Coffee Apps Super Useful or Completely Absurd

Today we're going to have a little bit of fun. We're going to look at the world of apps about coffee for your phone. It could be iOS, it could be Android, we've got you covered. Unless somehow you're still using Windows Phone, in which case you're beyond helping anyway. So, coffee. Coffee's taken over the world. Coffee may well have taken over your life, should you let coffee into the last private place that is most likely your phone. We're going to look at apps in four different categories. We're not going to look at apps tied to smart devices. If you've got a smart scale or a coffee machine that has an app, that's not for this. This is, well, kind of an open access coffee app. You don't need a thing, you just need an interest in coffee. First category we'll look at is brewing coffee. There's apps to guide you, to sort of help you track it, do all sorts of stuff there. Then we'll have a little look at caffeine tracking. I might make the case that this is, you know, a little section, but a worthwhile one. Then we'll look at apps to help you find coffee out there in the real world. The fourth section, the one that I kind of fear the most, is gaming. I don't think there's a need for spoilers at this point. Anyway, let's move on. Let's start talking about that first section, brewing coffee with an app. Now, most of the discussion I've seen online about apps for coffee for your phone are in this category. There's a bunch out there. I'm going to highlight one I particularly like that frustratingly now seems only available for iOS, but I will talk about a few other apps in kind of similar categories. And the one that I'll use to kind of highlight this whole thing is an iOS app called PhilTru. Now, this is a free app with a kind of paid tier to access more brewing methods, those kind of things. I have paid the extra to access those things. You can sort of see recent brews, if there's techniques that you like, you can build your own technique, you can sort of download other people's techniques and follow along. There is an espresso section, there's a filter section. And overall, this thing was just jam-packed with features in a way that was perhaps overwhelming for me. And there's nice little features here where you can take a photo of a bag of coffee and it will pull the data from the label and kind of organize it with reasonable efficiency because it wants you to track which coffee you're brewing, how much you've got of it. And this kind of data input makes the whole thing a lot easier. There's also, I'm going to be honest, it's a little bit excessive, an AR function, an augmented reality function, to kind of help you kind of understand the kind of mechanics of brewing coffee. It's really intense. Now, a lot of these apps that I mentioned, and I'll kind of give the call out to the other apps that I tested that are sort of worthy of note, a lot of them think the same way. They want you to kind of set up your brew with some information at the start, and then it's going to guide you in terms of how much water you're pouring when in a pour-over or, you know, in something like an AeroPress, when you're steeping, when you're adding water, when you're stirring, when you're plunging, all of those kind of things. It's going to guide you step by step. Some of them have very nice little animations. I think this one does too. It's a good way of kind of taking a method you might've seen online, getting into your phone and having prompts to hand. You know what I mean? I can't argue with trying to learn a technique with this and actually with a bunch of the other apps. Yeah, it works pretty well. To have a visual prompt is pretty useful. Filtro advantages itself by very quickly and easily sort of connecting with most Bluetooth scales, or a lot of them anyway. I was impressed by that. It quickly connected to mine and it's all then kind of baked right in, tracking flow rate, all of that kind of stuff. Like I said, these apps are useful if you're trying to learn a technique and you want that kind of prompt. You can oftentimes brew along with a YouTube video, but maybe you just want it there. Connect it to your scale and that does make the experience a little bit easier to learn. The idea that you might use this every day is more difficult because really I think that these things are super useful at one specific phase of your coffee journey. I don't want to use an app like this every day, not because they're not good, because it doesn't really fit my needs. In terms of who these apps are really useful for, well, I think it's for people at one specific stage of their coffee journey. You're kind of through the amateur section where you're just kind of blindly trying to work out what's going on. You know the kind of brew methods you like. You're beginning to understand your own coffee preferences, though you still find the world of coffee pretty wide and pretty confusing and a little bit overwhelming. Here, I remember this