Fill up your phone or tablet with the best Android apps around – now with 100 to pick from!
The Google Play store has exploded in recent years, with a proliferation of apps that can cater to your every need. The problem is: there are just too many of them, even with Editor’s Picks, Featured and Best Selling, Top Paid and Top Free categories there to help.
There are things you can do to filter the winners from the wannabes. Google builds a list of apps it recommends for you based on your previous downloads, so that’s often a good place to start.
You can also filter by new releases if you just want to see the latest things to hit the store. Or, if you want something similar to an app you already have, search for that app and see what comes up.
And of course using user reviews and ratings is an essential part of ensuring the apps you download are high quality. But the easiest (and best) way to find top quality apps is to have someone else do the searching for you.
And that’s why we made this list. Like you we want the best apps for our Android phones. The apps that are going to revolutionize functionality or, at the very least, offer something so great that it becomes one of the must-have apps that has to be downloaded whenever you get a new handset.
The following apps will be constantly updated and are a mixture of paid and free ones that have been chosen by our Android experts. So, even if you do dip into actual cash for one of these apps, you are safe in the knowledge that it is a worthwhile purchase.
There are entirely too many ways to find and consume news on the Play Store, yet somehow Squid manages to be a bit different and worthy of mention.
First, the bits that aren’t different, but are still good: you can select from a range of interests (such as tech, culture and politics) and you’ll then be provided with a feed of relevant news stories. Or rather several feeds, as you can switch between a combined one, a feed of ‘top news’ and separate feeds for each individual topic you’re interested in.
Each of those feeds is image-heavy and attractive to look at, and with a tap you can be on the web page hosting a story. Loading these pages seems surprisingly fast, but if you prefer there’s also a reader view, which cuts out most of the adverts and other extraneous content.
You can also block any sources you don’t want to see and get push notifications for new stories. So far, so familiar, albeit done well.
The new bit is where the name Squid comes in, as you can also annotate stories with ‘ink’, underlining or circling key bits, adding stickers, then sharing the result with friends. That’s handy if you want to draw attention to a specific part of a story, rather than the whole thing, or simply want to leave your mark on it.
If that feature appeals then squid stands out from the raft of similar apps and services. If not, it’s still a highly competent and completely free news feed.
With over one billion active Facebook users there’s a good chance you’re one of them. But Facebook’s various apps can prove harsh on battery life and data use alike, so if you use Facebook Messenger you might be interested in Messenger Lite.
This, as the name suggests, is a lightweight alternative to Facebook Messenger. It’s an official Facebook app and still includes many of the core features – you can send and receive messages, see who’s online and even have voice calls.
But Messenger Lite is smaller than Messenger, so it takes up less space on your device. It should also load faster and use less data; in fact, it’s even designed to work on 2G networks and in places with unstable networks. This makes it ideal if you have a small data allowance or don’t have great coverage where you are.
The whole interface is also a lot less cluttered than the main Messenger app. There are some downsides – you can’t make video calls or play games for example, so for the full fat experience you’ll have to stick with the main app, but if you mostly just use it for instant messaging then Messenger Lite could be a worthwhile downgrade.
Chances are there are a number of things you’ll want to know in the morning before you start your day. They might include the weather, the latest news or any reminders you’ve set for the day, among other things. With Clockwise Smart Alarm you can hear all these things as soon as you wake up.
Simply set an alarm time and customize what things you want to hear, with the selection also including a fact about this day in history, a daily quote, Reddit or Twitter posts, the travel time to a custom destination and a countdown to an event.
Then when your alarm goes off it will start by making a loud alarm sound (of your choosing) to make sure you wake up, before either automatically reading out various information from the selection above, or doing so when you tap ‘play’.
You can also choose from a wide range of male or female voices to read things out, set multiple alarms and choose which content you want each alarm to read.
With options like customizable volumes and snooze lengths, Clockwise Smart Alarm handles the basics well, while also offering far more than a typical alarm clock.
The free version of Clockwise Smart Alarm limits you to three different types of content (called ‘modules’) for any one alarm, but a single IAP of $0.99/£0.89 lets you unlock unlimited modules, unlimited alarms and removes adverts, which is probably worth it if you start using this your main alarm clock.
