This Week's Best Non-Game iPhone App Deals: SkySafari 8, Scan to PDF, and More

Games get most of the App Store deal-hunting attention, but this week's most interesting price drops are in productivity, weather, and reference apps — the kind of software you actually open every day. The standout is SkySafari 8 Plus, currently half off at $14.99, alongside a flashcard app that's dropped to $0.99 and a run of apps that switched from paid to free with subscriptions attached. As of mid-July 2026, here's what's worth grabbing and what to read the fine print on first.

#SkySafari 8 Plus: a real half-off, if you catch it at the right moment

SkySafari 8 Plus is the deepest stargazing app on iOS — point your phone at the sky and it identifies stars, planets, and satellites in real time, plus it can drive a telescope directly via ASCOM Alpaca or INDI if you own one. The current release added an image gallery for astrophotography imports and plate-solving, on top of the usual sky simulation tools that go back to 2009's original SkySafari.

Right now it's $14.99, down from its $29.99 list price. Worth knowing before you buy: this app's price has been unusually volatile lately — it dropped to $14.99 on June 21, jumped back up to $29.99 a week later, and dropped to $14.99 again on July 5. If you've been eyeing it, this is a real 50% discount at the moment, but don't assume the price is stable; check it again before you recommend it to a friend next month.

#SwiftCard drops to 99 cents after a wild pricing month

SwiftCard: Flashcard Maker is a straightforward spaced-repetition-style flashcard app — build unlimited card sets, run timed tests, and sync across iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch with the optional Pro subscription. It's a one-time purchase, not a subscription trap, which is rare enough in the study-app category to call out on its own.

The pricing history here is genuinely erratic: $2.99 in early spring, down to $1.99 in April, then a spike to $12.99 on July 1 before crashing to $0.99 the very next day. At 99 cents it's an easy pickup regardless of the noise, but the swing is a good reminder that a single snapshot price on a search result page can be stale within 24 hours — always check the live price before publishing or recommending one.

#The "free" apps: read what they're free of

A cluster of formerly-paid utility apps flipped to free this week, and each is free in a different way. None of them are a straightforward gift — here's the true cost of each.

SessionDock (was $49.99, now free) is a companion app for viewing SessionDock desktop music-production sessions on your iPhone — it's read-only and genuinely useless without the Mac app it pairs with. If you don't already run SessionDock on a Mac, the free download buys you nothing. If you do, it's a legitimate freebie; a $5.99/month Pro tier or a $39.99 lifetime unlock adds extra features on top.

Scan to PDF - ScanStudio Docs (was $14.99, now free) turns your camera into a document scanner with automatic edge detection and cleanup filters — solid basics for free. The catch is the same one most scanner apps use: a "Pro" subscription ($19.99/year, with a 3-day free trial) unlocks unlimited scans and cloud sync. The free tier is usable for occasional scanning; heavy users will hit the wall fast.

Rain Radar Pro - Live Forecast (was $9.99–$14.99, now free) gives you an animated precipitation radar and hourly forecasts at no cost, funded by ads and a $3.99 one-time premium unlock to remove them. Reasonable trade if you don't mind the ads.

Vireel – AI Video Maker (was $9.99, now free) generates short AI video clips from text prompts, but the free download only gets you in the door — actual video generation runs on credits or a subscription ($7.99 per single video credit, or $29.99/month for six generations). Anyone downloading this expecting a free AI video tool will be disappointed within a minute of opening it; only a handful of watermarked or heavily-limited generations are truly free.

#This week's deals at a glance

If a "free" app needs a subscription before it does the one thing you downloaded it for, it isn't the deal it looks like — read the in-app purchase list before you install, not after.

#Our pick

If you only grab one thing from this list, it's SkySafari 8 Plus at $14.99 — it's a mature, genuinely deep app at half its usual price, not a formerly-full-price app that just flipped its monetization model. SwiftCard at $0.99 is the easy impulse download. The four "free" apps are all fine to install, but go in expecting a limited free tier rather than a full app, and check the in-app purchase list before you assume "free" means "finished."

More deals worth a look: our roundup of this week's best iOS game deals covers what's discounted on the gaming side, and the productivity apps topic page tracks ongoing picks in that category year-round.

#FAQ

Do App Store prices really change this often? Yes — SkySafari 8 Plus and SwiftCard both moved price at least three times in the past month. Treat any listed price as a snapshot, not a guarantee, and check the App Store listing before you buy.

Are the "free" apps in this list safe to download? All four have working free tiers and disclose their in-app purchases in the App Store listing — none are the kind of subscription-trap apps that hide pricing until after signup. They're just more limited for free than the headline "Free" tag suggests.

Is a one-time purchase like SwiftCard better than a subscription app? For most people, yes, if you'll use the app for more than a year — you pay once and own it, versus a subscription that keeps billing. It's a smaller commitment to try at $0.99 regardless.

Prices confirmed via the App Store as of July 19, 2026 and are subject to change at any time.