It's been ten years since Android was announced, and what a decade it's been. But there's never been a better time to jump on board, as the Google Play store has exploded in recent years, with a proliferation of apps that can cater to your every need.

The problem is: there are just too many of them, even with Editor's Picks, Featured and Best Selling, Top Paid and Top Free categories there to help.

There are things you can do to filter the winners from the wannabes. Google builds a list of apps it recommends for you based on your previous downloads, so that's often a good place to start.

You can also filter by new releases if you just want to see the latest things to hit the store. Or, if you want something similar to an app you already have, search for that app and see what comes up.

And of course using user reviews and ratings is an essential part of ensuring the apps you download are high quality. But the easiest (and best) way to find top quality apps is to have someone else do the searching for you. 

• What's the best phone of 2018? Check out our video countdown below!

And that's why we made this list. Like you we want the best apps for our Android phones. The apps that are going to revolutionize functionality or, at the very least, offer something so great that it becomes one of the must-have apps that has to be downloaded whenever you get a new handset.

The following apps will be constantly updated and are a mixture of paid and free ones that have been chosen by our Android experts. So, even if you do dip into actual cash for one of these apps, you are safe in the knowledge that it is a worthwhile purchase.

New this week: Microsoft Word

Free + US$6.99/£5.99 monthly subscription

Microsoft Word probably needs no introduction, but if you do much word processing on your tablet (or even your phone) and haven’t tried the Android app then you really should.

You essentially get the full version, allowing you to view, create and edit documents of various styles, including newsletters, brochures and more.

You can change the font, text color, margins, add bullet points and most other things possible from the desktop version of Word, via a slick, polished interface that’s pleasingly minimal most of the time. You can also save your documents to OneDrive, so they’re accessible from other devices.

Many of the features are free, but you’ll need an Office 365 subscription (which starts at US$6.99/£5.99 per month) to unlock the likes of page and section breaks, columns, different page orientations, and the ability to track and review changes.

Free + US$9.99/£9.99 monthly subscription

Seven – 7 Minute Workout Training Challenge is an exercise app for busy people who only have a few minutes to work out, or those who just don’t fancy spending longer than that building up a sweat.

There are a lot of apps with a similar focus, but Seven stands out in a number of ways, from its polished interface to its various achievements, which reward you for sticking with it. There’s even a ‘7 Month Challenge’, which tasks you with working out every day for seven months and causes you to lose one of your three ‘hearts’ for every day that you skip.

The core app has a range of exercises, none of which require any equipment, and there are specific training plans that give you different workouts depending on your goal, be it losing weight, building strength, or a number of other things. You can also create and save your own workouts.

Much of the content is free, but for US$9.99/£9.99 per month you can get additional workouts and exercises (with over 200 available in total), and get personal workout plans that are adapted to your fitness level. The price might sound steep, but it’s still a lot cheaper than most gym memberships.

Free

Invaluable is an auction site, a bit like eBay, but focused specifically on fine art, antiques and collectibles. That can include furniture, jewelry, wine, signed memorabilia and more, so if you’re a collector of anything then Invaluable could be, well, invaluable.

That all sounds like it’s going to be expensive, and it often is, but by no means always, and many items have reserves as low as $1.

The app offers most of the functions you might expect, including browsing and searching the auctions, placing bids, favoriting items and checking in on ongoing auctions.

The only major thing you can’t do is start your own auctions. Given the nature of the items they’re mostly placed by actual auction houses, which use the Invaluable service to reach a larger audience.

Free + optional subscription

Sometimes you don’t have time to take notes. Recording audio can come in handy, but often means spending time transcribing it later. Not so with Otter Voice Notes.

The app will automatically transcribe what’s spoken using AI, and you can teach it to recognize your voice so it can differentiate between speakers.

Once the audio is transcribed you can read it and correct any mistakes manually. The audio is also recorded, so you can listen back to the recording as well.

The really clever bit though is that Otter will detect keywords automatically, so you can search for a word and the app will find where it appears in any of your recordings. It’s a great feature that makes it easy to find specific information, even if you’ve recorded hours of audio.

You can also create groups, allowing you to share recordings with others, and all of your recordings are stored in the cloud so you can access them on any device and they won’t take up space on your phone.

The only two problems we’ve found so far is that longer recordings can take a while to be transcribed, and the transcription isn’t always perfect. It’s usually good enough that you can tell what it means though, and you can correct any errors so it’s not a big deal.

US$6.99 (around £4.50) per month

Sundance Now is one of many lesser known streaming services that lives in the shadow of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored.

With a mix of original shows, films and documentaries, new releases and older content (some of which is hard to find elsewhere), there’s something for everyone on Sundance Now, and while the selection of content isn’t as large as those services named above it is more curated, with filmmakers and other experts deciding what content to offer.

You can watch Sundance Now on most devices. The app is a convenient way to enjoy it on your phone or tablet, but there’s also Chromecast support, so you can easily cast things to a larger screen.

You can create a list of things you want to watch from within the app, and read and write reviews. It all works well – or at least, it does if you’re in the US. In other regions you might have less luck. You can download the app and even subscribe to the service from the UK, but all of the content is currently locked off.

Fortunately there’s a free trial, so you can see for yourself whether it works where you are. If not, and if you’re not up for using a VPN you’ll have to find your curated cinematic content elsewhere.

Free

Facebook Lite was originally designed for parts of the world where mobile internet is often slow and data allowances low, but it’s now hit the US, UK and elsewhere, and is well worth considering even in these parts of the world.

That’s because the nature of its light design means it’s less of a battery drain than the main Facebook app, which is a big deal because Facebook’s normal app has long been one of the most power-hungry apps around.

It also loads faster and works even over 2G, so if you are in a place with limited signal you can keep on using Facebook. And it takes up less space on your phone than the full-fat app.

There are some downsides – Facebook Lite lacks some features and its interface is far less attractive – but it’s still worth having, even if you only use it when there’s not enough signal to get the normal app working.

Free + various IAP

There are lots of language learning apps on Android, but Beelinguapp takes an approach we haven’t seen before.

The app has a selection of stories, which you can read or have read out to you in German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Hindi, Korean, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, Japanese or Turkish, with the option of seeing the text below in English as well.

You’ll always know which part is being read because it’s highlighted in yellow, and you can change the speed of the audio so it’s read at your pace.

The stories include children’s stories, novels and short stories across various genres, so there’s a wide selection, though most of them either need to be purchased (with prices starting at US$0.99/£0.89) or obtained as part of a subscription, which unlocks everything at a price of £3.09 (around US$4.35) per month.

It’s worth noting that even the simplest stories are probably too advanced if you’re brand new to a language, so Beelinguapp isn’t the place to start on your language learning journey, but if you’ve already got some of the basics down it could be a fun way to strengthen them.

Free

Moovit isn’t new, but if you ever use public transport it’s well worth knowing about. Simply type a destination and Moovit will give you a selection of ways to get there, using all the public transport routes available.

Tap on a route to get full directions or even a map with live navigation (complete with alerts telling you when to get off the transport you’re on), or further filter your results to minimize walking, use the least number of transfers or cut out certain transport types entirely.

