Ask HN: What are some mentally healthy apps to have?

You could use Greg [0] to learn how to grow plants. Disclosure: I'm one of the co-creators :). There's also a thriving community [1] that has become honestly surprisingly healthy/supportive. Think "Strava for growing plants".

We're still early, any feedback is appreciated. We raised our seed round [2] last year, check out that announcement for more info on our long-term mission.

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[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/greg-easy-plant-care/id1512912...

[1]: https://greg.app/community/

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/27/greg-an-app-for-plant-love...

These are my "good" apps:

- Spotify: everyone loves music. Put it on speakerphone. Dance and sing silly while you cook.

- Shazam: discover music. Exactly what apps ought to be.

- Google Maps: Does what it does.

- Google home: setting my lights to match the time of day / mood / or movie.

- Google Authenticator: 2FA is good

- "Justin Guitar", a simple guitar tuner, and a metronome app: I've been learning guitar

- Duolingo: my wife and I have been learning Spanish together.

- Apple Books, Libby, Kindle: I use Books for PDFs and epubs I "find" online or get through Humble Bundle. With Humble Bundle you can get a TON of books for super cheap. Libby for getting ebooks from the library. Finally, Kindle for books I purchase b/c I couldn't find them anywhere else.

- Audible: for audiobooks, which was more important when I had a commute.

- Stranger "Things to do": very specific to Seattle, but connects me to my community by giving fun events and activities to check out.

- Carbon: also specific to my interests, this is the best life-tracker app for Magic the Gathering Commander games. Worth the $5 upgrade.

"Mixed" apps:

- Discord. At best it keeps me connected with my friends. It was invaluable during the pandemic and strict quarantines. But can be addicting, toxic, and net-negative.

EDIT: from a comment below, I also realized that everything on the Control Panel is a Good App: airplane mode, low power mode, add note, add audio recording, alarms, timers, stopwatch, calculator, flashlight, Apple Pay, Shazam, and camera.

> Your physical presence is optimised for long days of doing fuck all, sitting in the grass, waiting for a deer to pass by.

No, your physical presence is optimized for being active most of the time. If you do "long days of doing fuck all", you'll lose bone density, muscle mass and probably gain weight and a mass of health issues. You'll probably experience cognitive decline.

The older you get, the more rapid these issues manifest themselves and the more important constant activity becomes.

App looked really cool until I read it has Tinder Engineering DNA. What a heap of trash app Tinder turned out to be over the past couple years, but maybe Greg will be good for a few early years like Tinder was until it turns into a gamified dark-pattern botany app.

Just imagine, we have to buy Greg Gold to access additional plants beyond grass or weeds, purchase water-boosts to unlock the next time we have to water plants (or they die). Maybe even have a hidden ELO system on our plant pics where the less healthy our plant condition looks the more we have to pay for Greg credits so it'll dish out the plant-care advice we rely on to prevent our entire garden from dying.

> Also delete anything that gamifies passive consumption, e.g. Duolingo

Since when is Duolingo passive consumption? I've learned two languages to fluency and Duolingo was my main source of practice. If language learning is your goal, Duolingo is a great app to keep around.