Superfast broadband and a powerful router aren’t the only things you need to ensure a fast, stable internet connection. One other potentially major factor is making sure you’re on an uncongested Wi-Fi channel, and Wifi Analyzer helps you do that.
It can tell you what channel your network is on and also which nearby networks are using, so you can see how busy your channel is relative to others.
This should give you a good idea of which to use, but there’s also a separate screen, giving each channel a star rating and suggesting which you should move your router to.
There’s also a signal meter so you can see how strong your Wi-Fi signal is in different parts of your house or on different channels, so you’re better able to optimize it.
Actually changing the channel will be handled by your router’s interface, but if you’ve got a modern one it should be fairly simple to do, and could lead to a faster, more reliable connection.
Smoothies tend to be both tasty and healthy, and the selection on Daily Blends are also all vegan and gluten-free, but should appeal even if you don’t have those requirements.
The Daily Blends app has over 100 smoothie recipes, split into categories such as energizing, workout, dessert and kid-friendly, and you can also search based on the ingredients that you have to hand, or filter based on dietary requirements (such as nut free).
When you find a recipe you can also tweak it to your liking, swiping across an ingredient that you don’t want to use to view an alternative.
The Daily Blends app is enjoyable to use too, with big high-quality photos of all the smoothies and descriptions to accompany the recipes.
You can save favorites and add all the ingredients for a smoothie to an in-app shopping list with a tap, and the recipes are mostly quite quick and simple.
For the purchase price you get all the smoothie recipes, but there are additional IAPs to unlock full meal plans if you want to go beyond smoothies.
If you’re anything like us you need all the help you can get when it comes to remembering to do, basically, anything. To-do lists and the like help, but you need to remember to look at them, while calendar reminders only pop up at certain times.
Memory Helper on the other hand appears whenever you wake up your phone, which we’re probably doing about 3000 times a day. In other words, this app was seemingly built for us, but it could help you too.
It displays a simple list of tasks or reminders, which you can swipe away once you’ve completed, or tap a button to bring back an accidentally cleared entry.
You can customize the colors and layout, set it to only run when you have things in the list or always run, choose whether you want it to pop up before or after your lock screen and a few other helpful functions.
Basically Memory Helper is just good at making sure the things you want to remember end up in front of your eyes as often as possible, in a mostly unintrusive way.
There is an IAP to remove adverts, but oddly it only claims to remove them for a month, before presumably you have to pay again. This isn’t worth it in our opinion, as the free version is fully featured.
PhET Simulations are interactive simulations designed to demonstrate and teach you various aspects of science and maths, such as forces and motion, the area of shapes, fractions, atoms, gravity and more.
The simulations and the concepts they’re teaching vary in complexity, but generally we’d say they’re suitable for teenagers and above, and are also handy tools for any adults who want a slightly hands-on refresher or guide to these subjects.
The PhET Simulations app contains over 45 of these simulations, so there’s plenty to explore. And some go beyond just simulating a thing, also offering a ‘game’ to help you learn it.
For example, the Area Builder simulation lets you put colored squares on graph paper and as you do it will tell you the area and perimeter of the shape you’ve created, while the Area Builder game will challenge you to construct a shape of a certain area.
If you’re already confident in your science and maths skills then PhET Simulations might seem a bit basic – though we’d wager you’ll still learn something from some of them – but for everyone else it’s a useful and fun tool.
Desygner lets you unleash your inner graphic designer on your phone or tablet, but with an intuitive interface and thousands of templates it’s simple enough for beginners to use.
You can combine text, shapes, images, stickers, backgrounds and more to create logos, posters, adverts, PowerPoint-like presentations, postcards or any number of other things where images and typography are important.
Each component of your design can be moved, resized, rotated, flipped, duplicated or have its color changed, and you can work with multiple layers. Results can then be saved to your device to be used wherever you want.
We suspect it might be a bit limited for professional graphic designers, who may want more freedom to completely create designs from scratch, but for everyone else Desygner is a great way to make something that looks professional.
The basic app is free but certain features, as well as the majority of the templates, require a monthly subscription which costs $7.49/£5.99. That’s probably worth it if you’re going to use the app semi-regularly, but if you just want to design something as a one-off you might find the free version good enough.