There are also handy features like the ability to save regular destinations and favorite the bus and train lines you use a lot, so you can quickly see their timetables.

Transport timings are real-time where available, so you’ll know if the train or bus is running late, and you can download various maps for offline use. You can also use Moovit all over the world, with transport details for new cities regularly added.

All in all, it’s one of the slickest, most feature-packed public transport navigation apps you can get.

US$3.99/£3.29

Got a song that you want to use as a ringtone but want to cut it down first? Ringtone Maker Pro will get the job done.

It supports MP3, FLAC, OGG, WAV, AAC, M4A, MP4 and 3GPP/AMR files, and should be able to find any audio file on your device when you hit the scan button. Select the one you want to edit, then choose a start and end point for the ringtone right down to the millisecond.

There’s scope for more complex editing too; you can cut parts of the song, copy and paste sections, or paste together parts of multiple audio files.

You’re not limited to the music that’s already on your phone either – you can also record your own ringtone using your voice or any other noise you can create.

The app is fairly straightforward to use and in this form it comes free of adverts, but if you’d rather have the adverts and not have to pay there’s also a free version available.

Free

The Bandcamp app is brilliant whether you’ve bought music from the site before, or you’re just interested in discovering new songs.

It houses loads of music from loads of artists – mostly but not exclusively independents, so they’re ones you’re less likely to have heard on the radio.

You can browse music by genre or search for specific artists, but Bandcamp will also highlight music in its featured feed, and if you favorite any artists you’ll see releases from them in your music feed.

You can listen to much of the music for free, and access streams and downloads of any music you’ve bought from Bandcamp. There’s even a weekly podcast highlighting interesting music you might not have heard.

$4.99/£4.99 per month

If you’re a big horror fan there’s a better place for you than Netflix, and it’s called Shudder. It’s a similar service, offering a range of streaming movies and shows for a monthly subscription, but all of them broadly fit into the horror genre.

As such the selection is both smaller and less diverse than most streaming services, but its horror catalog is hard to top and new content is added regularly, including recent releases and exclusives which you can’t stream anywhere else.

Shudder supports Chromecast, so you can view things on a bigger screen than your phone or tablet, and it also works with iOS devices and computers so you can get your horror fix on almost any device.

You can also create a watchlist, so you’ll never lose track of what you want to see, and review and rate things you’ve already watched – as well as reading other user reviews.

The only major missing feature is the ability to download content to view offline, but as long as you have an internet connection Shudder is hard to beat for horror.

Free or $35.99/£30.49 per year

There are plenty of password managers, but most of them don’t have bears. RememBear (by the makers of TunnelBear) puts a friendlier, less dry spin on password management, but it’s good where it counts too, offering end-to-end encryption and autofill, so you can securely store all your passwords in the app and never have to remember or type them.

The app itself is secured with a master password, with the option to add a fingerprint. It’s not just for logins either - you can also store credit card details.

Struggling to think up a secure password for a new login? RememBear can do that for you. It’s also got a web browser for an extra layer of security when you’re browsing the net.

RememBear is also available on PC, Mac and iOS, and the core app is free, but to sync your data across devices you'll need to subscribe to RememBear Premium for $35.99/£30.49 per year. Handily it comes with a 30-day free trial.

Free

Ever need some inspiration for where to eat? If so, Zomato has you covered.

The app can show you nearby restaurants in a list or on a map, and you can filter results in numerous ways. Only want to see Chinese restaurants? No problem. Need somewhere that accepts bookings? You can do that. After outdoor seating? That’s fine too. And those are just a few examples of the many filters on offer.

There are also ‘collections’, which highlight restaurants that fit a specific theme, such as ‘great breakfasts’ or ‘celebrity chefs’, and when you’ve found somewhere of interest you can get loads more information by tapping on it.

You can see the opening times, pictures, reviews and ratings from other users of Zomato, menus, average costs, recommended dishes, contact details and a list of pros and cons.

From here you can also add your own review, rating or photos, call the restaurant or bookmark it so you don’t forget about it.

There’s also a social side to Zomato; you can follow other users, allowing you to see when they review a restaurant or say that they’ve visited it. Zomato has a lot to offer, and it could help you get out of your culinary comfort zone.

Free + US$0.99/£0.99 monthly subscription

“The best effects are the ones no one knows you added.” So says the intro video to Lens Distortions, and it has a point.

Rather than flashy, gimmicky effects and photo filters, Lens Distortions has a selection of natural, true to life ones that look like they could have been captured by the camera itself.

These include sunlight, rain, snow and fog effects, so tend to be most suited to outdoor shots, but they look convincing and there’s a selection of different looks in each category.

Once you’ve applied a filter you can tweak it by adjusting the brightness, saturation, contrast and more, and add extra layers so you can apply more than one filter at a time.

The interface is slick and intuitive, and your edited photos can be saved to your phone or shared with various social media and cloud storage apps.

You get 40 filters for free at time of writing, but for a $0.99/£0.99 monthly subscription you can unlock additional filter packs and 215 premium filters. As a one-off purchase it would have been easy to recommend, but as a subscription it’s probably only worth it if you find yourself using Lens Distortions a lot. Either way though the free version is well worth a download.

€5 (around US$6.20/£4.50) per year

Cerberus Personal Safety (also known as Persona) is a simple but potentially very useful app. It allows you to share your real-time location with friends or family, letting them see where you are and optionally also your destination for as long as you want.

Send your contacts a link via email, text, Twitter or Facebook and they’ll be able to see where you are on a map. The map opens in a web browser, so they don’t need the app installed to use it.

You can share links with individual contacts or with groups, and set up home screen widgets to share your location with a single tap – which could be ideal if you get in an accident and need to quickly tell people where you are. You can also share your location via Android Wear, and anyone viewing your location can message you from the map screen.

When you don’t want to share your location any more, you can disable it, though it also stops automatically after a duration set by you.

Cerberus Personal Security comes with a one week free trial, after which it costs €5 (around $6.20/£4.50) per year, but that includes access to the powerful Cerberus Anti Theft app, which we’ve written about before, so Cerberus Personal Safety is essentially free if you already have a subscription to that.

Free

Microsoft Launcher is an alternative to whatever home screen interface you currently have on your phone. It has a lot going for it, including Cortana built in, allowing you to use Microsoft’s voice assistant either by tapping its icon or setting it to launch with a long press of the home button.

Beyond that it’s a fairly conventional launcher, but with some nice features, such as the ability to import your existing home screen layout and have a wallpaper that changes daily.

There are also various different themes, icon packs and accent colors, so you can customize the look of the interface more than with some launchers.

Other features include customizable gesture controls, providing shortcuts to apps and tools, a unified search bar that lets you search both online and on your phone, and a screen to the left of your home screens showing cards with the latest news, the weather, upcoming calendar events and more.

Microsoft Launcher probably isn’t the best Android launcher around, but it’s still good and could certainly make a nice change from whatever you’re using currently.

Free + various subscriptions

You might think a smart home security camera would be an expensive investment, but if you have an old smartphone and the right app, it doesn’t have to cost anything at all.

