The Android ecosystem is big. Nearly 90% of all smartphones in the world run Android, and with more than 1.4 billion active devices there’s a huge and ever hungry market for the latest and greatest in apps. They’ve got more than enough choice; more than 2.2 million apps are available for download, so now the question is how do you sort out the best from the rest? Read on to learn a bit about a few of our favourites.
All the info you need on the go
With so many sources of information competing for our attention, it can be useful to have a way to remember those articles and videos you didn’t initially have time for. Enter Pocket. Available in both a free version and with a paid subscription, Pocket allows you to download an offline copy of nearly any article on the web – images included. All of your articles are held in your own private library and are converted for maximum readability, allowing you to grab all of your long reads at once at home on your wireless and read them without touching your mobile data on the train.
Also seemingly designed for Singapore’s private transport-centred lifestyle, BeyondPod is the number one podcasting app on Android. With a simple, easy to use interface and capabilities for both in-app subscription to all of your favourite feeds and reading of local audio files, it’s got everything you need to power through those episodes of Serial or This American Life you’ve been meaning to get to for months.
Tracking what’s important in your life
One of the most sadly underused services from internet giant Google, Keep is a notetaking app designed and built for the Android infrastructure. Add text, image, audio and video notes from anywhere within the operating system and let the app intelligently pull content from other apps. Ideal for everything from shopping lists to ideabooking, notes can even be shared with other Google users enabling full real-time collaboration. Perfect for ensuring you both don’t buy milk!
Extremely useful for individuals who have to absorb huge quantities of data each day, gReader is the RSS reader of choice on the Android platform. A bit unknown outside of tech circles, RSS feeds are a simple way to stay up to the minute on any website. Best of all, the websites you read probably already have them. Download the free version today and start subscribing to feeds.
Those are just a few of our favourite apps for the Android platform. What are yours?