There are a number of thesaurus apps on Google Play and some are free, but if you’re regularly writing – or looking words up – on your Android device, then Chambers Thesaurus is one of the best options, and worth the outlay.
It has entries for almost 40,000 words, along with around 400,000 synonyms and antonyms, and they’re browsable alphabetically so you can read through the thesaurus if you want, rather than simply searching for a word.
When you do search, you’ll get results as soon as you start typing, and not just for words that fit the spelling, but also similarly spelt words, those that sound similar, and those that are often confused for one another.
You can also bookmark entries and cross reference with the Chambers Dictionary or WordWeb apps (if you have them), or look the words up on Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Google, all with a tap from Chambers Thesaurus.
Data is stored locally, so you don’t need an internet connection to use the Chambers Thesaurus app itself, and there are all sorts of customization options, letting you change the color scheme, font size and more.
Weather forecasts are usually a bit dull – you might think that’s unavoidable – but What The Forecast?!! disagrees, as it provides a sentence of humorous commentary alongside every forecast.
There are well over 6,000 of these humorous phrases in the app, and you’ll always get one appropriate to the current forecast, and it will usually be quite amusingly negative. Musing even on sunny days, for example, that the weather will probably be rubbish tomorrow.
The personality doesn’t end there, as What The Forecast?!! also has animated backgrounds appropriate to the current weather, and it has all the usual information, such as wind speed, 7 day forecasts, sunrise and sunset times, chance of rain and more.
The core app is free, but for $1.99/£1.89 you can remove adverts, while a separate purchase of the same amount will let you add a weather widget to your home screen.
You might think you have a good idea of what Recent App Switcher does from the name, and you’d be half right. One of the things it does is give you an easy way to switch between recently used apps, in this case by pinning them to a bar on your notifications screen.
Of course, the recent apps menu is never far away anyway so this isn’t super useful, though being able to access recent apps from the lock screen as you can with Recent App Switcher is nice. What’s more useful is the ability to also pin your favorite apps to the notifications screen, so they’re never more than a swipe away.
Or you can have a mix of recents and favorites, and you can choose between either one or two rows of icons, each with between one and eight apps.
Speaking of shortcuts, you’re not limited just to apps, you can also add shortcuts to functions, like calling a specific contact or opening a specific Dropbox folder.
And Recent App Switcher is visually customizable too, letting you choose the shape of the shortcuts and the color of the bar they’re on, as well as whether or not to display labels under the shortcuts.
In all it’s a handy slice of Android customization ideal for power users or anyone who just wants to make their phone feel more tailored to them.
Box breathing is a breathing technique used by the Navy Seals, sports professionals and others, which involves taking long deep breaths and holding them.
It has a number of supposed benefits, from reducing stress and anxiety, to improving blood flow, awareness, focus and attention.
While we’re not sure how sound the science is for all of that, it can certainly serve as a calming influence, and the BoxBreathing app helps you get started.
It contains an instructional video to help you get the technique down, and then can guide you through the required breaths, with words or sound effects and visual indicators to tell you when to breathe in and out.
You can work through a number of levels, which adjust how deep a breath to take and how long to hold it, or just stick with the basics, and BoxBreathing also keeps a log of your breathing practice and can be set to remind you to do it daily.
There are even gamification features, with new ranks handed out for practicing a number of consecutive days. And all in all, the app is about as comprehensive as possible for such a simple technique, and justifies its price tag.
Ava won’t be for everyone, but if you’re deaf or hard of hearing, or know someone who is, it could be enormously useful.
The core feature is simply that it listens to what’s being said and shows it on the screen, so if you’re deaf or hard of hearing you can have Ava listen to someone who’s speaking to you and then you can read their responses.
Alternatively, if you’re talking to someone with hearing difficulties you can show them a text version of what you’re saying.
Ava can also learn your voice, so it can better determine whether it’s you or someone else speaking, and if you’re communicating with other people who use Ava then you’ll also be able to see who else said what in the conversation (rather than the app assigning all speech to you or ‘other’).
Ava isn’t perfect – it doesn’t always hear what’s being said perfectly in our limited experience with it, and for unlimited use you’ll need to shell out a hefty $29.99/£27.99 per month, but for those who could benefit from Ava that’s a price that could be worth paying, and for free you can still host up to five hours of group conversations each month.