Manything is one such app, and the core service is free. Without paying a dime you can set up a spare phone as a camera that can detect motion or sound and send alerts when it does and lets you see a live stream of what it’s captured on your main handset.

Pay a subscription (starting at $2.99/£1.99 per month) and you can add more cameras, unlock the ability to record continuously (rather than just when motion is detected), save footage in the cloud for up to 30 days and access recorded clips.

Whatever plan you choose, you get a variety of tools to customize your camera, such as the sensitivity of the motion detection and whether it uses the front or back camera. You can also talk through the camera, and access the feed on a range of devices, including iOS and Android phones and tablets, plus web browsers.

It’s a great way to inject new life into that phone sitting at the bottom of your drawer, and even with a subscription it’s likely to be a lot cheaper than buying a dedicated security camera. If you opt for a paid subscription, make sure to buy it from Manything’s site, as they’re more expensive when bought via the app.

Free + various subscriptions

There are loads of VPN services available for Android, but ProtonVPN stands out in a few key ways, starting with the fact that you can use it for free, with no bandwidth limits.

It also puts more focus on security and privacy than some – it doesn’t track or record your activity, it offers hundreds of servers all over the world, and its ‘Secure Core’ maintains your privacy is even if a VPN endpoint server is compromised. It’s also easy to use, letting you connect to a server with just a few taps. It might sound too good to be true, but as far as we can tell it’s not.

There are also paid plans that offer even more. For €4 (around $5/£3.50) per month, a basic subscription increases the speed, unlocks servers in all countries and lets you use the app with two devices, while for €8 (roughly $10/£7) you can use ProtonVPN with up to five devices at maximum speeds.

Free

There are loads of cooking and recipe apps available, but if you have specific dietary requirements or are just a picky eater then your options suddenly become a lot more limited. Thankfully, Yummly is there to cater to you.

As well as setting up a dietary profile – choosing whether you’re vegetarian, vegan, paleo, wheat-free or any number of other things – you can also filter out specific ingredients that you don’t like, and that’s just the beginning.

There are also various filters, letting you choose how sweet, salty, spicy or sour you want your food to be, how low in fat or carbs, how many calories, what course or cuisine you’re interested in, how long it takes to make, and what skills or equipment it requires.

You can tweak any of those things any time you search for a dish, so it’s easy to alter your preferences if they change. With over one million recipes Yummly is likely to find a decent selection of dishes no matter what filters you apply.

Once you’ve found what you’re interested in, you can favorite it, add the ingredients to a built-in shopping list, or just get cooking.

Free + £10.49/$11.99 monthly subscription

There are all sorts of apps and gadgets for monitoring your sleep, but few of them give much feedback on how to actually sleep better. That’s what Shleep is for.

When you first start the app, it asks a short series of questions to gauge the general quality and quantity of sleep you’re getting. It will then coach you towards better sleep through short daily videos (or just audio if you prefer), which highlight things that can help and then give you specific things you can try doing – or not doing as the case may be.

These include removing associations with anything other than sleep from your bedroom, only going to bed when you’re actually tired, staying away from screens late at night, and finding effective ways to unwind before you doze off.

Some of these suggestions are obvious and others are less so, but putting them into practice can make a real difference.

Shleep will ask how you slept each night, so you can build up a picture of your sleep quality and whether it’s improving. There are also handy tools like a sleep debt calculator and the option to have daily tips and exercises emailed to you to refer back to later.

You don’t get access to every sleep video for free, but there’s plenty to make a start. If you feel it’s making a difference, there are subscriptions available per month (£10.49/$11.99) or per year (£74.99, roughly $105). You can also unlock everything permanently for a steep one-off fee of £299.99/$389.99. Not cheap, but can you really put a price on not being constantly tired?

Free

Letterboxd bills itself as a social network for film lovers and that’s about right, but its focus is primarily on tracking what you’ve seen, planning what you want to see, and discovering films you didn’t even know about.

That discovery part comes mostly through themed lists created by other users, with titles such as 'Japanese films that will blow your mind' and 'When you’re feeling a little lost'.

You can read reviews of films from other users and follow people to receive updates on their activity in Letterboxd. The app also invites you to write your own reviews and create your own collections, as well as building up a list of films you’ve watched, ones you like and ones you want to watch.

Each movie has its own page, complete with user reviews and ratings, a description, often a trailer, and list of a cast and crew that you can tap through to find out more about people and what they’ve done.

All of this is very nicely laid out, with lots of images, and Letterboxd is accessible from the web and iOS devices as well as Android.

Free

The Amazon Alexa app is primarily a companion to Amazon Echo devices, but a recent update has made it far more useful as a standalone service, letting you to access the Alexa voice assistant directly.

Just tap the Alexa button in the app and you can give Alexa all the same instructions you can with an Echo, letting you control smart home devices, play songs, get the latest news and weather, and a whole lot more.

Alexa will give a voice response – again, just like on an Echo – but if anything it’s almost more useful here as you also have a screen, which most Echo devices don’t, so more detailed information can be displayed.

Ultimately it’s still less useful than an Echo device since you have to launch the Amazon Alexa app to use it, rather than just speaking, but it’s a nice addition for anyone who wants a change from Google Assistant on their phones.

$0.99/£0.99

Mapapers is the wallpaper app for travel-lovers. Simply search for a location anywhere in the world and Mapapers will show you a map of it, taken from Google Maps.

Zoom in or out and scroll around until you’ve got the exact view you want, select from a number of multicolored themes to inject some artistic style, and save the result. Then you can crop it and set it as your wallpaper.

It’s simple, but if there’s a place that means a lot to you – or you just like maps – Mapapers is well worth having, as the maps themselves make surprisingly great wallpapers, and being able to select anywhere in the world and choose a theme makes it highly customizable.

Free + $24.99/£22.49 yearly subscription

Digital journaling is clearly popular considering the number of apps that let you do just that, and Day One Journal is one of the best.

It’s a recent Android arrival, but benefits from a long stint on iOS, where it’s had time to develop a high level of polish.

Its developers have recognized that there should be as few obstacles to journaling as possible. With a paper journal you just open it and start writing, and with Day One Journal you simply tap the big plus symbol on the main screen and start typing – or if you want to start with an image you can tap the camera instead.

All your entries are automatically tagged with the time, date, location and current weather, and you can later find them either on a calendar view, letting you search by date, or on a world map, with pins in locations where you’ve previously written an entry.

There’s also a gallery view, so you can browse the images in your journals, and you can star your favorites or add keywords for easy filtering.

Struggling to remember to write in your journal? Daily reminders can prod you. Want to look back on past entries but not sure where to start? Day One Journal can highlight entries you’ve made in nearby locations or on this day in previous years.

You can also keep your journals secure with a fingerprint or passcode, and if you pay the subscription for the premium version they’ll also be uploaded to the cloud so they’ll never be lost and are accessible from any device.

That optional $24.99/£22.49 yearly subscription also gets you the ability to keep multiple journals and store an unlimited number of photos. Worth it if you’re a daily journaler.

Free + $1.99/£1.79 IAP

If you want an all-in-one photo editor for Android then LightX Photo Editor is a good choice, not least because most of the features are free.