stage in my kind of coffee journey. I wanted to track every brew method to understand more about how I was brewing. I could sort of see the changes of grind or technique sort of manifest in the cup, or I was trying to understand what kind of coffees I liked. And again, useful to understand, well, if I brew these like this, then I like it. If I brew those like that, I don't like them. That's a useful part of your journey. I think if you're at the very start, logging everything is just overwhelming and it's analysis paralysis gonna happen. Like it's just too much information at that stage. As a more seasoned user, therefore, my frustrations with these kind of apps, and it's not just filter, it's most of these kind of apps, is that they often want me to put in quite a lot of data before I start brewing. And for me, it's only once I've tasted it that I might consider it sort of worth keeping track of or having a note about. Now you can obviously use them afterwards. You don't have to track the brew in the app to log a brew. You can just go back and add a bunch of data into most of them. But in terms of the idealized experience where you're getting brewing guidance from the app and you're logging it, that's where things occasionally were a little bit frustrating. Conscious of being a little iOS heavy at this point, I will say there's a few different apps on Android. None are as full-featured as Phil True. I think my favorite of that group was probably Bean Conqueror over iBrew Coffee. Brew Timer also worth a note there. There's some great apps. They're well made. They work in a very similar way. And I think Phil True might have more features than average, but I'm not sure it's gonna supercharge your coffee brewing experience more than some of the others if you're not on iOS. Having said nice things, I have been reminded that I should say there are no affiliate links for these apps, the coffee apps that we recommend in the description down below, and we are not being paid. There's no endorsements here for any of these coffee apps. I don't really know anyone who made them. We haven't been in touch with any of them. This is an unbiased review as far as I can make it one. It's time for the next category of app. The Caffeine Tracker. This is a weird thing to recommend, but I may be on a little bit of a caffeine kick these days in terms of paying a bit more attention to it. I found one that was free on iOS that I think I quite like. It's called Hi Coffee, and everything about it I found actually surprisingly charming. You've got a nice little graph display to show you your caffeine levels right now and how they will sort of drop in time. You can add different beverages at different times, how much of them you're gonna have. It's not going to be exactly accurate. Outside of soft drinks, soft drinks, you know how much caffeine's in a Coca-Cola or a Dr. Pepper, but if you have a filter coffee, well, we've seen in the past, the amount of caffeine in that can vary quite dramatically. Now, why would I recommend a Caffeine Tracker? Well, I think the experience is genuinely really interesting. I kind of liken it to calorie tracking. Now, I'm not trying to encourage everyone to track their calories every day. That's not what I'm going to. It's a complex thing. What I think is interesting is if you have, for a short period of time, properly tracked your calories, it's been enlightening because your sort of remembered consumption and your actual consumption don't really line up. And actually, just a week of tracking your caffeine consumption, I think would be really interesting for most people. Quick caveat on this one. It's important. There's a bunch of variables in all of this, like your body and your genetics, for example, that factor into the rate at which you metabolize caffeine. And so these apps cannot give you a gospel truth, but they can give you an idea of kind of trends and roughly what's going on, but it would be pretty much impossible for them to be truly, truly accurate to your kind of blood serum cholesterol. So that was worth noting. This app is a sort of paid upgrade to allow you to do more stuff, custom beverages. I'm not sure that's really necessary. The best Android app that's very similar to this was a paid app. It's up to you if you think £1.49 or a couple of bucks is worth it for this experiment. But actually tracking and sort of seeing how your coffee consumption through the day is going to be sort of in your bloodstream come bedtime. That's interesting. That's just an interesting week of your life and you could delete the app right afterwards. You'd probably change some behaviors, probably think about things a little bit differently, but it's a useful little app. So the third category, apps to tell you where to drink coffee. This is tricky. Go with me. There's some really nice apps here. And as a good example, I'll use the Coffee Trip app from European Coffee Trip, who have a YouTube channel, which I'll link down below. You should check that