TouchBar for Android is inspired by the feature of the same name for the MacBook Pro. It adds a little shortcut bar to the bottom of your screen, which you can reveal or hide with a swipe up from the bottom left corner, or set to stay visible permanently.
The bar gives you quick access to a number of features, and you can customize which ones, choosing from the likes of brightness, volume, Wi-Fi, Google Search and music controls. You can also change the size and colors of TouchBar to your liking.
TouchBar is accessible from any app and even the lock screen, giving you a handy, customizable alternative to the shortcuts found on your notifications pull-down.
There’s a free version of the app, but that forces you to watch an advert video every time you change a customization setting, which gets old fast, so the $0.99/59p TouchBar for Android PRO is the better option.
In the age of the web, magazines can feel like a dated concept, but Readly does a decent job of bringing them up to date by offering a Netflix-like subscription service.
We say Netflix-like, but while most of the content on there is far from brand new, you have access to the latest issues of thousands of magazines on Readly, all in digital form and with unlimited access for $9.99/£7.99 per month.
You can read content from not just your own country but various others too and the selection is strong, with plenty of big names on offer, along with more niche magazines.
Readly is accessible on phone, tablet and computer, so you can access your magazines almost anywhere with a screen, and even download them for offline reading.
You also have access to back issues, and navigation is a breeze, handled by intuitive swipes and taps. Readly even supports crosswords and other puzzle content, so you can do just about everything you could with a paper version.
You’re probably well aware of how customizable Android is, and may even have dabbled with custom icon packs to change up the look of your apps, but what if you want to go a step further and actually create icons of your own? Well, then you probably want Adapticons .
This app, as the name suggests, lets you adapt your existing app icons – though the changes you make can be significant enough to almost count as a whole new icon.
You can pick from a range of shapes to surround the existing icon, not just squares and circles but also things like paw prints, flowers and hearts. Then choose the size and position of the existing icon within that shape, change the orientation if you like, and change the color.
If you want to change the original icon completely you can import new images from your gallery or icon packs and you can even change the text underneath the icon.
Batch edits make the whole process a lot faster if you want to make a whole set of similar icons, and the interface is intuitive and simple.
Many of the shapes and features are locked behind a $0.99/£0.99 IAP, but you can get a taste for free.
Chromecast, AirPlay and the like are great, but not all services support them, which is where an app like Tubio comes in.
The app lets you cast web videos and music from your phone or tablet to your smart TV and other smart devices, including Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Nexus Player, Android TV, Xbox One and Xbox 360.
It also works with some older smart TVs which support DLNA/UPnP/AllShare, but may not come with an easy built-in casting solution.
Just head to the video or audio you want using Tubio’s built-in browser and hit the cast button. It’s as simple as Chromecast, but more far-reaching. Although we can’t be sure it will work with all website video content, it certainly widens your options.
Tubio also works with locally stored content and you can keep using your phone as normal once you start streaming, without interrupting the content.
The app is free, but for $2.99/£2.49 you can get rid of adverts and unlock HD playback (where supported).
Want to learn something new? Udemy could be a good place to start. This website and app has over 40,000 video courses across more than 12,000 topics, covering everything from yoga and meditation to psychology, photography and web development.
Courses are of varied lengths and aimed at various different levels. Some are just a few hours long, others have dozens of hours of content.
And they’re more than just videos. You can also ask the instructors (all of whom are theoretically experts in their fields) questions, or communicate with other students.
Some courses are free, but many cost money (starting at under $10/£10 and rising to well over $100/£100). Don’t baulk at the fees though – the pricier ones are often available at a discount and you have access to them for life. Courses can also be downloaded, cast to your TV or viewed on just about anything with a web browser.
Some courses are better than others, but with numerous user reviews for most of them it’s easy to separate the good from the bad before you put any money down.
Gratus is a simple app designed to remind you of the things you’re grateful for. When you open the app it asks you to write out something you’re grateful for and optionally add an associated image. You can build up a collection of these, which you can then view whenever you need a reminder that there are good things in your life.
