The 33 best Android apps you can download

Your Android device is a supercomputer that sits in your pocket – but too often Android is dismissed when it comes to apps. People say great things aren’t happening on the platform compared to iOS. As it turns out, these people are wrong. This feature is about setting the record straight: unearthing fantastic apps for the platform and showcasing how you can do more with your Android device. And, yes, some of them cost a few quid, but it’s worth delving into your wallet to experience the best that mobile has to offer.

CAMERA FV-5

The stock camera app’s fine for snaps, but for more control over your photos, Camera FV-5’s where it’s at. Although not quite a DLSR crammed into your smartphone, the app does provide adjustments for shutter speed, exposure, ISO, focus, and more.

SNAPSEED

We’ve long had a soft spot for Snapseed. Its intuitive interface was always one of the most tactile on Android, while the huge range of filters and effects made it perfect for all manner of photographic manipulation and fine-tuning. Now, major revamps have further entrenched Snapseed in must-have territory. The star of the show? Stacks, which converts each filter you apply into an editable layer.

PRISMA

The idea behind Prisma is to turn photos into works of art, with almost zero effort. You load a pic, and then select a painting or illustration. Styles vary from Munch to manga-style fare, and the results are surprisingly authentic (although occasionally terrifying – probably don’t try your own version of The Scream unless you want to look like a demon).

PIC COLLAGE

If you want to do a bit more with your digital snaps than weld yet more of them to a creaking Facebook account, Pic Collage is a good bet. You load a bunch of photos into pre-defined grids, which you can subsequently customise with text, stickers, and scribbles. For special occasions, there are greetings card templates, which you can send with the implicit suggestion you’re too cheap to buy a real card.

STOP MOTION STUDIO PRO

If you fancy attempting to reboot Morph as a grim and gritty ninja assassin, by way of your desk and some Blu-Tack, grab Stop Motion Studio Pro. The app has everything you need to compose a miniature stop-motion masterpiece. You can shoot live, with onion-skinning and a grid helping you position objects, or you can import frames from elsewhere.

CAUSTIC

Speaking of Korg Gadget, the hugely impressive Caustic 3’s in a similar space. Inspired by old-school rack-mount rigs, this app enables you to choose from 14 tiny synths, which can be played live or coaxed into performing your next chart-topper by way of the song sequencer.

BEBOT

At some point in the distant future, we can dream of an Android device awash with all the synths available to iOS users. In the meantime, at least we have the wonderful Bebot. In terms of immediacy, this one’s a winner, with its suited robot farting all kinds of weird noises on stage as you prod the screen. But bring up the controls and you find there’s much more going on.

KORG IKAOSSILATOR

Android’s not exactly drowning in synths, and so KORG Kaossilator fills a gap in that way. But much of the joy here is in how it encourages you to experiment and play. Eschewing a traditional piano, the app has you swipe and tap a touch panel. All the while, coloured pulses explode in the background, in an odd marriage of tempo and school disco lighting.

DJAY 2

People will probably look at you a bit weird when you’re sitting on the train, frantically DJing away using two tiny virtual decks on your smartphone. They don’t know what they’re missing. Djay 2 might verge on the ridiculous at times, but it’s also a hugely capable app. You can intelligently match songs, set looping and cue points, mess round with effects and samplers, and delve into waveforms.

POWERDIRECTOR

If there’s proof Android doesn’t need to end up second-best when it comes to creative fare, you’ll find it in PowerDirector. This app in many ways echoes Apple’s iMovie, in providing you with a user-friendly but powerful video editor. Clips and stills can quickly be arranged, rotated and trimmed, titles can be added, and you get a decent set of transitions to experiment with, including slow-motion effects.

GOOGLE MAPS

Chances are, you’ve already got this beauty installed on your Android device. If not, what are you waiting for? Google’s mapping app is the best around, with excellent routing by car, public transport, or bike/foot. You also get Street View for nosing around selected spots, fast access to information about local amenities and entertainment, and an offline mode.

WEATHER TIMELINE

Weather apps are tricky to get right, but Weather Timeline cuts through the dross, balancing information and lush visuals. Current conditions are displayed on a little card, below which are hourly, daily, and weekly forecasts. You also get graphs for weather geeks, an interactive map, notifications, alternate source selections, widgets and a rainfall forecast.

RUNKEEPER

If you’re putting yourself through a fitness grind alone, this virtual back-patter will help spur you on. It tracks all your runs, walks and rides, then does the maths to tell you (and the entire world via social media, if that’s your thing) how many calories you’ve burnt, how far you’ve gone and generally how heroic you’ve been of late.

AMBIENCE – NATURE SOUNDS

Whether you’re surrounded by irritating office noise or need a helping hand getting a night’s sleep, ambient sound apps can help. Ambience gives you pages of sounds to trigger, from rainfall and oceans through to animals and chimes. Along with playing sounds in an ad-hoc manner, you can set a timer, store custom mixes or, if feeling a bit lazy, play one of the preloaded mixes.

AUTOMATE

Waste time and you’re not productive. And if there’s one thing it’s easy to do on your Android device, it’s faff about performing mind-numbing actions time and again. With Automate, you can build flows from actions, conditions and event triggers. These can include UI automation, file transfer, file archiving, making calls, creating alarms and more.

MINDLY

Whether you’re an office drone tasked with sorting a horribly boring report, or planning your best mate’s stag do, it pays to organise your thoughts. With Mindly, you do so by way of two-dimensional tiny universes. You create a central thought around which related thoughts are positioned, like little planets you can pleasingly set in orbit with a flick.

