From smoother scrolling to smarter sharing, underrated apps can make your phone feel easier and more thoughtful to use every day.
There are many apps on our phones that we barely touch, while some apps that are actually beneficial fly under the radar. By 2026, the Google Play Store and the App Store have become so saturated that finding a truly beneficial app feels like a task. The best apps shouldn’t be just about navigation or streaming music or movies. They should also be capable of easing our daily lives and adding a layer of excitement to our mobile usage experience that we didn’t know we were missing.
While we continue using the most common apps, such as Google Maps, Spotify, Netflix, TikTok, Instagram, and VLC, we keep ourselves distant from a bunch of underrated apps. In the modern scenario, settling for default apps is a waste of the supercomputer that you have inside your pocket. Let’s be real for a second and evaluate how many apps on your phone you actually open. Most of you would agree that a better part of our device’s battery and screen time is consumed by the same five favorites every single day.
But this year, limiting yourself to just the big names is like living under a rock. This is where this list comes into the picture by skipping the obvious choices. You don’t need another article recommending that you install Netflix, Spotify, or Google Maps. I have hunted down 10 underrated apps — split between Android and iOS — that you have likely never heard of. But once you try them, they will likely have a permanent place on your phone.Volume Scroll (Android)
Volume Scroll is one of those apps you don’t realize you need until you start using it. Frankly, after installing it and using it for a few days, it’s one of the apps that I’ve started recommending to people, especially those with big-screen phones. The aim of the app is simple — it allows you to scroll web pages, social media feeds, or documents using your phone’s volume buttons. Once you start using Volume Scroll, you may feel that it should have been a native Android feature.
It may sound like a small change to scroll using the few physical buttons left on a modern-day smartphone. But for a person who loves pushing buttons and misses the tactile click in everyday life, the Volume Scroll app immediately solves that issue. It also helps reduce what’s often called the smartphone pinky fatigue. Research cited by Hinge Health, including a 2024 study published in BMC Public Health, found that nearly 60% of frequent smartphone users report discomfort or pain in hand, including in the pinky, often linked to supporting the phone’s weight or prolonged use.
This app ended up on my phone while I was searching for a solution to scroll through my social media feed while eating messy wings. Instead of greasing up the phone’s display, I just tapped the volume buttons to scroll. You can use it across most apps, adjust the scroll speed, scroll amount, style, double-press, long-press, and more. The free version unlocks all features for just one app. For unlimited apps, you need to purchase a weekly or yearly subscription.Quick Cursor (Android)
Quick Cursor is another app that solves one of the main issues with big-screen phones — reaching the top of the screen without adjusting your hand. Smartphones have become massive over the years. A 6- to 7-inch phone is released every month. While extra screen real estate is great for media and content consumption, reaching the top of these oversized displays requires stretching your fingers, basically doing hand gymnastics. Quick Cursor solves this issue by adding a computer-style mouse pointer to your Android phone, activated from either of the lower side edges.
I have been using Quick Cursor for several years, and it has been one of the apps that gets rolled over to every new phone. Without Quick Cursor, I had to make hand adjustments to reach the notifications panel or the Quick Panel to access notifications or shortcuts, respectively. But after installing this app, all I had to do was swipe from the edge of the screen to reveal a cursor. You can control the tracker with your thumb, and the cursor mirrors the movement at the top of the display. This way, you can easily click buttons that are out of your reach.
The free version lets you customize the size of the trigger areas, the speed of the cursor, and even includes a nifty feature for my Galaxy S25 Ultra, where it automatically disables itself when the S Pen is detached. With the paid version, you can unlock trigger and tracker actions directly from the edge of the screen, edge actions, floating tracker mode, advanced tracker and cursor customization features, and more.Screencraft: 4K Wallpapers (Android)
The only ways to actually make your smartphone truly yours are by changing the cover or the wallpaper on it. Think of wallpapers as the clothes your phone wears. And by that rule, Screencraft is one of the best tailors in town. While searching for the term “wallpaper”, you can find an enormous list of wallpaper apps, most of which are filled with aggressive ads or low-resolution content. Screencraft is a different option, as its interface resembles the Liquid Design of iOS and gives you true 4K-resolution wallpapers without any fuss.
