It has been over ten years since Android was first outed by Google, and back then it was hard to imagine the sheer number of apps we’d have today.
There are apps for everything, and many of them are completely free, meaning you’re just a few downloads away from supercharging your smartphone at no extra cost.
Admittedly, the huge quantity of apps doesn’t mean they’re all quality – far from it in fact, and finding the good ones can be tough.
There are tools and techniques to help, with various lists in the Play Store providing you with Editor’s Picks across a range of categories, new releases and even apps that are specifically recommended for you based on your previous installs.
You can also hunt out apps that are similar to your favorites by searching for an app you have and seeing what else comes up.
And checking out user reviews and ratings can save you from downloading a dud of an app.
But even with all that, the sheer number of apps on Google Play means many of the best can often get lost, while weaker ones sometimes rise to the top.
So to make sure you never install a duff app here’s our selection of the best you should install right now – each one carefully chosen to ensure you’ll have a whole suite of fun, engaging and, dammit, useful apps on your phone or tablet.
We’ve sorted them into categories so you can more easily find what you’re looking for. But make sure to check back every two weeks for out latest app selection, which you’ll find below.
Best free Android app of the week
Every two weeks we add a new app to this list and you’ll find the latest addition below.
Screen Stopwatch
Google has released a number of ‘digital wellbeing experiments’ – apps thataim to make you more aware of how much you use your phone, and Screen Stopwatch is one of the more successful ones.
It turns your wallpaper into a big stopwatch that counts every second your phone’s screen is on, so at the end of the day you can see exactly how long you’ve spent looking at it.
That’s all it does, but it looks fairly good, so you probably won’t mind having it as your wallpaper, and the large amount of black in it should help marginally extend the battery life of phones with OLED screens (as they won’t have to light the black pixels). Though those gains will probably be countered by the slightly increased juice drain of having a live wallpaper.
In any case, having a running screen time total that you can’t really escape is a great way to ensure you’re always aware of just how much you really use your phone – and if the numbers surprise you, it might even help you reduce your usage.