out. They have been fascinated and uncovering some of the greatest coffee culture, coffee shops in Europe for ages. And they have an app out that will help you find coffee in Europe. Now, these kinds of apps are really tricky. They've got some almost insurmountable challenges. Firstly, vetting. Who's going to visit all of the coffee shops and check that they're actually good? And how many times do you have to go to check that it's good? If I have a bad shot one day because someone was just having a bad day, do I strike that coffee shop from the list? Or do I have to give it a few chances? How many shops are there in just one city like London? There's a lot. How do you do it? It's really, really difficult. Secondly, who's checking if they're still opened? Then there's the question of, you've got all of this kind of overhead. How do I find the shops? How do I check they're good? How do I check they're still open? And ultimately then, if I'm building an app around this, how do I make any money doing it? The European Coffee Trip app has a little kind of support the app button where you can support them that way, which seems good and kind of sensible. But I don't know if that's the kind of viable long-term business model, especially when there's a bunch of places like Sprudge, have some great sort of city resources that most people are then just gonna feed to something like Google Maps, which has sort of replaced Yelp these days as the kind of place to worry about your reviews as a coffee shop. And it's the kind of search place for everything these days. And so there are some good apps out there. And I'll show you a few on Android and iOS and the Coffee Trip app, I'll shout that out on both Android and iOS. It's a free download if you're curious and you're looking for coffee in Europe. But ultimately, I think it's a really difficult thing. One final twist. These days, great coffee is not everywhere, but it's not that hard to find. 10 years ago, going to a new city, hunting out the one or two or three good shops, well, that was a frustration and having an app to help you do that was genuinely really useful. These days, you know, people come to London like, where should I drink coffee? The question is going to be, well, which neighborhood are you in? How far do you want to travel? Because there's going to be great coffee pretty much wherever you are. So these are a category of app that I think are great if you're on a little business trip going somewhere kind of out of town. If there's something suitable out there and it's free, then grab it. But ultimately, nine times out of 10, you're going to end up kind of double checking through something like Google Maps. And that's just the nature of the world these days. Can't say I'm happy about it, but it is what it is. Now, before we proceed to the fourth section, the section that will make me the most angry, I need to talk about one other app on my phone, which happens to be the sponsor of this video, which is Surfshark. Surfshark is a fast, easily used VPN service, jam-packed full of features, super easy to install. And one of my favorite things is you can install it not just on a few devices, but on unlimited devices because they've got apps for every mobile platform as well as every desktop platform too. Why would you want a VPN? Well, one of the key uses of a VPN is it lets you travel the world digitally. This obviously opens up different content on streaming services available in different geolocations. It also, even on YouTube, prevents you from sort of being frustrated when you hit the, this is not available in your country moment when you're trying to watch a video. Surfshark also has a couple of really interesting add-ons. One of them is a search feature that lets you search anonymously. Usually you're served a lot of search results based on who you are and what the search engine knows about you. It's all personalized. Sometimes you don't want that. You want the genuine organic results. And this is how to get there. If you want to check out Surfshark, then you can use the link down in the description below or you can use the QR code on screen and you can use my code for three extra months for free of Surfshark at surfshark.deals slash James Hoffman. Thank you to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. Now, one of the weirder requests I've had consistently over the years is that people want me to live stream myself playing, coffee computer games to see how many good at them because I'm quote-unquote good at coffee. And so I thought it'll be interesting. There's got to be kind of mobile games based around coffee. I should download some of those and see if my coffee skills translate to gaming skills. What I found was profoundly irritating and just bad. It's just bad. So this is a game called Barista Life. You open it just to set the tone. It's immediately like, would you like to remove the ads? I've said no. I might regret that. High quality. This person would like a cappuccino. So I've