The 5 best apps for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9

If you’ve pre-ordered one of the exciting new Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 models at no little expense, you’ll want to make the most of it. Among the many top-tier features of the latest Android tablets are a 120Hz Dynamic AMOLED display, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset, 20% larger speakers than the Tab S8 line, and the S Pen. It’s a beautiful hardware package, but what are the best apps for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 to ensure you unleash its full potential? We’ve picked out five of the first apps you’ll want to get.

There are obviously dozens of amazing apps that would be perfect for the new Samsung tablet range. The impressive display and powerful processor make this an ideal tablet for both streaming and gaming, but we’d fill our list pretty fast if we included those options. So you can take Netflix and YouTube as a read, and our list of the best Android tablet games can guide you on the gaming front. We’ll focus on a few other apps you might not have immediately considered.

The best apps for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9

Adobe apps

Price: Free / Up to $52.99 per month

While there are a variety of excellent design apps that suit the Galaxy Tab S9, this one is a no-brainer. Adobe offers a suite of creative tools that are industry standards in their respective fields. Apps like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom provide professional-grade photo editing, graphic design, and digital art capabilities, which are optimized for touch interfaces, including styluses like the S Pen. The 2K AMOLED display of the tablet ensures your artwork jumps off the screen, plus Adobe frequently updates its apps with new features and improvements, ensuring you always have access to the latest creative tools.

Adobe’s cloud-based services, such as Adobe Creative Cloud, allow you to sync your work across multiple devices. You can start a project on your Samsung tablet and finish it on your desktop without hassle. There are also more practical and business-related apps, such as Adobe Fill & Sign, that pair well with the document-scanning capabilities of the Galaxy Tab S9.

LectureNotes

Price: Free / Up to $4.99

LectureNotes is ideal if you’re a student, teacher, or professional who frequently attends meetings or lectures. This app is designed to make note-taking simple and efficient. It allows you to jot down notes using your S Pen, mimicking the natural feel of writing on paper. The app supports multiple pages and notebooks so that you can organize your notes based on different subjects or meetings. You can import and annotate PDFs, allowing you to directly write or draw on your lecture slides or meeting materials for easy reference and review later. The app also supports audio and video recording while taking notes, so you won’t miss any important details.

You can share your notes with classmates or colleagues via a variety of export options, including PDF and JPEG. It’s also compatible with cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive, ensuring your notes are backed up and accessible from any device.

RoughAnimator

Price: $4.99

We haven’t made the whole list about the S Pen, but we wanted to mention RoughAnimator, which is a fun tool for your new Galaxy Tab S9 if you’re an animator or aspire to be one. This featured-packed app is a hand-drawn animation program designed specifically for tablets. It allows you to create animations frame by frame, offering a level of control and precision that’s hard to find in other mobile animation apps. One of the key features is support for multiple layers, allowing you to separate your animations into foregrounds, backgrounds, and characters.

RoughAnimator offers a range of drawing tools, and it supports pressure sensitivity, making it ideal for the S Pen. The app also allows audio import so that you can sync your animations with sound and enjoy the full dynamism of your creation thanks to the upgraded speakers of the Galaxy Tab S9. When you’re done, you can export your animations as GIFs, MP4s, or image sequences.

Amazon Kindle

Price: Free / Book costs vary

For avid readers who don’t actually own a Kindle device, the Galaxy Tab S9 makes a more than adequate alternative for tucking into a good e-book. The large, bright display of the tablet provides a crisp reading platform, and it includes a blue light filter mode to reduce eye strain, although the Kindle app also has a night mode for this purpose. The app itself gives you access to millions of books, magazines, newspapers, and audiobooks to choose from out of Amazon’s vast library. Text size, font, and background color are all adjustable to suit your reading preferences.

The Kindle app supports Whispersync technology, which syncs your last-read page, bookmarks, and annotations across all your devices. You’ll also get features like X-Ray, which provides in-depth information about the book’s characters, places, and terms, as well as Word Wise, which offers definitions of difficult words as you read. There are some free titles, and for the books you have to pay for, the app allows you to read a sample before purchasing.

Feedly

Price: Free / $9.99 per month (optional)

Sticking with the reading theme, your Galaxy Tab S9 can also replace the morning paper, and one of the best apps to achieve that is Feedly. Instead of hopping on your browser and jumping from news site to news site and then heading over to a sports rundown, Feedly acts as an RSS reader to aggregate all of your favorite sources and topics of interest into one curated feed of articles. It’s simple to use, syncs between devices, and you can follow as many topics as you want. There is also support for Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others. You can even save articles and read them offline. 

Those are just a few great apps to get you started on your new device, and the Galaxy Tab S9 comes with some excellent S Pen-oriented apps pre-installed, such as the popular Samsung Notes app. We’ll be sure to keep this list updated as more apps that make the best use of the Tab S9’s feature set emerge.