I still remember when the first pocket electronic dictionary came out in Vietnam and became a sensation, because you could finally carry one around. Before that it was desktop software. Learning tools were genuinely scarce. My mother worked as a teaching assistant at an international school, and the books and English teaching materials she brought home were how I first saw what "international" actually looked like.
Now the problem has inverted: learners are drowning in apps. The app store offers thousands for English, for listening, for speaking, AI-powered, personalised, every buzzword going. Somewhere in that confusion, most people have paid for an app they never really used.
I understand, because I have wasted more money on this than anyone. Which is rather the point of this post.
Ask one question before downloading
What am I using this for? Software is a means to a specific learning purpose, nothing more.
It also helps to accept that apps are only good at certain things.
Vocabulary and reading
Quizlet, using flashcards. Free, with advertising light enough not to matter.
The crucial part: you must build the lists yourself. No app will hand you a perfect vocabulary list that works simply by opening it. It has to be yours, personal to what you are reading, or it will not stick.
Listening
TEDict, which is dictation. What makes it good is that it carries current TED Talks split into individual sentences for you to transcribe. There are two modes: easy, where you pick from given words, and normal, where you type every character.
Compared with today's monthly subscriptions it is remarkably cheap, bought once and kept, and it works across devices on one account.
This is the tool that got me 9.0 in IELTS Listening, with no tricks involved.
Apps cannot teach you writing and speaking
Roughly eighty percent of this cannot be learned from an app, because these are productive skills: you are generating language. Anything you produce in order to communicate needs a human to verify it, and software is not there yet.
The 80/20 of it
Twenty percent of the apps produce eighty percent of the result. Take these two, work them hard, and after three months the difference is unmistakable.