got to push the cappuccino button. Look at me. I can do that. Small. Good. Good to know. Right. And lactose-free milk is what they want. And they want fruit cake. $260. Bargain. One second. There's an ad. I won't show you the ad because they're not getting free advertising. Okay. Draw me something happy. Let's keep this child-friendly. There you go. High quality smiley. Don't show me another ad. There's another ad. So here's the coffee machine. This is exciting. I touch the coffee machine. Oh, just, oh, I just squeeze the juice out of it. And then I squeeze the juice out of it again. Oh, lactose-free milk. Good. I put it in the picture. Look at my skills. Unbelievable. And I, oh, steaming. That's not how steaming works, but nevermind. Oh, I did it wrong. Oh, it's all gone wrong. Wait, have I got to, oh, got to keep it in the green. This is, I just, I can't. And another ad. Let's try perfect coffee. Here we go. VIP customer. Oh, also a VIP customer. Sure thing. We need, I want to get some coffee. Can I get some coffee? I pour the beans in the machine and then I hold to heat it up. That is how that works. And then steam comes out. That's exactly how coffee machines work. Precisely how coffee machines work. I want to put that, I'm going to put the coffee in the little upside down bear cup. Very cute. Let's just, I know they want glitter tea. No, they're going to have a strong black coffee. Oh, this little chat being like, whoops. Oh, there's an ad break. I don't want an ad break. Don't make me. I've done a perfect job. Done. And done. What a terrible drink. Thank you very much. I have got a what a terrible drink. 0% match. 100% toppings. I don't know what that means. I've got 100% toppings. No. No, I don't want an ad break. I've got a tip though. That seems surprising. I'm upgrading. I don't want to upgrade. How do I get to move around? Let's upgrade there. Now we've got a table. What a perfectly designed coffee shop. I'm sure nothing bad will happen. Anyway, there's one more game that I will show you that for reasons I find very hard to explain. I've played quite a lot of now. It's a game called Coffee Break. Your job is to build a little cafe and then sell lots of coffee. And to say that it's everything wrong with capitalism might seem a bit of a stretch to complain about an iOS game. It's also available on Android. Don't worry about that. It's the most bizarre game because it's just so pointless. It's the most pointless thing that I've kept playing for some time. You build your little coffee shop with your little person and then you accrue money and you slowly upgrade your coffee shop. But the thing that just makes me wildly frustrated is that you cannot design your own coffee shop. It forces you to put things in the most ridiculous places. The whole mechanic of this is that you have to walk quite a long way from your coffee machine to the counter where people sell coffee. The machines themselves have no baristas. They are three group lever machines though. That's very weird. And then your job is to wander around with stacks of coffee and then just sort of shuttle it around the place. And to do that, you then earn money and you can spend the money to open another coffee shop where you do everything again, but everything costs more money. And then if you do that, then you get to open another coffee shop where you do everything exactly the same again, but everything costs more money. And then that's it. You accrue money to spend it, to somehow make more money, to accrue money, to spend more money. And it's just so unsatisfying. So completely pointless and just very silly. And I regret deeply the time I have spent playing this game. Though I'm also aware that there's just part of my brain that's like, yeah, I'll just make more money and do the thing some more and then I'll get to the next level. There's no dissatisfaction or progression. Knowing about coffee only makes it a hundred times more annoying. That's the impact. You know, none of this makes sense. None of this is real. None of this is remotely close to life and you can't change any of the things that you want to. I did not think I would get this upset about a free phone game, but there we are. There we are. Deep breaths. Living on. Is there an app I've missed? Is there a category of app I've missed? I genuinely was curious. With the rise of coffee culture has been the rise of interest in coffee in all quarters and that has also meant the rise of these apps. Has there been a beautiful, incredible app been made, published out there that I haven't covered? Please shout it out in the comments down below. Don't link it, just tell me the name of it because links don't work in comments down below. But let me know if I've missed something. Let me know if you have one of these, if your experience has mirrored mine. Let me know if you use an app on the regular. Do you find it really useful and where are you in your coffee journey? But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a great day.