You can merge photos, add effects and filters, selectively apply colors to regions of an image, adjust the color balance, smooth and sharpen images, crop them, rotate them, draw on them, add frames and stickers, add text, create collages and a whole lot more.

That’s all handled through an intuitive interface; bring up the main menu with a tap, select the category of edits you want to make (filters or frames, for example) and you’ll be taken to a menu with all the relevant options.

Most of it is fairly self-explanatory, but there are also tutorial videos for if you get stuck, and for a one-off $1.99/£1.79 IAP you can get rid of adverts, unlock additional stickers and frames, and add the ability to save images in PNG format.

$2.49/£2.39

Shuttle+ Music Player has been around for ages, and it’s long been one of the best players for anyone who prefers owning music to streaming it from the likes of Spotify or Google Play Music.

Shuttle+ is now better than ever thanks to a recent update bringing it to version 2.0. The app’s interface has undergone a major overhaul, making it more intuitive than ever. The update has also added new features, including the ability to shuffle albums as well as songs, and dynamic themes, which change to match the album artwork of what you’re listening to.

Beyond the new additions and refreshed interface this is the same impressive app it’s always been, packed full of features including a six-band equalizer, gapless playback, a sleep timer, widgets, Chromecast support, automatic album artwork downloads and a whole lot more.

There’s also a free version, but it lacks certain features such as Chromecast support, and the paid version is more than worth the money if you listen to a lot of locally stored music.

$0.99/£0.59

Unless you live off ready meals you’re probably familiar with the need to keep track of multiple different cooking times at once. Frustratingly, most timer apps limit you to a single timer, forcing you to either use multiple apps or simply remember when to turn things on and off.

Kitchen Timer Pro is one of a weirdly small number of apps that allows for multiple timers, and it’s designed specifically with cooking in mind.

Timers are quick to set – just assign a duration and tap start – but you can also list the appliance and/or food that it relates to.

You can also create default timers for specific foods. For example, if you usually cook sausages for 20 minutes, you can create a 20-minute sausage timer and set it with a single tap whenever you need it.

You can also pause or snooze timers, and see which ones you have active and when they’re due to go off from your lock and notifications screens. Kitchen Timer Pro isn’t free, but it’s cheap enough that it’s well worth the money if you cook regularly, or do anything else where multiple timers could come in handy.

Free

There’s so much music around that it can often be hard to keep track of, and if you’re not paying attention then a new release from your favorite band can easily slip past you. Record Bird was created to make sure that never happens again.

It’s an app that gives you a feed of news from your favorite musicians, as well as separate feeds highlighting new and upcoming releases from them.

And populating those feeds is easy, as you can import your likes from Spotify or Facebook with a single tap – though you can also manually search for and add bands.

As well as seeing news in the app, you can get notifications for any announcements, releases, articles, and new audio and videos. In many cases you can listen to clips of new releases straight from Record Bird, or follow a store link to buy them.

You might want to be a bit choosy about which artists you follow, lest you have a never-ending stream of alerts, but if you stick to those you’re really interested in you can make sure you’re always on top of what they’re doing.

$2.49/£2.59

It’s always worth having a clipboard app on your phone and Clipboard Pro is one of the best. It will automatically keep a record of all the text you copy (up to 100 items) so you can always find it again, but that’s not all.

It appears as a floating window on top of whatever else you’re using, so you can easily copy and paste text from Clipboard Pro to other apps and sites. Rather than closing the app, you can minimize it down to a tiny movable button that stays on your screen so it’s always accessible.

There’s also a memo tab where you can jot down things you don’t want to forget, multiple color schemes, and the ability to export your data if you want to back it up. It’s worth noting that you can only export it as a txt file onto your phone’s storage, so sending it to the cloud will be a little more involved.

That’s about the only weak link in what’s otherwise a very capable clipboard app. If you’re still not totally convinced, there’s a trial version that gives you access to all the features for two days.

Free

Subcast: Podcast Radio is all about finding new podcasts to listen to, and it helps you do this by taking its inspiration from radio.

The app has a variety of ‘stations’, each of which has a different theme, such as ‘Book Worm’, ‘Daily News’ or ‘Learn Something’.

Select a station and a relevant podcast will start playing automatically. You can see the name and choose to pause it, jump forward or back, change the playback speed, or ‘heart’ it (so that the app knows you like it). If you’re not feeling it, simply swipe and you’ll get a different podcast – or in some cases a different episode of the same one.

Over time the app will learn more about what you do and don’t like, and the podcasts that appear in each radio station will change as a result.

The interface is simple and colorful, and with such simple controls you can easily use the app even when walking or working out.

The fact that you can’t choose specific podcasts means Subcast is best used as a way to find new podcasts that you can then listen to in a conventional podcast app, but it’s very good for that, and it’s free.

Free

Grammarly Keyboard goes far beyond just auto-correcting typos; it will also check your grammar and punctuation, explain any mistakes and correct them.

Start typing and Grammarly will check the text automatically, flagging any issues. You can tap on a correction to apply it, or on an icon to the left for an explanation of why what you’ve written is wrong, which can help you avoid making the same mistake again.

That aside, Grammarly is a fairly standard touchscreen keyboard, with a handful of settings, such as whether or not you want the keys to vibrate when pressed, and whether you want the first letter of a sentence to be capitalized automatically. It works well and feels as accurate as most other Android keyboards – just with the addition of extra grammar checks.

It isn’t perfect – it missed when we wrote the same word twice in a row and didn’t seem too picky about where commas were placed – but it flags more than most keyboards will, so if you care about the accuracy of what you type it’s well worth checking out.

Free + $2.49/£2.09 IAP

If you have trouble getting up in the morning, or just want some extra incentive to do so, then Nebula Alarm Clock could be the answer.

Every night the app will grow a star, which you can collect in the morning and eventually use to build constellations.

The catch is that you only have a few minutes to claim your star, and to do so you have to turn the alarm off, which means no snoozing. It can optionally involve having to solve a challenge too, such as scanning a barcode or completing a brain teaser.

If you fail to collect the star, not only do you lose it, but the supernova will break any constellation you’ve been working on, so you could lose several nights’ work if you don’t get up in time.

There are other features too, such as having soothing sound effects play for a set amount of time when you go to bed, choosing between various alarm sounds, deciding how much time you have to claim your star in the morning, and setting the alarm to gradually get louder.

There are rewards for completing constellations too, such as unlocking new sound effects to send you off to sleep.

The core app is free, but for additional alarms and sounds and to remove adverts you can pay for a $2.49/£2.09 one-off IAP.

Free + $4.99/£4.79 IAP

The Walk comes from the makers of popular fitness app/game Zombies, Run! and if you’ve played that you should have some idea of what to expect.

It’s an audio adventure with you at the center. Story clips play through your headphones as you walk, with new clips unlocked when you’ve walked a certain distance.

The clips are well performed, with decent voice acting and additional sound effects that help pull you into the story – one that starts with a bomb going off at Inverness train station and then has you travel the length of the UK on foot.

