Got a Samsung Galaxy S7, OnePlus 3T or any other Android device? Then you need to download these 40 free apps
Everyone loves free stuff. And there's plenty of it on Android, with an insane number of free apps available in the Google Play store.
But most of them are rubbish: a frustrating mix of non-official rip-offs, shonkily designed bedroom projects and, in the worst cases, plain old arrgghh-this-doesn't-even-work-at-all duds.
Fortunately, there are gems lurking among the dross, and we’ve rounded up 40 crackers. Read on, download and enjoy.
Photography
Snapseed
We’ve long had a bit of a soft spot for Snapseed. Its intuitive interface was always one of the most tactile on Android; moreover, the huge range of filters and effects made it perfect for all manner of photographic manipulation and fine-tuning. But with 2015’s major revamp, Snapseed became further entrenched in must-have territory.
The star of the upgrade: Stacks, which converts each filter you apply into an editable layer. This means each effect can later be tweaked, rather than being burned into your image when applied, thereby providing even more scope for experimentation.
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).
The only snag is you must be online for Prisma to work its magic. However, any art it makes can be saved to your device or shared with the world. Just don’t get a bit too excited about your artistic prowess and lop off an ear.
Retrica
There are so many camera apps, social networks pretending to be camera apps, and camera apps pretending to be social networks, that it takes a lot to stand out. Retrica manages to do so due to its straightforward interface, slew of live filters and effects (so you can see what you’re going to get at all times) and excellent multishot collage-creation mode.
Use the last of those when you’re zooming along in a car (er, as a passenger, obviously) and you get some really amazing photo strips. And if you miss a Retrica moment by using your normal camera app, you can always apply one of Retrica’s filters later.
Stop Motion Studio
Fancy yourself as the next big thing in animation? Sadly lacking the money to buy any equipment or even an app? No matter: with Stop Motion Studio, you only need your Android device’s camera and some bits and bobs to shuffle about your desk.
This app’s a cut-down version of the paid app, and so is light on features. Nonetheless, it still enables you to shoot individual frames, arrange and edit them, and then spit out the results to a movie or animated GIF.
Adobe Photoshop Fix
Until the (unlikely) day Adobe sees fit to release its desktop products in full on mobile, we’ll have to make do with the company carving off bits and squirting them into apps. Photoshop Fix is, though, a suitably impressive bit, if you’re in the habit of retouching and restoring photographs.
The basics – cropping and adjustments – aren’t anything you can’t get elsewhere. But Photoshop Fix’s Heal and Liquify tools are something else, respectively knocking out imperfections and enabling drastic effects. Load a portrait and Liquify becomes face-aware, too, so you can subtly adjust features – or give your boss a massive conk if you’re in a funny mood.
Art and design
Animatic
One of the greatest things about smartphones is how the right app can make complex tasks far more approachable. Animatic is an animation tool designed for anyone. You scribble on the canvas, add a new frame, see the previous one faintly so you can line things up, and then scribble some more.
A few dozen frames later and you’ll (hopefully) have an animation you can play and export as a movie or GIF. Nothing you create is going to trouble Pixar, but the scribbly, sketchy quality of Animatic output is full of character – plus it’s far less hassle than doodling flip animations on a notepad.
Adobe Illustrator Draw
On the desktop, Adobe powerhouse Illustrator is most known for enabling creative types to fashion anything from logos to elaborate illustrative fare. Illustrator Draw brings much of the tech to Android, but is mostly concerned with creating freehand artwork.
This is an impressive desktop-oriented app, in terms of feature set. There’s a layers system for separating elements or tracing over an imported photo, a 64x zoom, multiple configurable pen tips, perspective grids, and shape stencils to temporarily plonk on the canvas when you fancy some accuracy. Export options are limited unless you subscribe to Creative Cloud, but that’s the only drawback.
Adobe Photoshop Sketch
Much like stablemate Adobe Illustrator Draw, Adobe Photoshop Sketch utilises the smarts of an Adobe desktop app to provide you with a seriously impressive Android-based fingerprinting environment. This one’s all about natural media – scribbling with digital takes on thick acrylic paint, pastels, inks, and watercolours.
The app excels in terms of features, with a layers system, configurable brushes, and you being able to stash favourite tools and colours in the toolbar. Again, export’s a bit limited if you’re not a Creative Cloud subscriber, but you can at least output work to Gallery for sharing online.
