For most of us, Africa is a once-in-a-lifetime destination. So how do you manage to take it all in? Apps. Lots and lots of apps. Whether you’re looking for wine or wildebeest, look no further than your phone.

On the Wild Side

What most people want to know, by far, is how and where to find wildlife, said Jennifer Goetz, a founder of the travel website Your African Safari, specifically wildebeest. The herd is a big attraction as it makes its annual migration across the Serengeti and Masai Mara national parks, and Herd Tracker, from the tour company Discover Africa, is one of the best tracking tools, she said.

In addition to its ease of use and great videos and photographs — must-haves for Ms. Goetz — it gathers real-time status updates from pilots, park rangers, safari guides and lodges in both parks; helps predict the herd’s future path; and then shows users available lodging options in those areas. The app can be accessed via any web browser.

A similar app, Africa: Live, can help travelers find a broad range of animals through posts shared by users on the ground. Searches can be filtered by animal type, and offline maps are handy in out-of-network areas. An ecologically friendly feature allows users to report littering, poaching and bad safari behavior.

Another app that makes use of crowdsourcing is Wildlife Tracker, which goes a step further by notifying users when animals have been spotted near their location.

For general information on all sorts of wildlife, Ms. Goetz recommended the Audubon African Wildlife app, which includes stunning images and loads of detail on more than 500 birds, mammals and reptiles in 47 countries.

Want to get the children involved? Sasol’s Young Explorer app series provides audio descriptions of a variety of South African mammals, and a separate app just for frogs — 55 in total — in four languages, including English. Recordings of each animal’s sound are included, along with games designed to help a child hone her identification skills.

Off the Reserve

Madiba’s Journey, a new app from South African Tourism, is designed to help travelers walk in the footsteps of former President Nelson Mandela, from Mvezo Village on the Eastern Cape, where he was born, to the Mandela House Museum in Soweto, near Houghton, Johannesburg, where he died. An easily navigated timeline corresponds to an interactive map identifying points of interest, commemoration sights, museums and memorials.

We may be biased, but could there be anything more helpful than having a journalist in your pocket when touring a new city? How about a historian, a novelist or just a really passionate local? VoiceMap culls city-specific stories from them all and fits them neatly into walking tours through five areas in South Africa: Overberg, Hermanus, Johannesburg, Cape Town and the Cape wine lands. Tours can be purchased, downloaded and played offline.

And for those who want to delve deeper into the wines of the Western Cape, an app called Sideways will guide you to the region’s must-have pours and offers a comprehensive list of area vineyards.

Minor Paperwork

One of the biggest areas of growth in African tourism has been family travel, but getting children in and out of South Africa, certainly the continent’s most-traveled country, just got a little more complicated — and for good reason.

The Passport and Travel Document Act, a law passed this summer to deter the trafficking of minors, requires parents to navigate a sea of documentation requirements when obtaining travel visas for children. So Drive South Africa and its parent company, the Discover Africa Group, set about creating the Child Visa Checklist App, another web browser-based app that distills exactly which papers a parent or guardian needs to obtain.

And for families planning journeys on the road, Tracks4Africa’s offline guide maps are a handy addition to snacks and juice boxes. The app merges with an iPad’s GPS system to point out hundreds of attractions, fuel stations, lodging, restaurants and other services along mapped routes. Though it’s currently available only for drives in Namibia and Botswana, the company plans to expand it.