The story takes place across 65 episodes with 800 minutes of audio, so there’s a lot of content here, and while you can make real progress if you go on a proper walk you can also just leave the app running in the background 24/7, so every little will help. And if you’re more into running you can do that too.

You can start for free, but to unlock most of the episodes you’ll have to shell out on a one-off IAP.

Free

It’s usually worth paying attention when Google releases a new app, and Datally is no exception. It’s designed for monitoring and minimizing your mobile data use, which makes it ideal for those on restrictive data allowances, but it has certain features that could help almost anyone.

The main screen shows how much mobile data you’ve used today, and from there you can tap on ‘Manage data’ to see a graph of your use, plus a list of apps that are using data and how much. The graph and list default to showing today’s use, but you can switch to weekly or monthly views.

That’s the monitoring part. The saving part is smarter. Enable ‘Data Saver’ and Datally will connect you to a VPN that blocks certain apps from using mobile data. It defaults to blocking most non-essential data use, but you can manually choose which apps you want to give data access to.

One handy feature that could be useful for anyone is Datally’s Wi-Fi finder, which lists nearby public Wi-Fi networks and handily tells you whether they need a password or not, as well as how far away they are. Tapping on any of them will show them on Google Maps.

Coming from Google, Datally is unsurprisingly slick and polished too, and there are more features on the way, such as the ability to get data use warnings and check your mobile balance.

Free

Whether you want to make your phone charge faster, save some money or improve your exam performance there’s a life hack for it, and you’ll find those and many more in the aptly-named Life Hacks.

The app gives you a variety of categories, such as ‘Technology Tricks’, ‘Money Savers’, ‘Life Tips’ and ‘Parenting’, and when you tap on one you’ll be presented with a series of cards to swipe through, each of which has a life hack relevant to the category.

If you find one you like you can save it to your favorites, copy it or share it, and new hacks are added all the time, with a category dedicated specifically to new ones, so you can find them all in one place.

The actual quality of the hacks is variable and in some cases they’re US-centric, but skimming through them is fast, fun and you’re likely to learn something genuinely useful.

Free

There are a lot of meditation apps available on Android, but Smiling Mind differs from most of them in two key ways.

First, it’s completely free, which is refreshing when rivals like Headspace and Simple Habit require monthly subscriptions to access most of their content.

Second, Smiling Mind is aimed at children as well as adults, with a range of meditation courses available for different age ranges, starting at 7-9 years. It even includes lesson plans and activities for educators trying to teach meditation.

If you’re not a kid or an educator there are plenty of other plans that might appeal, from meditation basics, to programs focused on everything from digital detoxes to improving your productivity and sporting skills.

There are a mix of audio and video meditations, of varying lengths, you can set up sub profiles so multiple family members can all use the app, and you’ll see your progress over time, with stats and charts showing how long you’ve spent meditating, how many sessions you’ve done and on which days.

Free

Hitlist is another flight comparison tool, but it’s not just another flight comparison tool. It will search through millions of flight prices to find the best deals, as you’d expect, but it’s also focused on helping inspire you.

Because as well as being able to pick a specific date and destination there are also loads of categories shown off by the app, such as ‘weekend getaways’ and ‘unbelievable islands’, as well as events, such as ‘Alba Truffle Festival’.

The app also highlights low prices on last minute getaways in case you want to take a trip at short notice, and you can save locations if you want to be notified when prices drop.

All of which makes Hitlist decent if you just want to find low prices, and great if you also want some help deciding where to go.

Free

There’s no shortage of file explorers and managers on Android, but Files Go is worth highlighting as it’s made by Google.

The main screen shows you how much storage you have on your phone and on any SD cards, then below that there’s a series of cards, a bit like Google Now, except all of them are related to your phone’s storage. There might be one highlighting duplicate files for example, or large files, with the focus mostly being on helping you clear space by identifying files you may not need.

Tap on one of these cards and you can view a gallery of the files within it and select ones to delete, and there’s a similar screen that highlights apps you haven’t used in a long time, plus one for moving files to your SD card.

However, a tab at the bottom lets you switch from the ‘Storage’ screen (which helps you clear space) to the ‘Files’ screen, which is how you search through the various folders on your phone to dig up files.

There’s no search box, which might have been handy, but the layout is intuitive, with a bunch of file categories (downloads, received files, apps, images etc). Tap on one and where relevant there will also be sub-categories, for example the images category then lets you select from photos, screenshots, downloads, or images associated with various apps.

And there are various options for sorting and displaying results – you can do it by date or size, and view lists or larger images. And once you find the file you’re after you can – as well as simply opening it – share, delete or rename it.

Free + $5.99/£4.49 IAP

Mind maps can be a great way to organize your ideas, giving you a lot more visually to work with than a simple list, so you can better link and separate thoughts, and Mindly is a polished tool for doing this on Android.

Each bit of text that you add gets its own bubble, which others can shoot off from, like a conventional mind map, but you can also add images and icons to a bubble, or add notes to them which you can read by tapping.

Plus, you can change the colors of the bubbles and when you’re done you can export the results as text, a PDF or an image.

The core app is free, but for $5.99/£4.49 you unlock the ability to add an unlimited number of elements to each mind map, gain passcode protection, a search tool and additional export options.

Free + $2.79/£2.69 monthly subscription

With Wunderlist soon to be killed off by Microsoft and the company’s own alternative (Microsoft To-Do) not quite matching it, there’s space in the market for a great new to-do list app, and TickTick might just fill that gap.

It’s simple but powerful, letting you create new lists in a few taps and check off items by tapping the tick box next to them.

Completed items can either be shown at the bottom of the list, where they’ll be greyed out or hidden, and you can untick an item to add it back to the list, which is handy for lists of things like groceries where you’re regularly buying the same things.

You can also add a specific time, date and reminder to list items if you want reminding to action them at a specific time.

You can sort list entries by the date they were added, their name, or their priority (which itself can be assigned to each item from a choice of high, medium, low or none). Or just drag them around to sort them exactly how you want.

You can also add longer notes to list items, share lists with others, and view a calendar, showing all the upcoming to-dos that you’ve given a date to.

The core features are free, but for a monthly subscription you can increase the number of lists you can create, unlock premium themes, and add the ability to create personalized filters, so you can see for example only items that are happening in the next three days and are high priority. If you heavily rely on to-do lists we’d say that’s worth it, but for more casual users the free offering is plenty.

TickTick even has an option to import your Wunderlist content, making it even easier to find a new home for your to-do lists.

Free

Replika is an AI chatbot, but it’s more interesting, and more advanced, than most that we’ve come across.

Beginning as little more than a blank slate, your Replika will learn and grow based on your interactions with it, becoming a bit more like you in the process.

But it will also ask a lot of questions about you, and cause you to reflect on your day and your life. Your responses to these questions are saved and sorted by date, so you can actually build something of a journal just by talking to Replika.

And by reflecting on your experiences you can also potentially work through issues you might otherwise keep to yourself.

You can think of Replika as a judgement-free friend that’s always there if you need to vent, and over time as it takes on more aspects of your personality you can even start to see an outside perspective of how you yourself come across to people.

