The 5 Best Apps For YouTubers and Filmmakers

Let’s face it — when it comes to content creation it’s YouTube’s world; we’re all just living in it. And for those who choose to embrace our YouTube overlords rather than rail against them, this becomes a great opportunity.

Not only can you start a YouTube channel from scratch and grow it to millions of followers, but you can also get started on the platform very easily — sometimes with nothing more than the phone in your pocket.

For those just starting their YouTube video journeys, or perhaps even for YouTube video experts, let’s go over some of the best apps for YouTubers that you can use to help you along the way. These different apps can help with different parts of your process for creating YouTube videos and growing your YouTube channel — from planning to shooting to editing — and can be found on both Apple and Android smartphones.

Everything you need for creating quality YouTube videos

But first, let’s quickly go over some basic pointers outlining everything you need to get together before you can start creating quality YouTube videos.

As we mentioned above, your first need is a camera. And yes, while this certainly can be your smartphone, we also have a killer list of the best YouTube cameras out there — they’ll definitely help you elevate the quality of your content.

Second, we also need to outline the steps for creating YouTube videos:

Pick your niche
Research and learn your audience
Concept and script your videos
Shoot your footage
Edit your video together
Pick out your music and SFX (check out all our YouTube music options)
Upload your videos
Clear your audio and content with YouTube (read more about this process here)

And viola, you’re a YouTube star!

What’s that, you still need some more help and want some additional resources? Well, you’re in luck, because we have you covered with these awesome apps for YouTubers and content creators below.

TubeBuddy Mobile

If you’re a YouTube content creator and you don’t know about TubeBuddy already, you’re doing something wrong. TubeBuddy is chiefly a browser extension that helps YouTubers optimize their videos to unlock thousands of more views and push their channel to new limits.

If you don’t have an account with TubeBuddy you should definitely check it out and consider creating one. If you do have an account (or choose to get one), then you should also absolutely get the TubeBuddy Mobile app to help you with optimizing your content on the fly.

The TubeBuddy Mobile app offers:

Live Subscriber Count
Tag Explorer
Comment Filtering
Canned Responses
Channel Milestones
Tag Rankings
Suggested Tags
Commenter Subscriber Counts
Video Topic Planner
Tag List Management

And it actually is free to download and use. However, if you want to benefit from the full array of TubeBuddy Mobile Unlimited, that will cost you a small monthly fee of $2.99.)

Filmic Pro

While apps like TubeBuddy will help with the planning and optimization of your YouTube videos, we also need to highlight some of the best apps for shooting YouTube videos. And there is no name higher on the list than the phenomenal Filmic Pro app.

Filmic Pro helps turn your smartphone video camera into a bonafide cinema camera. It unlocks the maximum dynamic range in your mobile devices with 10-bit SDR capture capabilities. Filmic Pro also uses a new LogV3 gamma profile that can enable a powerful color grading experience which filmmakers will recognize and love.

Filmic Pro has been used by the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Olivia Wilde, and Zack Znyder to unlock their smartphone projects, and it offers a huge array of features including:

Dual arc slider controls for manual focus and exposure
Live analytics suite of Zebras, False Color, and Focus Peaking
Dolby Vision HDR support
ProRes support on 13 series
Realtime film looks
Frame.io Camera to Cloud integration on iPhone 11 and newer
Waveform monitor including tri-mode histogram
Manual white balance adjustment and custom presets
Shadow and highlight controls
RGB, saturation, and vibrance controls

For the amount of services which it unlocks for your smartphones, Filmic Pro is actually available at a pretty cheap price point of only $14.99 and is available for both iPhone and Android.

Adobe Premiere Rush

Moving on now from production and planning to post-production and editing, you can’t really do any better in terms of smartphone video editing apps than Adobe’s powerful Premiere Rush app. Regardless of whether or not you’re an Adobe Premiere Pro user (or perhaps a DaVinci Resolve fan), Premiere Rush is one of the best for mobile video editing.

It’s also free to use and lets you unlock video recording, access a full video editor toolset, create videos, and upload videos while on the run. It’s also a very familiar-feeling timeline-based format that has all the basic tools and functions any beginner editor might need for simple tutorial videos, or any advanced editor might need for high quality videos.

Here’s a list of some of the key features:

Customizable animated titles
Pro-quality video and sound
Multitrack timeline
Advanced audio tools
Resizing and aspect ratio controls

While we did mention that Premiere Rush is free to download, in truth this is one of the best video editing apps for YouTubers who are already using Adobe Creative Cloud. So keep that in mind when considering your video editing app options.

YouTube Studio

If we’re going to talk about the essential YouTube video apps out there (as well as some of the best free apps), we of course have to highlight the YouTube Studio app itself as the official YouTube app, because the YouTube creator studio app is obviously one of the best apps for YouTubers.

You can always create YouTube video content with your smartphone and then send it over to your desktop PC or laptop to upload. But if you want to truly work within the system you can of course go directly to the source with YouTube Studio — which is actually a pretty slick and sophisticated app unto itself.

Here are some of the key features:

Monitor channel and video performance with easy-to-use analytics
Respond to and moderate comments
Get notifications about important moments on your channel
Update video details including descriptions, titles, custom thumbnail images, and monetization settings
Manage playlists
Create and update your account profile pictures
Search help content by voice

Along with TubeBuddy, it’s really one of the best ways to just keep tabs on your YouTube content as well as quickly engage with your audience and comments while on the go.

The YouTube Studio app is free to download and is available for both Apple and Android devices.

Soundstripe

For the final app on our list, we have to highlight one of the best libraries for royalty free music for video. When you use tracks from Soundstripe, you can rest assured that your tracks are fully copyright protected to use anywhere — including YouTube or broadcast.

With the Soundstripe app you can browse, search, and even filter through 7,000+ radio-quality songs from anywhere. Here’s a full list of the features with the Soundstripe app:

Comprehensive search and filter
Featured curated playlists
Find more from the artists you love

Favorite
Add to playlists
Find similar songs

Share your favorite music
Listen anywhere, license later

Plus, the app is free to download and use, although if you’d like to get the most out of your favorite tracks and SFX, you’ll want to upgrade to one of our Soundstripe plans (which start as low as $9.99 a month).

The Soundstripe Mobile App is publicly available for iOS devices in the App Store (download it here) and the Google Play store (download it here).

Tips for growing your YouTube channel

Along with the awesome smartphone apps listed above, the real trick for growing your YouTube channel comes down to understanding the platform and your audience, then simply creating authentic and well-crafted content which your niche audience can enjoy.

We’ve broken down the steps for growing your YouTube channel here:

Develop your channel concept and niche
Take a cue from successful YouTubers
Invest in your own pre-production protocol
Make your concept a reality during production
Bring everything together in post-production
License music the safe (and smart) way
Optimize, optimize, optimize

And you can read much more in-depth into this process for building a strong YouTube presence in our complete guide to starting and growing a YouTube channel.