This was a huge year for apps.
Apple's App Store surged to more than 700,000 apps and is still growing. Google's Android Play Store also swelled to around 700,000 apps as of October 2012, significantly closing the gap between the two rivals.
As the year nears a close, we took a look at some of the industry game changers of 2012.
Brewster changes the way we look at our address book and relationships
Brewster is a personalized address book that understands your social networking relationships and merges everything into a beautifully-designed app. The goal is to make it easier to manage your contacts. And to that end, the app delivers.
Our favorite feature is the ability to mass email or text a group of friends.
Price: Free
Available for: iPhone
The Fancy challenged us to think outside of the box when it comes to e-commerce apps
The Fancy is changing how we discover and purchase things that we like. Think of The Fancy as a social version of Amazon or a shopper-friendly version of Pinterest.
The Fancy was so cool this year that there were even talks of Apple buying the service.
Check out our walkthrough of the Fancy >
Price: Free
Fantastical made a better iPhone calendar than Apple's built-in app
Fantastical's goal is to be fast and friendly. It realizes that people are always on the go and makes it very easy to quickly pull up the app, check your appointments, and avoid complications.
The team built Fantastical for iPhone from the ground up because they didn't want to just port a desktop app to the iPhone and be done with it.
Price: $1.99 (launch price). Flexibits plans to raise the price to $3.99 at some point, so if you want an alternative to the iPhone's built-in calendar, now's a good time to try it out.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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