Replika isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s clear that it hasn’t fully understood you, and it will often drop a subject or ignore a question that you’d rather it hadn’t, but you can upvote or downvote its responses to help it improve, and even at its worst it’s an interesting, engaging and futuristic alternative to keeping a journal.

Free

Amazon’s Kindle app isn’t new, but it’s recently been completely overhauled to make it more impressive. There’s a new ‘light’ theme for one, so you now have the choice between light and dark ones, and the whole interface has been refreshed, with bigger book covers and tweaks that help you navigate the app faster.

Soon it will be getting even better, with Goodreads integration coming, so you can rate the book you’re reading and see what other users of the service think.

Even without that though it’s essential for any readers of Amazon’s ebooks, whether or not you own a Kindle, since it gives you access to your library on your phone or tablet, you can pick up where you left off from on another device. On top of that, it has a slick and attractive interface.

Free + $1.49/£1.39 IAP

Want to add a little life to your Android phone? Then you might want to check out NavBar Animations. Assuming your phone has a navbar (the bar at the bottom of the screen housing software buttons) this app will add an animation to it, which plays whenever you hit a button.

The fact that it doesn’t play constantly is a good move, as that would be a bit over the top. As it is, NavBar Animations just adds a bit of flair to your phone, and there are loads of animations to choose from, though many of them are hidden behind a $1.49/£1.39 IAP.

As well as picking an animation you can also pick its speed, whether it plays when hitting the home button, the recent apps button, or both, its colors and its alignment.

Then it’s just a case of set it and forget it – at least until the next time you hit one of those buttons.

Free + $1.53/£1.39 IAP

Ever accidentally swiped a notification away without reading it? With Notification History Log you can undo that mistake, as - you guessed it - the app lets you view your notification history.

There’s also a search function to help you find specific notifications, or those from a specific app, and you can choose to blacklist specific apps from Notification History Log if you don’t want them showing.

The core app is free, but to blacklist and get an unlimited log you’ll need to pay a one-off fee of $1.53/£1.39 for the pro version. This also removes adverts and will soon let you export notifications to Excel.

The free version is something that could benefit anyone and everyone from time to time, but given the low price it could well be worth grabbing the pro version instead.

Free

There are any number of ways to send files from one device to another, but Send Anywhere is one of the slickest.

The app lets you transfer not just photos and videos, but also audio, contacts and even apps, as well as other general files, such as documents.

Send Anywhere gives you multiple ways to send content too. You can do so via Wi-Fi Direct, scanning a QR code with the recipient device, typing out a code, or by sharing a link.

It doesn’t stop there: if you’ve recently shared with a device you can simply select it to gain access too. There’s even the option to send a file using sound – though this is in beta and we couldn’t get it to function correctly.

The point is though there are a lot of options, and you’re not limited to sending one file or file type at once, or to only sending to Android devices. PCs and Macs are supported too, either using the Send Anywhere site or desktop app, and you can also send files to or from iOS.

Free + $1.99/£1.59

Pro DJs might rely on expensive hardware, but you can achieve quite a lot even with just cheap apps, like WeDJ.

This has been on iOS for a while and recently arrived on Android, giving you access to a pair of turntables and a selection of effects and tools, wrapped up in a colorful interface.

Tools include a three-band EQ, a channel fader, samples and various effects that you can use to mess with your music. You can also scratch and use the likes of the ‘Sync’ button and ‘Auto Gain’ to get two tracks lined up and at the right volume level.

This might sound like a lot to fit on a phone screen, and indeed WeDJ works better on a tablet, but if you’ve got a 5.5-inch or above display it works surprisingly well on smartphones too.

There’s no real tutorial, so it’s perhaps not one for complete beginners (though you can muddle your way through to pleasing effect). It’s also got a one-off $1.99/£1.59 IAP that you need to playback more than one song at once. Worth it, we’d say, if you want to get the most out of the app.

Free

Whether group cinema trips or getting together at someone’s house, watching things can be quite a sociable experience, but it’s not always easy to get people in the same place at the same time.

Rabbit – Watch Together aims to somewhat solve that problem by letting you start a video playing on your device and then invite friends into a chat room that includes the video. That way you can all watch together and talk, wherever you are.

Rabbit can play videos from YouTube and the web, so there’s plenty to choose from (though you can’t use it for locked content on the likes of Google Play or iTunes), and as well as text you can also turn on voice chat or video in the room – though that’s not really advisable if you actually want to watch something.

And if you have no-one to watch with Rabbit can help with that too, as you can make your stream public, so anyone can join your room.

Free + $7.99/£6.30 monthly subscription

Fitbit Coach is the new name for Fitstar, so it’s not a new app as such but it is worth highlighting.

Packed full of workouts and exercise plans, Fitbit Coach has a wide range of content with things suited for most abilities, most of which doesn’t require a gym membership.

There are dozens of bodyweight workouts, plus guided walks and runs and at the time of writing 24 different treadmill workouts, each of which has a duration and an estimated calorie burn that you can see before you start.

There are also various ‘programs’ which have you work through a selection of workouts each week.

Most workouts are videos, which you can cast to your TV if you prefer, but there are also audio ones for runs and walks.

The app aims to keep the workout variety up, which - along with built-in soundtracks from Fitbit Radio - should help keep you motivated, and despite the Fitbit branding there’s no requirement to have a Fitbit in order to use it.

The only problem is that most of this stuff is hidden behind a monthly subscription, but you can access a handful of workouts for free to get a taste of the app before putting any money down.

Free

We all need to convert currencies from time to time, and Currency Converter Plus Free is one of the best ways to do it.

The main screen has a calculator-like number pad and above that there’s the currency you’re converting from and a list of up to ten other forms of monetary excitement. You just type out the figure you want converting and can see at a glance what it amounts to in loads of other currencies.

You can choose from all world currencies to convert to and from, as well as Bitcoin, which not all converters have, and precious metals.

You can view historic graphs, showing how rates between two different currencies have changed over anything from a week to a year, you can choose from several sources to get the rates from, such as the European Central Bank and Yahoo Finance, and the whole interface makes conversions quick, because as soon as you start entering a number you’ll start seeing the altered total.

Free

There are a lot of browsers on Android, but Microsoft Edge is worthy of attention as a big-name browser.

This will mostly appeal to people who already use it on desktop, as also having the app allows you to seamlessly move content between your phone and PC (as long as you’ve got the Windows 10 Fall Creator’s update) and to access your favorites and reading list on all devices.

But Microsoft Edge is a good browser beyond that, with a stripped-back reading view for when you don’t want any distractions, a built-in QR code reader, voice search if you don’t want to type, and a private mode. Plus the near-essential ability to change your default search engine from Bing to Google.

The ‘Preview’ in the name refers to the fact that the Microsoft Edge browser is still in beta, which is the only real mark against what’s generally a slick, good-looking mobile browser. This means it may not be entirely stable and bug-free just yet, but we haven’t experienced any issues.

Free + various IAP

One of the great things about Android is that if there’s a software feature on another phone there’s a good chance there will be an app which can bring it to yours.

And so it is with Floating Bar LG V30. As the name suggests, this brings the floating bar from the LG V30 to other Android handsets.