That much is free, but Gratus really comes into its own when you pay a $2.99/£2.59 IAP, as this unlocks a reminder feature, so you’ll be reminded daily to add something you’re grateful for, along with the ability to see your entries in a widget or as a notification, allowing you to see them whenever you use your phone, without having to actively launch the Gratus app.
That’s important, because having to launch the app is an extra step that you might not get into the habit of doing.
Though the idea of writing or seeing things you’re grateful for might seem inconsequential it can have a lasting effect on your happiness, as it’s otherwise so easy to overlook good things, or take them for granted where writing them down helps cement them for future moments.
Blackpills is a video streaming service a bit like Netflix, except, well, not really (bear with us). Like Netflix it has a variety of shows across a number of genres (all of which are fiction in this case), but unlike Netflix it’s all original content, so you won’t see these anywhere else.
Blackpills is also designed specifically for mobile. You can’t access it on a desktop, just an Android or iOS device, consisting of very short episodes of around 10-15 minutes, so you can fit them into a coffee break or while you’re waiting for the bus.
The app promises a new episode every day and a new original series every week, so while there’s not a huge amount of content on there right now it should grow rapidly, and it’s all completely free.
Blackpills also lets you subtitle the shows in various languages and change the streaming quality, though notably you can’t download any of its content for offline viewing.
Still, as a free service there’s little to complain about here, especially as – crucially – the content is of a generally quite high quality. It’s not quite a match for Netflix, but think low-to-mid budget TV standard, rather than student film.
Your phone’s status bar can show you how much battery you’ve got left or how strong your signal is, but what if you want to be able to see how much memory your phone has left, how many unread messages you have, the battery temperature or your CPU usage?
For those things and many more there’s PowerLine. And rather than just an icon, it shows a colored bar at the top of the screen, giving those indicators a much more eye-catching look.
You can also add bars for some of the jobs the status bar already does, such as one for battery life, and the length of the bars depends on the status of the thing they’re tracking. So for battery life it would run halfway across the top if you’re at 50%.
But you’re not limited to putting the bars at the top. They can run along the left, right or bottom edge instead, or some combination of the four.
You can customize the colors and sizes of the bars too, but if you want more than two displayed at once you’ll need to go pro with a one-off $2.99/£2.99 IAP. This lets you have up to nine bars at once.
It’s a worthwhile purchase if you want to be able to see more things at a glance, or just like the stylish design of the bars.
Flowx isn’t actually a new app, rather a rebranding of WeatherBomb, but it’s worth your attention if you don’t know about it.
Yes, it’s a forecast app, but it’s more interested in showing you how weather systems move than simply telling you whether it’s going to rain.
The app gives you a map and then you can choose whether to track precipitation, cloud, wind speed, temperature, pressure or wave height. Then zoom in or out with a pinch and swipe slowly to see how these conditions are predicted to change over a period of hours or days, by watching for example clouds or storms move across the map.
You can add arrows to give you a clearer picture of the direction weather systems are moving in, key details such as the temperature are shown at all times, and you can customize the units of measurement.
Flowx probably won’t replace your normal forecast app, in fact the app description even suggests you use Flowx alongside a more conventional weather app, but if you want deeper insight into weather patterns it’s a fascinating addition to your app arsenal.
And if you get really into it an IAP of $1.99/£1.99 per year or $4.99/£4.99 as a one-off will remove adverts, give you 10 days of data instead of 7 and ensure you get future features.
From the company behind the popular ES File Explorer app comes a new tool, this time aimed at freeing up space on your device.
ES Disk Analyzer can find and delete duplicate files, compress images (and suggest large or rarely used ones that you might want to compress), highlight the size of cached files in apps and clear the cache from any or all of them, and display big files, new files and rarely used apps, in case any of them are expendable.
ES Disk Analyzer also has a basic file explorer built in, but one which orders files and folders based on their size, so you can see where all your storage is going, and you can delete files and folders from there too.
Obviously, much of what it finds will be things you want to keep, so it’s up to you to decide what is and isn’t important, but ES Disk Analyzer at least highlights many things that you’re unlikely to need and makes it easy to get a clear picture of your overall storage use.
If you’ve got any interest in Space Flight you probably know that launches of shuttles and satellites are happening all the time. The thing is keeping track of them all can be tricky, especially as various different space agencies are responsible for organisation.