PicsArt Photo Studio & Collage
There’s an awful lot going on in PicsArt. It seemingly wants to simultaneously be Snapseed and Prisma, although it’s not as good as either of those apps. So why’s it in this round-up, then? Collages – that’s why.
Fire up PicsArt, select a bunch of snaps and a layout, and you can fiddle around with placement, borders, effects, and dividers, and then hurl the end result at your social network of choice.
Pigment
It turns out that colouring in is good for relieving stress – although that’s not the case when you spill paint all over the furniture or accidentally grind pastels into the rug. Fortunately, Pigment provides a safe digital alternative – and one far beyond its contemporaries.
This isn’t just a rubbish tap-to-fill pretender (although you can use that input mechanism if you’re feeling lazy). Instead, you get a range of tools to use – markers; brushes; fancy gradients – and can even choose whether the app helps you ‘stay between the lines’. There’s IAP for unlocking new illustrations, but plenty are available for nowt.
Travel, weather and health
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. But it’s more than just a massive map. You get Street View for nosing around selected spots (including national monuments – and a TARDIS, if you can find it) by way of panoramas, fast access to information about local amenities and entertainment, and an offline mode. That last one enables you to save a chunk of a map to your device, using it as a turn-by-turn driving aid even when you’ve no internet connection.
Citymapper
Google Maps might be the best mapping app around, but if you find yourself immersed in a massive city, you might want something a bit more focussed. Citymapper is all about zipping about by the best modes of transport possible, and dozens of cities are supported.
It figures out where you are and plugs into all available transit information, enabling you to rapidly plan journeys via train, bus, bike, or ferry. Journey overviews enable you to compare how many calories or bucks you’ll burn, along with discovering which are ‘rain safe’, and those that’ll require you to hang around for ages before getting going.
Weather Underground
This one’s ideal for weather geeks and anyone who just wants to know whether walking the dog will result in them getting drenched. Select a location and the app flings data into a bunch of tiles you can shuffle about, depending on your needs.
Current conditions (temperature; local rainfall map; conditions) always stay at the top along with a day/hour/summary forecast; below those, you can delve into dew points, a lovely sunrise/sunset animation, air quality details, and local webcams for when you don’t believe the app and someone’s annoyingly painted over your windows.
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) how many calories you've burnt, how far you've gone and generally how heroic you've been over the past week or so. The in-app purchase model keeps it all nice and tidy too, so even in the basic free format it's a very neat app to use.
Zombies, Run!
If you’ve piled on the flab, it can nonetheless be a drag working up the enthusiasm to slog along local streets in trainers that have seen better days. But you can spice up running/jogging/hobbling (depending on your competence) with Zombies, Run!
It’s more or less a post-apocalyptic Walking Dead-style scenario smashed into Runkeeper, sending you out on vital missions that rather suspiciously always involve running. Periodically, zombies will show up, and unless you up your pace, they’ll tear your face off – a handy motivator. Want more structure? Take a look at the built-in training plans.
TaoMix
If everything’s getting a bit much, have TaoMix take you to a calm place by way of meditative noises. The interface, though, isn’t new-age noodly – instead, it’s all neon discs and minimalism. It’s tactile, too: you drag sound discs to adjust the mix, then long-press and flick a mixing ring Angry Birds-style to create a constantly evolving soundscape.
For free, you can mix up to three sounds, save and load mixes, and use the timer. Splurge on IAP and you can concoct aural bliss with up to ten noises serenading your ears at once. Or possibly terrifying them, given that ten noises is likely to result in a cacophony.
Music, audio and video
RemixLive
We’re all for making music properly, but sometimes you just want to make a noise with a minimum of effort. With Remixlive, you select a genre and then tap away at pads to trigger loops. Everything’s always in tune, and you can record your electronic masterpiece as you go.
Want more control? Try the mini mixing desk, with its knobs and sliders, or the FX section with a pad for slathering your tune in delay or a filter. Got some cash burning a hole in your pocket? Then splash out on additional sample packs, effects, and features.
Music Maker JAM
Sitting somewhere between music-creator and loop remixer, Music Maker JAM is a great way to get started if you fancy making a noise. Choose a style (there are over a dozen freebies, and hundreds more available via IAP), assign loops to tracks, and even record yourself yelling over the top, like a repressed diva trapped in a bin.