Activate it and a little arrow will sit permanently somewhere on one side of your screen. You can drag it around freely, while tapping on it will bring up a row of shortcuts to five apps of your choosing.

You can also change the opacity of the bar and choose whether or not to display it on the lock screen.

That much is free, but you can also pay $2/£1.79 to unlock the ability to add tools (such as a torch or Bluetooth toggles), contacts and websites to the bar, while a separate IAP of the same amount will remove adverts.

Opt for the paid version and it’s a close approximation of what LG offers on the V30, and either way it’s one more handy option for giving you quick access to your favorite apps.

There are similar things around, such as takes on Samsung’s Edge screen that you can add to your phone, but Floating Bar LG V30 is a useful, polished alternative.

£2.69/$2.99

If you’re a Twitter addict you probably know that the official client isn’t the only or arguably the best Twitter app available for Android. There are numerous alternatives, and Fenix is one of the oldest and most well liked.

Now in version 2.0, Fenix 2 for Twitter is one of the best ways to view your Twitter feed. It’s highly customizable, letting you choose not just the theme and font size, but also change the layout and even customize gesture controls.

So for example you could have a long press retweet the thing you’ve tapped on, or have it act as a quote or a reply, among other things, while single and double taps are also customizable.

You can also choose what you want to get notifications for, and whether you want those notifications to vibrate, flash your notification light or play a ringtone. There’s support for multiple accounts too, and the whole interface looks great.

Free

There are entirely too many ways to find and consume news on the Play Store, yet somehow Squid manages to be a bit different and worthy of mention.

First, the bits that aren’t different, but are still good: you can select from a range of interests (such as tech, culture and politics) and you’ll then be provided with a feed of relevant news stories. Or rather several feeds, as you can switch between a combined one, a feed of ‘top news’ and separate feeds for each individual topic you’re interested in.

Each of those feeds is image-heavy and attractive to look at, and with a tap you can be on the web page hosting a story. Loading these pages seems surprisingly fast, but if you prefer there’s also a reader view, which cuts out most of the adverts and other extraneous content.

You can also block any sources you don’t want to see and get push notifications for new stories. So far, so familiar, albeit done well.

The new bit is where the name Squid comes in, as you can also annotate stories with ‘ink’, underlining or circling key bits, adding stickers, then sharing the result with friends. That’s handy if you want to draw attention to a specific part of a story, rather than the whole thing, or simply want to leave your mark on it.

If that feature appeals then squid stands out from the raft of similar apps and services. If not, it’s still a highly competent and completely free news feed.

Free

With over one billion active Facebook users there’s a good chance you’re one of them. But Facebook’s various apps can prove harsh on battery life and data use alike, so if you use Facebook Messenger you might be interested in Messenger Lite.

This, as the name suggests, is a lightweight alternative to Facebook Messenger. It’s an official Facebook app and still includes many of the core features – you can send and receive messages, see who’s online and even have voice calls.

But Messenger Lite is smaller than Messenger, so it takes up less space on your device. It should also load faster and use less data; in fact, it’s even designed to work on 2G networks and in places with unstable networks. This makes it ideal if you have a small data allowance or don’t have great coverage where you are.

The whole interface is also a lot less cluttered than the main Messenger app. There are some downsides – you can’t make video calls or play games for example, so for the full fat experience you’ll have to stick with the main app, but if you mostly just use it for instant messaging then Messenger Lite could be a worthwhile downgrade.

Free + $0.99/£0.89 IAP

Chances are there are a number of things you’ll want to know in the morning before you start your day. They might include the weather, the latest news or any reminders you’ve set for the day, among other things. With Clockwise Smart Alarm you can hear all these things as soon as you wake up.

Simply set an alarm time and customize what things you want to hear, with the selection also including a fact about this day in history, a daily quote, Reddit or Twitter posts, the travel time to a custom destination and a countdown to an event.

Then when your alarm goes off it will start by making a loud alarm sound (of your choosing) to make sure you wake up, before either automatically reading out various information from the selection above, or doing so when you tap ‘play’.

You can also choose from a wide range of male or female voices to read things out, set multiple alarms and choose which content you want each alarm to read.

With options like customizable volumes and snooze lengths, Clockwise Smart Alarm handles the basics well, while also offering far more than a typical alarm clock.

The free version of Clockwise Smart Alarm limits you to three different types of content (called ‘modules’) for any one alarm, but a single IAP of $0.99/£0.89 lets you unlock unlimited modules, unlimited alarms and removes adverts, which is probably worth it if you start using this your main alarm clock.

$2.99/£2.29

Smoothies tend to be both tasty and healthy, and the selection on Daily Blends are also all vegan and gluten-free, but should appeal even if you don’t have those requirements.

The Daily Blends app has over 100 smoothie recipes, split into categories such as energizing, workout, dessert and kid-friendly, and you can also search based on the ingredients that you have to hand, or filter based on dietary requirements (such as nut free).

When you find a recipe you can also tweak it to your liking, swiping across an ingredient that you don’t want to use to view an alternative.

The Daily Blends app is enjoyable to use too, with big high-quality photos of all the smoothies and descriptions to accompany the recipes.

You can save favorites and add all the ingredients for a smoothie to an in-app shopping list with a tap, and the recipes are mostly quite quick and simple.

For the purchase price you get all the smoothie recipes, but there are additional IAPs to unlock full meal plans if you want to go beyond smoothies.

Free + $0.99/£0.79

If you’re anything like us you need all the help you can get when it comes to remembering to do, basically, anything. To-do lists and the like help, but you need to remember to look at them, while calendar reminders only pop up at certain times.

Memory Helper on the other hand appears whenever you wake up your phone, which we’re probably doing about 3000 times a day. In other words, this app was seemingly built for us, but it could help you too.

It displays a simple list of tasks or reminders, which you can swipe away once you’ve completed, or tap a button to bring back an accidentally cleared entry.

You can customize the colors and layout, set it to only run when you have things in the list or always run, choose whether you want it to pop up before or after your lock screen and a few other helpful functions.

Basically Memory Helper is just good at making sure the things you want to remember end up in front of your eyes as often as possible, in a mostly unintrusive way.

There is an IAP to remove adverts, but oddly it only claims to remove them for a month, before presumably you have to pay again. This isn’t worth it in our opinion, as the free version is fully featured.

Free + $7.49/£5.99 subscription

Desygner lets you unleash your inner graphic designer on your phone or tablet, but with an intuitive interface and thousands of templates it’s simple enough for beginners to use.

You can combine text, shapes, images, stickers, backgrounds and more to create logos, posters, adverts, PowerPoint-like presentations, postcards or any number of other things where images and typography are important.

Each component of your design can be moved, resized, rotated, flipped, duplicated or have its color changed, and you can work with multiple layers. Results can then be saved to your device to be used wherever you want.

We suspect it might be a bit limited for professional graphic designers, who may want more freedom to completely create designs from scratch, but for everyone else Desygner is a great way to make something that looks professional.