SCANBOT

Even slimline desktop scanners take up room, and sometimes decide they want nothing to do with your computer. Enter Scanbot: an app that transforms your Android device into a handheld scanner. In its free incarnation, the app will auto-detect the edges of whatever’s plonked on a table in front of it, enhance scanned pages, and fling the result at cloud storage.

IA WRITER

Although iA Writer is often described as a minimal text editor, it’s perhaps more accurate to call it a focussed one. The main interface is streamlined – plain text, a small additional keyboard bar for adding Markdown, and an optional word count. There’s also a focus mode for highlighting the current line, and a night mode when tapping away in the dark and not searing your retinas.

EVERNOTE

Evernote is a dumping ground for… everything. Got a quick idea for something amazing? Bung it in Evernote! Got a receipt? Chuck it in Evernote! Fancy recording yourself yelling “ARGH!” because you forgot to save a receipt in Evernote and have since misplaced it? Upload it to Evernote! It’s clean, fairly simple, hugely flexible, very cross-platform, possibly a bit too green, and remembers stuff so that you don’t have to bother.

POCKET CASTS

If you’re into podcasts, you need a decent player – and Pocket Casts is the best around. It looks great, is strong in terms of discoverability, subscription, sync and management, and will happily notify you when new episodes of your favourites appear. It’s also packed with clever controls to help you get to the good bits.

INSTAPAPER

The web, increasingly, isn’t geared towards reading. During long-reads, you’re often bombarded by other things, trying to make you click away. Hence ‘read later’ systems, the original of which is the superb Instapaper. Send content to Instapaper from a browser and it arrives stripped of extraneous junk, leaving only the article’s text and imagery.

FENIX 2

If you demand your social media comes in text-message-sized chunks, Fenix 2 should be an immediate install on your Android device. This Twitter client supports multiple accounts, and makes it simple to delve into your tweets. Lists are easy to access, and direct messages are neatly presented like the output of a chat app.

REDSHIFT

There are quite a few Android astronomy apps, but Redshift excels through its no-nonsense, feature-packed approach. There’s little in the way of gloss and gimmicks; instead, this app doubles down on tools for efficiently exploring the heavens. A virtual sky can be dragged about, or the app can use your accelerometer to detail what you’d be able to see if your device wasn’t in front of your face.

METAMORPHABET

This app’s oddball universe features letters that transform in unforeseen ways: an ‘A’ grows antlers, turns into an arch, and goes for an amble. A ‘B’ grows a beard, sprouts a beak, and spews an endless stream of bugs. It’s deranged and imaginative — like CBeebies employed Terry Gilliam as controller — and marvellous to explore for kids and adults alike.

NOVA LAUNCHER PRIME

A key reason why many people gravitate towards Android is that it’s not a closed box. You can configure all kinds of things, including the main interface for launching apps. And, if you’re not happy with your current launcher, Nova Launcher Prime is the best around. The app enables you to mess about with themes, colours, and icon arrangements.

SOLID EXPLORER

One of the big advantages of Android is its relative openness, and Solid Explorer is a superb app for rampaging around your device. You can dig into local files, managing (or wrecking) them at will. But Solid Explorer goes much further: you can mess about with how everything looks, delve into cloud storage, preview media, and drag and drop using a dual-pane browser.

SWIFTKEY + EMOJI

The default Android keyboard is perfectly decent, but SwiftKey’s a popular alternative for good reason. Along with boasting excellent predictive typing, it enables you to more rapidly type by swiping your fingers across the keys rather than laboriously pecking away at them individually.

1PASSWORD

Every year, security companies furiously note too many people are still using stupid passwords, such as ‘password’. Don’t do this. Instead, secure your online world with 1Password. This user-friendly password manager creates strong, unique passwords to keep your online logins safe, and can also store identity information, payment card details, notes, and more.

RINGDROID

It’s been knocking around in various forms for near on a decade, but this ringtone maker is ad-free, based on a reputable open-source project and – importantly – does what it’s supposed to. Bung an audio file on your device – be it a favourite song or something you’ve concocted yourself – and Ringdroid will unearth it. Load the track and you can quickly and easily isolate the bit you want, which will then be hurled at the relevant storage area on your device.

SKETCHBOOK

Should you require a general purpose app for digital scribbling, it’s hard to go wrong with SketchBook. An intuitive interface provides quick access to specialist tools, such as the app’s three layers, and image import (for tracing). There’s also a symmetry menu, for those days when only fashioning a trippy kaleidoscope will do.

INFINITE PAINTER

There are loads of painting apps for Android, but Infinite Painter’s the winner because of how it feels. On applying finger to glass, it’s the closest thing on the platform to slapping paint on to a canvas. You get loads of brushes – everything from subtle watercolours to chunky slabs of oil; and although the virtual paint doesn’t interact in an entirely realistic fashion, with care and judicious use of the smudge tool you can create art you’d happily hang on a wall.

INFINITE DESIGN

By the same brains as Infinite Painter, Infinite Design initially feels like a sketching app with a snazzy ink pen. But flick the ‘display outlines’ switch and you realise this is all about vector graphics. Delve into the menus and you’ll discover an impressive range of tools for a mobile illustration product – everything from pen-based path editing to the means to mash shapes together.

PIXLY

If your idea of art involves graphics so chunky you could conceivably cut yourself on the corners of every shape, Pixly will be your idea of heaven. It’s a basic Photoshop as filtered through early 1980s graphics, with brushes, pattern stamps, gradient fills, select and line tools, layers, and an isometric shape creator.