Let me be blunt about most IELTS apps: they hand you vocabulary flashcards and call it a study plan. The ones below actually earned their place on my recommendation list, because they're real, widely used, and they change study behavior instead of just filling time.
Duolingo is the streak king. Its whole design exists to keep the chain unbroken, and for daily English exposure it works. It won't carry you to band 7 alone, but fifteen minutes a day keeps your brain in English mode, and that compounds. Anki is the opposite of flashy and the best tool on this list for memorizing academic vocabulary and collocations. Spaced repetition is the least glamorous, most effective study technique in existence. Fight me on that. Quizlet sits between the two: enormous shared IELTS flashcard sets made by other students, plus games that make drilling slightly less miserable.
Then the two unsexy picks that matter most. Notion becomes your study headquarters: a simple dashboard with your test date countdown, weekly targets per section, links to your materials. It's not an IELTS app until you set it up as one. Google Calendar is the pick nobody wants to hear about. Block study sessions like appointments. An IELTS prep app with streaks on iOS and Android keeps you motivated, sure, but a calendar keeps you scheduled, and scheduling beats motivation every single time.
What none of these do, and this is the gap, is tell you what to study on day 23 versus day 24. Apps give you tools. A plan gives you sequence. The setup that works is two or three of these apps plus an actual week by week plan built around your target band. The personalized 8-week study plan at internationalstudyhelp.fyi is built to fill exactly that gap: your apps handle the daily reps, the plan tells them what to do.