You can also see details of different space vehicles, information on previous launches, and search for specific events if you know what you’re after.
Most of the features are free, but if you’re a serious shuttle-head you can pay $1.99/£1.69 to automatically have upcoming events synced to your calendar, get weather details from the launch pad for historical and upcoming launches, and get dynamic pictures of launch vehicles as a watch face for your Android Wear device. As well, of course, as supporting the developer – which should never be overlooked as a reason to pay.
There are lots of apps for discovering and building a watch list of films, but CineTrak is more feature-packed and polished than most.
For one thing, you can make a list not just of things that you want to watch, but also have a second list of the things you’ve seen, so you’ll never again get halfway through a movie only to realize that you’ve watched it already… but it was just really, really forgettable.
You can also rate the movies you’ve seen, and the app builds up a third list with all of your ratings. Movies can be searched for by name or genre, or you can check out what’s coming soon, and results are shown as big poster-like images.
Tap on one and you can see a film’s length, release date, synopsis, trailer, cast and crew and its ratings both from users of the app, and from other sources, including IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
You can also find reviews from other CineTrak users – or add your own, and if you’re looking for something similar the app has you covered there too, with a list of similar films.
The app also builds up stats based on your watch list, telling you how many films you’ve seen and how long you’ve spent watching them.
All that’s completely free, but for $2.99/£2.89 you can remove adverts, get curated lists, staff picks and unlock the ability to collect achievements. If you use CineTrak a lot, that’s probably worth paying.
The quick settings that you can reach from the notification shade on Android phones can be enormously useful, saving time when you want to toggle often used features, but the features you use most may not be the ones available on this screen. If that’s the case, you’ll want Shortcutter Quick Settings.
This lets you add new shortcuts to the quick settings screen, with 63 options available in all. These cover expected things like the flashlight and NFC, but also far more unusual options like a random number generator, and one you can tap to launch straight into typing out a new tweet on Twitter.
As well as adding shortcuts to the quick settings screen, Shortcutter also has an optional swipe-out sidebar, or you can add shortcuts to the home screen or app drawer.
The core app is free but it’s well worth paying the $2.49/£2.19 IAP, as this unlocks additional quick settings to give you a more fully-featured experience.
Avoiding sunburn can seem like a dark art at times. It doesn’t always need to be that warm or sunny to get burned, and everyone’s different in terms of how much UV they can take. It’s also not always clear how often you should reapply sunscreen, but with UVLens you need never get burned again.
The app tells you the UV index now and throughout the day, so you can plan the best time to be outside. And based on the current index, combined with what you tell it about your skin (the tone, whether you have many freckles etc), it will estimate how quickly you’ll burn and what if anything you should wear to prevent damage – be it sunscreen, sunglasses or a hat.
You can also tell the app the type of sunscreen you’ve applied and what activity you’re doing, and then it will tell you how soon you should re-apply, and can even alert you when it’s time to.
UVLens is a simple, easy to use app that makes the effects of UV – and how to combat them – far clearer.
There are many apps aimed at motivating you to walk more, but Walkr is more gamified than most. Like a standard pedometer it tracks your steps, as well as making a rough estimate of how many calories you’ve burnt, but Walkr also has you exploring a galaxy.
Your steps are converted into energy which fuels your spaceship, allowing you to blast off to new solar systems and discover new planets.
These planets have cute illustrations and unique wildlife which you can feed by building food factories. Feeding the wildlife in turn gives you currency which you can spend on more buildings and ship upgrades.
And there are also missions to undertake, leaderboards to compare your progress with friends, and achievements to unlock.
Walkr can take a bit of learning as the tutorial only covers the very basics, but once you get to grips with it it’s surprisingly engaging.
It’s also essentially free, but you can speed up your progress with various IAP. We don’t recommend that, since it’s a bit of a cheat and the whole point of the app is to get you moving more. You might, however, want to spend $1.99/£1.56 to remove adverts.
Firefox Focus was a hit on iOS, and now it’s come to Android. It’s a fast, simple browser with security and privacy at its heart, essentially operating like the private mode in other browsers at all times.
