensure the switches are toggled on beside the categories of data you'd like to clear.

Jesse Hollington / Digital Trends

Step 6: Choose Clear Private Data and then select OK to confirm.

Christine Romero-Chan / Digital Trends Other ways to clear cached data from your iPhone

Although your web browser(s) are the most common places you'll find cached data, they're not the only ones. As we mentioned earlier, many individual apps also keep their own caches, and while these tend to be relatively small in most cases, there are exceptions. Apps that store large caches usually provide a way of clearing out that data, although how to do this varies with each app.

You can see a list of how much storage each of your apps is taking up by going into the iPhone's Settings app and selecting General > iPhone Storage. If something on that list seems excessive, it may be worth opening the app up and poking around inside to see where you can clear out the cache or otherwise free up some space by removing downloaded content from apps like Music, TV, Podcasts, or YouTube.

For cloud-based apps like Google Drive, Google Photos, Dropbox, and Evernote, you can remove the app from your iPhone entirely and then reinstall it from scratch. These apps store all your data on their respective cloud-based services, so you won't lose anything by deleting them except for your personal settings — and of course, any superfluous cached data they've been holding onto.

Unfortunately, freeing up space in third-party apps is a largely manual process. For security and privacy reasons, iOS uses a technique called "sandboxing," which prevents apps from getting at each other's data. This means you won't be able to find any "system cleaner" apps for the iPhone (or iPad) the way you can for a Mac or Windows PC. Any third-party app that claims it can clean or optimize your entire iPhone is misleading; most of the valid apps for this on the App Store are designed for specific purposes like cleaning up duplicate photos or contacts or ridding you of spam emails. While these served a purpose once, these are mostly things that you can do yourself with the built-in features in iOS 16.

Editors' Recommendations

8 Best IPhone Ringtone Apps To Use In 2023

The iPhone, like other phones, offers a variety of ringtones to choose from, depending on personal preference. On the other hand, individuals enjoy exploring a variety of alternatives when it comes to choosing something for their phones, and ringtones are no exception.

So, if you get tired of one ringtone, you can simply switch to another one that suits your preferences. This isn't as simple as it seems since Apple doesn't allow its users to add any song as a ringtone. Thus, you'll need third-party software to make this possible on your iPhone.

Fortunately, using custom ringtones on your devices has been simplified with the help of these iPhone ringtone apps. However, there are thousands of ringtone apps in the App Store, making it difficult to distinguish between those that work well and those that don't. Therefore, we'll introduce some of the best ringtone apps for iPhone and their features so that you can see if they're suitable for you before trying them out.

How to set a custom ringtone on an iPhone?

Instead of choosing a ringtone from your iPhone's ringtone app, you can create your ringtone with the music of your choice. The process is simple, but you need to follow the instructions described below to achieve it.

To create these ringtones, you can use either iTunes or the Garageband app to make the song compatible as a ringtone. This will also save you from the annoying ads that pop up with some of these apps.

However, it's more recommended to use Garageband as the method is very simple and easy to accomplish by anyone. Here are the steps to make a custom ringtone and set it as your default:

Step 1: Download Garageband from Apps Store.

Step 2: Go to Safari and download the song you wish to use as a ringtone (skip this step if you already have the song downloaded on your iPhone).

Step 3: Open Garageband and follow all the prompts till you get to its homepage.

Step 4: Swipe left on the homescreen and select Create Song.

Step 5: Choose any one of the musical instruments available and click the Track icon at the top of the page.

Step 6: Select the project icon and tap the Loop icon at the top right side of the page.

Step 7: Afterward, choose Music or Files and click Browse items from the Files app. A file explorer window will open where you can select the song you wish to use as a ringtone. Navigate through it and select the song.

Step 8: Press and hold the song, then drag it from the file explorer to the Garageband workspace.

Step 9: Now, trim the song to 30 seconds to make it fit to be used as a ringtone on iPhone. This can be done by going to settings on Garageband and enabling Time Ruler. With this, you'll be able to cut the song and leave only the part you wish to use as a ringtone behind.

Step 10: Click on the arrowhead icon at the top left corner of the page and select My Songs.

Step 11: Long press on the song and choose Rename to name it. Also, long press on the song and click on Share.

Step 12: Select Ringtone from the Share Song list, and click on Export on the resulting page.

The song will now be added to your iPhone's ringtone library, and you can simply set it as your ringtone by navigating to your iPhone's Settings.

Related Read: How to Set Any Song as Ringtone on iPhone for Free

What are the best iPhone ringtone apps?

Instead of buying ringtones directly on iPhone, you can get ringtones from one of the best iPhone ringtone apps that we present below. Some of these apps are free, while others require a subscription, but they all allow you to enjoy a variety of ringtones on your iPhone.

1. Ringtones for iPhone: TUUNES

At the top of my list is Tuunes, one of the oldest and most widely used iPhone ringtone apps. When it comes to choosing licensed ringtones or text tones for your device, this ringtone app is the best choice, as you'll find more than 10,000 settings in it.

It has not only an extensive catalog but also the most attractive and interesting collection of ringtones for different user personalities. This application is easy to use and available in over 50 countries.

Although some ringtones must be purchased in the app before they can be used on the iPhone, downloading the Tuunes app is free and does not require a subscription. The app cannot be used to create a custom ringtone for the iPhone; however, this limitation is not a disadvantage for users since it offers more ringtones to choose from.

2. Ringtones Maker- the ring app

Ringtones Maker is one of the most rewarding iPhone ringtone apps on the market. With this software, users can easily switch from one ringtone to another. Ringtone Maker is also free, but there is a premium version if you want to learn more about it. Thanks to the small size of 20 MB, the software is easy to download and use on the iPhone.

The app can be used to create custom ringtones on your iPhone and also offers a wide selection of ringtones. However, GarageBand is still required to set the ringtone on the iPhone. This process can be completed in a fraction of a second, and the app also includes a tutorial to guide users in creating ringtones.

Another feature is the extensive ringtone editing options, such as extracting audio from videos, converting audio and video to MP3 or MP4, fading in and out, and more.

3. Zedge