But that’s not all – Music Maker JAM enables you to live mix, create song sections to switch between, and also adjust the key of the loop across any of its beats. You’re still ultimately fiddling with other people’s loops, but it feels like you’re making your own songs.
Yousician
These days, people are just as likely to pick up a tiny plastic guitar as a real one. Yousician takes advantage of the gamification of music, essentially spinning Guitar Hero 90 degrees and having a proper guitar be your controller. You therefore work your way through timing-based exercises that have you strum chords and pick notes at precisely the right moments.
The free version limits how long you can play each day, but it’s a smart, fun way to pick up the basics and also to stop your inner Johnny Cash from getting rusty. And should you prefer tinkling ivories, there are lessons for mastering the piano, too.
Quik
The only problem with modern smartphones having superb video-cameras built-in is you end up with loads of videos you never do anything with. Quik gives you a helping hand, largely by being a video editor where you don’t have to do any of that time-consuming editing stuff.
Pick some videos and a theme, and Quik spits out an energetic, great-looking short. If you’re not thrilled by the results, tweak cuts, filters and fonts to suit. Or if you decide even selecting videos is a bit too much work, wait for Quik to serve up its weekly ‘highlights’ video.
FxGuru: Movie FX Director
This slightly gimmicky special effects app is nonetheless very clever, verging on useful. It comes with a batch of free effects (the kind of things you'd see in a disaster movie) with additional packs as in-app purchases.
You point your phone or tablet at a scene (say, your office, the street or your garden), and then the app records a short video clip with a destructive missile attack or perhaps a hovering UFO superimposed over the live action. Motion tracking allows you to pan as you film, too.
Work and studying
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. But this app has plenty of features that make it closer in nature to a desktop app.
There’s a focus mode for highlighting the current line, and a night mode when tapping away in the dark and not searing your retinas. The Markdown preview offers multiple templates, you can sync your work to Google Drive or Dropbox, and there are plentiful export options. Add a keyboard and it’s a typewriter from the future.
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.
Initially, you might find yourself facing some oddball typos, but with some practice, SwiftKey can hugely speed up banging out some words on your device. And if you’re armed with a massive phone but wee hands, check out the excellent split keyboard.
Dropbox
As Android moves closer to home computer territory, syncing photos, music and work documents is increasingly important. As a free service, Dropbox offers 2GB of pleasingly simple online storage which is automatically synced whenever you log in from any of your devices – very useful for occassional file transfers, semi-permanent documents and shared folders. The Android app is nothing fancy but it doesn't need to be, getting the job done without fuss.
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 just 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.
CamScanner
If anyone would claim we currently live in a paperless age, we’d like to laugh in their face, but only after briefly being a bit sad that we don’t actually live without paper.
CamScanner at least tries to shift you in the right direction. Using your device’s camera, you can scan notes and receipts, and the app auto-enhances the result to make it clear and sharp. This can then be shared. (Stump up for the paid version and you also get OCR, to extract text from your scans.)
Work and studying (continued)
CalcNote
The problem with most calculator apps is they’re rubbish, and that’s because most calculators are rubbish for anything beyond basic sums. CalcNote’s cunning plan is to be part spreadsheet.
That might sound terrifyingly dull, but CalcNote proves hugely useful. You can work with custom keyboards, tapping out multi-line sums with context – as in, actual words alongside the numbers. Some of CalcNote’s ‘grammar’ is a bit awkward, but commit its quirks to memory and you’ll never use a traditional calculator app again.
Forest
The idea behind Forest is to use your smartphone less. You set a timer, and if you leave your phone alone, a little cartoon tree grows on the screen. Get tempted by Facebook or play Candy Crush, and you end up with a dead stick.
Your daily forests can be compared, and each successfully grown tree nets you some coins. These can be spent on new tree types to grow. Alternatively, if you’re socially inclined and have amassed thousands of coins (which takes weeks of dedication), use them to donate to tree-growing projects around the world.
Slack
It wears the beard of business, and talks about “all your team communication in one place,” and that is a side of Slack. It’s a powerful real-time messaging system, where you can talk all businessy about business things, and almost never drift into a conversation about jetpacks.
But Slack also works nicely as a group communications tool for anyone: friends working on a project, or just wanting to talk using a system that’s compatible with multiple platforms and devices.
Google Translate
We’ve seen a few clever translation apps in our time, but Google Translate now crushes them all. It offers (sometimes clunky) word-for-word translations of over 100 languages with input via text, handwritten words or symbols, spoken words or even text recognition via the camera. It can then give you the translation in the form of text or speak it for you.