Your browsing history, including passwords, cookies and trackers is erased automatically when you close the browser, or can be erased from within the browser with a single tap.
Firefox Focus also won’t appear in your recent apps list unless you turn the ‘stealth’ toggle off, but you can set it as your default browser, if you want to browse privately at all times.
It also blocks ad trackers, analytic trackers and social trackers by default, though you can unblock them if you’d prefer – and also block other content trackers if you want (at the risk of breaking some videos and web pages).
Web fonts can be blocked too, and all this blocking actually makes Firefox Focus run faster. And it won’t take up much space on your device either, coming in at just 3.5MB.
Obviously not everyone will want their history erased, and there are some limitations – for example you can only have one open tab currently, but if you’re after a speedy, lightweight browser and care about your privacy, Firefox Focus is a great choice.
UnreliAlarm is a simple idea, but one which could be enormously appealing to anyone who’s bored of generic alarm sounds, as it lets you use an app as an alarm.
By which we mean it will automatically launch an app of your choice when the alarm goes off, and in the case of a music app, such as Spotify, or a podcast app, keep playing whatever you were last listening to.
It isn’t the most reliable alarm app, as the name suggests. Mostly because if you don’t have anything queued in the app you’ve chosen you risk being met with silence.
That’s a shame, as an alarm is one thing you really need to be able to rely on. So in this case you might want to set a normal alarm for a few minutes later, or make sure you’re very careful about having content queued.
But when UnreliAlarm works – which it does most of the time – it’s far more enjoyable than hearing the same sounds every morning.
If you’re an outdoor adventurer then Komoot is for you, as whether it’s hiking, cycling or climbing you can use the app to plan routes.
Enter a start and end point, an activity and a fitness level, and the app will present you with an appropriate route.
However you can also manually change the route to your liking and view information such as the total distance, estimated time it will take and even a breakdown of the types of surface you’ll be traveling on, how far up and down hill you’ll go and what the highest and lowest points are.
And the map itself highlights parks and other scenic areas, so you can make sure your routes pass through the most interesting places.
That’s way more detail than a typical mapping app would give you, and once you’ve planned a route you can get turn by turn navigation and save it for future use.
You can also add photos to routes and share them, so friends and family can see where you’ve been or attempt the same journey. And Komoot has global maps, so you can use it wherever you are.
The only downside to Komoot is that you only get one region for free and regions usually only cover a single city or county. After that you’ll pay $3.99/£3.99 for each of them, or $29.99/£29.99 for the whole world.
Monitoring your expenses is the first step to reducing them, and while there are many general purpose apps for that, Drivvo is designed specifically to monitor the costs of running your vehicle.
You can track fuel costs, mileage, gas consumption, maintenance costs and more, and build charts of your fuel efficiency.
Monitoring this information could be useful for anyone, especially if you want a clearer breakdown of how much it actually costs to run your vehicle, and by seeing spikes in your spend, for example at certain gas stations, you could potentially cut your costs by filling up elsewhere.
But Drivvo is especially useful for anyone who has a work vehicle or fuel allowance and needs to monitor their running costs for that.
The core app is free, but for $6/£6 per year you can back your data up in the cloud, synchronize it between devices, export it into a spreadsheet and get rid of adverts.
Finance manager apps tend to be quite dry, which in turn can make you less likely to use them, but Fortune City turns the whole business of tracking your income and outgoings into a game.
You manage a cute little city, with new buildings added each time you add an income or expense, each of which you can do in several taps.
Workers can be hired and assigned jobs, buildings can be upgraded, and if you’re diligent in your tracking your city can flourish.
If friends are using the app too you can compete with them and visit their cities, and everything is backed up to the cloud, so you won’t lose your progress if you change phone.
But, like any good finance tracker, you can also see graphs and charts of your spending and income, to get a clearer picture of where your money is going, and there are dozens of achievements to work towards, many of which require saving and careful money management.
If you spend your days knee deep in email you’re going to want the most powerful email app around, and that’s arguably Newton Mail .
It’s packed full of features, many of which you’ll find elsewhere, but you’ll be hard pushed to find them all in a single app.
These include support – and instant push notifications – for all types of email accounts, from Gmail and Outlook, to Exchange, Yahoo Mail, Office 365 and more.
