Default Apps 2026
- 📨 Mail Client: Work uses Apple Mail. Personal I use hey.com’s Mac and iOS apps.
- 📮 Mail Server: Personal is hey.com, Gmail as a legacy fallback.
- 📝 Notes: Notion
- ✅ To-Do: Notion and paper journal
- 📋 Kanban: Personal self-hosted Fizzy for homelab tasks
- 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
- 🟦 Photo Management: Photos.app, also backed up to Dropbox
- 📆 Calendar: Google Calendar for work and family calendars, plus paper weekly, monthly, and annual planners
- 📁 Cloud File Storage: Two NAS devices — an Asustor AS1102TL Drivestor 2 Lite (2 x 2TB enterprise HDD) and a Synology DS223J (2 x 8TB NAS archival HDD) — with offsite backup to Dropbox
- 📖 RSS: NetNewsWire on iOS, backed by self-hosted FreshRSS
- 🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Contacts.app
- 🌐 Browser: Brave on iOS, Mac, and Linux
- 🔍 Search: Self-hosted SearXNG backed by the Kagi API on a pay-as-you-go usage-based plan
- 💬 Chat: iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Campfire
- 🔖 Bookmarks: Nothing that syncs across devices — a few static HTML landing/directory pages. Per-device bookmarks, but nothing sophisticated.
- 📑 Read It Later: FreshRSS starred items, plus self-hosted Karakeep
- 📜 Word Processing: Notion, Google Docs
- 📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets, Notion databases, evaluating self-hosted Grist
- 📊 Presentations: Google Slides, reveal.js
- 🛒 Shopping Lists: Pen and Post-it or weekly planner for tactical lists; longer-range lists go in Notion or a dedicated spot in my journal
- 🍴 Meal Planning: Self-hosted Mealie, plus pen and paper in my weekly journal planner
- ❤️ Health Tracking: Apple Health, Garmin, self-hosted Nomie deployed on Cloudflare Pages
- 📰 News: RSS reader, a handful of email newsletters, and an Apple News family subscription
- 🎵 Music: Spotify. Evaluating a self-hosted workflow with Navidrome and Strawberry Player on Linux, ripping FLAC from my curated CD collection with abcde and organizing with beets.
- 🎤 Podcasts: Spotify, though I’ll listen to some directly via RSS feeds on the web
- 🎧 Audiobooks: Spotify
- 📚 Ebooks: Grimmory self hosted with an xteink x4 flashed with custom firmware. Loading ebooks from Grimmory over OPDS.
- 📺 Media Tracking: Self-hosted Yamtrack for TV, movies, and books
- 🧠 Spaced Repetition System: Anki iOS app backed by a self-hosted Anki sync server
- 🔐 Password Management: 1Password
- 🤖 AI Chat (Desktop/Mobile): Self-hosted LibreChat with self-hosted LiteLLM. Primary models are gpt-oss-120b and qwen-3.8-27b on Cerebras, pay-as-you-go.
- 📱 AI Code Assistant (Mobile): Claude mobile app, Codex mobile app. I stay within the $20/mo Claude plan and $20/mo ChatGPT plan.
- 💻 AI Code Assistant (Desktop): Claude Code
- 🐙 Git Forge: Public repos on GitHub, private repos on self-hosted Gitea
Inspired by rknight.me’s App Defaults 2026.