The core app can do all this with a data connection, but if you’re abroad and fearing nasty roaming data charges, Google Translate may still come to your aid: 52 of the languages work entirely offline for basic translation.
Duolingo
Google Translate may be great, but the long-term aim should be to learn to speak all those languages yourself. Duolingo does an amazing job of making this fun, with a format that’s a bit like a pub quiz machine. It currently supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian, Esperanto, Polish and Turkish, and if you ‘play’ it regularly you’ll definitely pick up at least some competence in your chosen language. With more intensive use, you can give yourself a week’s crash course before a trip abroad.
Entertainment and distractions
Feedly
With the demise of Google Reader, the world needed an alternative RSS reader - and Feedly fits the bill nicely.
It does pretty much everything you’d want an RSS reader to do, presenting the latest stories from your favourite media outlets and blogs in an attractive, easily browsable list. You’ll find every site you might ever be interested in - yes, Stuff.tv is in there - plus it integrates neatly with the likes of Pocket and Evernote and sharing stories to social media is but a matter of a click.
The basic idea behind Flipboard is that turns your social media feeds into a constantly updating magazine, displaying the latest updates from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and many more in a lovely grid-based design. But there’s a lot more to it than that, with the ability to add content from specific RSS feeds or just by subject making it a truly personalised digital mag.
It’s ridiculously simple to use and works so well that Samsung used it to power its My Magazine app for its smartphones. High praise indeed.
Instapaper
The web, increasingly, isn’t geared towards reading. It’s geared towards quickly taking in information, and seeing what else is on offer. 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.
You send content to Instapaper from a browser, and it arrives stripped of extraneous junk, leaving only the article’s text and imagery. Start scrolling and the app subtly shifts to full-screen, providing one of the most pleasing reading experiences on the platform - for whatever web pages you send to it.
Hangouts
“Hey! Who wants brunch at Choochies today?” “Count me in! I’ve got tickets to the Nicks game, wanna come too?” Etc. Alternatively, you can use Hangouts to message friends via text, video and emoticon-style emojis in a more realistic manner. “Train cancelled again”, or “Dad, get on the video call so you can show me how to fix the boiler”. That sort of thing. Woah! Hangouts rocks!
Sago Mini Friends
If your Android tablet frequently finds itself in the hands of a tiny person, ensure Sago Mini Friends is installed. This sweet-natured outing features a cartoon critter visiting chums’ houses, and getting involved in all manner of kid-friendly activities.
These are supposed to promote empathy – during an eating mini-game, for example, feeding one animal causes the other to look utterly forlorn; although they both emit a massive burp at the end of the meal, which presumably makes everything all right. Just ensure your own little critter doesn’t get any bright ideas from the ‘hammering nails into a birdhouse’ mini-game.
Entertainment and distractions (continued)
Movies By Flixster
If you’re still brave enough to venture out to the cinema, rather than taking in movies via the magic of your smartphone or tablet, Movies by Flixster is a must-install. The app figures out where you’re located and then enables you to see what’s on at local cinemas; alternatively, you can select a film and get a list of where and when it’s playing nearby. Conceptually, it’s all very simple; technically, it’s mightily clever; and from an efficiency standpoint, it’s superb.
VLC
Wouldn’t it be lovely if there was one video format to rule them all, like MP3 is to music? Well, dream on... Until that day you’ll be thankful for VLC, which aims to play every video format you’ll ever encounter. If you like to source your movies from varied locations, you’ll find this one of the most useful apps on your phone or tablet. It’s ad-free and doesn’t try to harvest all your personal data either, which makes a nice change.
TuneIn Radio
Take a break from the endless banality of UK radio and tune in to a different point of view or musical selection. So long as you have a half-decent data connection, this app will tickle your ears with audio streams from all over the world, browsable by location, genre or what’s trending. It also works as an on-demand podcast player. It’s brilliant for in-car entertainment, so long as you have a data contract that can take the strain.
NASA App
This isn’t the best looking app in the world, but it’s full of geek-level info and media from the NASA archive, along with news and updates on what’s going on up there and back at base. Maybe one day they’ll get a slick front end for it all, but for now this raggle-taggle collection of links, pictures, videos and news feeds has plenty to keep space cadets informed and entertained.
