With the right apps, the iPhone can become the ultimate festival tool. From sharing the songs you've heard to keeping in contact with your friends, our selection of iPhone festival apps gives you all the tools you need to find your way around the festival, up to speed with the latest news and line-up changes, in touch with friends and with plenty of festival memories to savour…
Price: £1.19 from the iTunes App Store
Finding your tent in a vast camp site can be a little tricky, especially after dark, but not with your trusty iPhone in hand. Tent Finder is a handy way of keeping track of where you've pitched camp, as well as navigating your way to other festival landmarks. Tapping "Add Place" stores your current location and lets you to assign a photograph.
Once you've marked the spot, it’s added as a new item on Tent Finder's homescreen so you can pull it up and navigate back to it later. The compass and a direction line on the map give you an easy route to your tent, or any other location you choose to save, even if there are no landmarks on the map. The whereabouts of your car in the car park is another excellent location to add.
Price: £free from the iTunes App Store
Soundtracking helps you keep track of the songs you hear and share them with your Twitter followers and Facebook friends. The iPhone can recognise music you're listening to using its microphone, or you can simply enter the name of the artist or song and search for it. You can also add a photo and comment to your Soundtracking post.
Soundtracking also has Foursquare integration, so you'll be able to see where you tagged specific songs. Friends and followers can play a snippet of any song you share too. It's a really great app for both sharing your musical discoveries, and keeping track of them yourself.
Price: £free from the iTunes App Store
You're bound to take lots of photos as you make your way around a festival. Events like Glastonbury and Latitude have interesting art and kookily dressed people to snap, and it's handy to have an app that makes it easy to share your images. Instagram is a great choice.
With Instagram you get a selection of different filters to add to photos that will make them stand out, but the really great thing about the app is how quickly you can send photos to lots of web services including Facebook, Twitter and Flickr as well sharing them via Instagram itself. If you have friends at the festival also carrying iPhones, get them on Instagram and you'll be able to see everyone’s photos in your feed.
Price £1.19 from the iTunes App Store
The iPhone has a great camera, but the brilliant thing about apps is that they can make it even better. Camera+ is one of our favourites thanks to the sheer range of extra features it adds.
The most useful Camera+ features for festivals are its stabilisation feature (helpful in the rough and tumble of crowds), the grid for lining up shots perfectly, and its scene modes which make it easy to take sharp snaps regardless of the conditions. You can also easily crop out that guy in the jester hat or add effects later on.
Price: £3.49 from the iTunes App Store
Music festivals offer up such a huge feast of tunes you're probably not going to know every one. That's where Shazam Encore comes in. It can identify songs using your iPhone's microphone. If you’re not keen on paying for it, there’s a free version of the app simply called Shazam, but it's limited to 5 tags a month, which you'll race through if you use it at a festival.
As well as tagging songs you want to identify, Shazam Encore has hooked up with Spotify so you can play new songs you've just discovered in full (as long as you’re a Spotify subscriber). If you want to buy the track to own, Shazam Encore includes a link to iTunes for each track within the app.
Price: £0.59 from the iTunes App Store
Banner is a fun app that turns your iPhone's screen into an LED-style matrix to display messages. You can enter up to five different slogans and have them scroll across the screen at different speeds. You can also choose between six different shapes of LED and use a huge range of colours.
Why's Banner a great festival app? Well, with lots of stages to choose from, you'll probably need to meet up with friends after going to see different acts. While you could carry a flag with you or wear something to stand out, turning your iPhone into a custom banner will work better in the dark! It also makes a less dangerous replacement for a lighter during slow songs.
Price: £free from the iTunes App Store
UK festivals draw international crowds. If you find yourself with some new friends and keen to speak their lingo, Google Translate is a great tool to have in your pocket. The app can translate phrases in 50 languages and will turn text into speech for almost all of them.
You can also speak phrases directly into the app to have them translated. Having Google Translate downloaded and ready for festival season will mean you’re ready for any conversation, no matter what the language.
Price: £1.19 from the iTunes App Store
Twitter was designed for events such as festivals. It lets you stay in touch with lots of your friends at once, as well as sharing the experience with all your followers. Tweetbot is one of the newest and best designed Twitter apps for the iPhone and an ideal choice for festival tweeting.
One of Tweetbot’s best features is that you can set up multiple timelines and quickly switch between lists. That means you can set up a list dedicated to bands at the festival, or people you know who are there, to make sure you see the news you want to read rather than scrolling though lots of unrelated updates.
Price: £1.79 from the iTunes App Store
Part of the joy of British festivals is trying to guess what the weather will be like. Luckily, there's a huge range of weather apps for the iPhone to let you know whether to grab your rain jacket and wellies or slip on your sandals and shorts.
Fizz Weather is a well designed choice which gives you tonnes of information. Its detailed reports can give you up to 15 days of information including wind speed, visibility, a barometer reading, humidity, UV levels and sunrise/sunset times. The feature we like best for festival-goers though is the precipitation probability predictor!
Price: £free from the iTunes App Store
Beluga is a group messaging app which makes keeping in contact with all your friends at the festival easy. It's cross-platform so your friends with an Android phone can get in on the action too, and it makes rounding up friends into groups (or “pods”) very simple.
Once you've put a pod together, Beluga lets you share instant messages, your location and photos with the group. Whenever you send a message to a Beluga pod, everyone will receive a notification to tell them there's been an update. Great for sharing fantastic festival finds, or just asking who wants an icecream on the way back to the tent.
Let us know what you make of our selection of iPhone festival apps in the comments. Which apps would you recommend to a fledgling festival-goer with an iPhone in hand?
Photo by paulbence
Liked this? Then try these
- Android festival apps: 10 downloads to supercharge your summer
- Travel apps: smartphone apps to supercharge your summer holiday
- Smartphone apps to get yourself organised
press enquiries
press enquiries