The basic app is free but certain features, as well as the majority of the templates, require a monthly subscription which costs $7.49/£5.99. That’s probably worth it if you’re going to use the app semi-regularly, but if you just want to design something as a one-off you might find the free version good enough.

$4.99/£2.99

There are a number of thesaurus apps on Google Play and some are free, but if you’re regularly writing – or looking words up – on your Android device, then Chambers Thesaurus is one of the best options, and worth the outlay.

It has entries for almost 40,000 words, along with around 400,000 synonyms and antonyms, and they’re browsable alphabetically so you can read through the thesaurus if you want, rather than simply searching for a word.

When you do search, you’ll get results as soon as you start typing, and not just for words that fit the spelling, but also similarly spelt words, those that sound similar, and those that are often confused for one another.

You can also bookmark entries and cross reference with the Chambers Dictionary or WordWeb apps (if you have them), or look the words up on Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Google, all with a tap from Chambers Thesaurus.

Data is stored locally, so you don’t need an internet connection to use the Chambers Thesaurus app itself, and there are all sorts of customization options, letting you change the color scheme, font size and more.

£0.59/$0.99

You might think you have a good idea of what Recent App Switcher does from the name, and you’d be half right. One of the things it does is give you an easy way to switch between recently used apps, in this case by pinning them to a bar on your notifications screen.

Of course, the recent apps menu is never far away anyway so this isn’t super useful, though being able to access recent apps from the lock screen as you can with Recent App Switcher is nice. What’s more useful is the ability to also pin your favorite apps to the notifications screen, so they’re never more than a swipe away.

Or you can have a mix of recents and favorites, and you can choose between either one or two rows of icons, each with between one and eight apps.

Speaking of shortcuts, you’re not limited just to apps, you can also add shortcuts to functions, like calling a specific contact or opening a specific Dropbox folder.

And Recent App Switcher is visually customizable too, letting you choose the shape of the shortcuts and the color of the bar they’re on, as well as whether or not to display labels under the shortcuts.

In all it’s a handy slice of Android customization ideal for power users or anyone who just wants to make their phone feel more tailored to them.

$2.99/£2.79

Box breathing is a breathing technique used by the Navy Seals, sports professionals and others, which involves taking long deep breaths and holding them.

It has a number of supposed benefits, from reducing stress and anxiety, to improving blood flow, awareness, focus and attention.

While we’re not sure how sound the science is for all of that, it can certainly serve as a calming influence, and the BoxBreathing app helps you get started.

It contains an instructional video to help you get the technique down, and then can guide you through the required breaths, with words or sound effects and visual indicators to tell you when to breathe in and out.

You can work through a number of levels, which adjust how deep a breath to take and how long to hold it, or just stick with the basics, and BoxBreathing also keeps a log of your breathing practice and can be set to remind you to do it daily.

There are even gamification features, with new ranks handed out for practicing a number of consecutive days. And all in all, the app is about as comprehensive as possible for such a simple technique, and justifies its price tag.

Free + $29.99/£27.99 monthly subscription

Ava won’t be for everyone, but if you’re deaf or hard of hearing, or know someone who is, it could be enormously useful.

The core feature is simply that it listens to what’s being said and shows it on the screen, so if you’re deaf or hard of hearing you can have Ava listen to someone who’s speaking to you and then you can read their responses.

Alternatively, if you’re talking to someone with hearing difficulties you can show them a text version of what you’re saying.

Ava can also learn your voice, so it can better determine whether it’s you or someone else speaking, and if you’re communicating with other people who use Ava then you’ll also be able to see who else said what in the conversation (rather than the app assigning all speech to you or ‘other’).

Ava isn’t perfect – it doesn’t always hear what’s being said perfectly in our limited experience with it, and for unlimited use you’ll need to shell out a hefty $29.99/£27.99 per month, but for those who could benefit from Ava that’s a price that could be worth paying, and for free you can still host up to five hours of group conversations each month.

$9.99/£7.99 per month

In the age of the web, magazines can feel like a dated concept, but Readly does a decent job of bringing them up to date by offering a Netflix-like subscription service.

We say Netflix-like, but while most of the content on there is far from brand new, you have access to the latest issues of thousands of magazines on Readly, all in digital form and with unlimited access for $9.99/£7.99 per month.

You can read content from not just your own country but various others too and the selection is strong, with plenty of big names on offer, along with more niche magazines.

Readly is accessible on phone, tablet and computer, so you can access your magazines almost anywhere with a screen, and even download them for offline reading.

You also have access to back issues, and navigation is a breeze, handled by intuitive swipes and taps. Readly even supports crosswords and other puzzle content, so you can do just about everything you could with a paper version.

Free + various IAP

Want to learn something new? Udemy could be a good place to start. This website and app has over 40,000 video courses across more than 12,000 topics, covering everything from yoga and meditation to psychology, photography and web development.

Courses are of varied lengths and aimed at various different levels. Some are just a few hours long, others have dozens of hours of content.

And they’re more than just videos. You can also ask the instructors (all of whom are theoretically experts in their fields) questions, or communicate with other students.

Some courses are free, but many cost money (starting at under $10/£10 and rising to well over $100/£100). Don’t baulk at the fees though – the pricier ones are often available at a discount and you have access to them for life. Courses can also be downloaded, cast to your TV or viewed on just about anything with a web browser.

Some courses are better than others, but with numerous user reviews for most of them it’s easy to separate the good from the bad before you put any money down.

Free + $2.99/£2.59 IAP

Gratus is a simple app designed to remind you of the things you’re grateful for. When you open the app it asks you to write out something you’re grateful for and optionally add an associated image. You can build up a collection of these, which you can then view whenever you need a reminder that there are good things in your life.

That much is free, but Gratus really comes into its own when you pay a $2.99/£2.59 IAP, as this unlocks a reminder feature, so you’ll be reminded daily to add something you’re grateful for, along with the ability to see your entries in a widget or as a notification, allowing you to see them whenever you use your phone, without having to actively launch the Gratus app.

That’s important, because having to launch the app is an extra step that you might not get into the habit of doing.

Though the idea of writing or seeing things you’re grateful for might seem inconsequential it can have a lasting effect on your happiness, as it’s otherwise so easy to overlook good things, or take them for granted where writing them down helps cement them for future moments.

Free + $2.99/£2.99 IAP

Your phone’s status bar can show you how much battery you’ve got left or how strong your signal is, but what if you want to be able to see how much memory your phone has left, how many unread messages you have, the battery temperature or your CPU usage?

For those things and many more there’s PowerLine. And rather than just an icon, it shows a colored bar at the top of the screen, giving those indicators a much more eye-catching look.

You can also add bars for some of the jobs the status bar already does, such as one for battery life, and the length of the bars depends on the status of the thing they’re tracking. So for battery life it would run halfway across the top if you’re at 50%.

But you’re not limited to putting the bars at the top. They can run along the left, right or bottom edge instead, or some combination of the four.

You can customize the colors and sizes of the bars too, but if you want more than two displayed at once you’ll need to go pro with a one-off $2.99/£2.99 IAP. This lets you have up to nine bars at once.

It’s a worthwhile purchase if you want to be able to see more things at a glance, or just like the stylish design of the bars.

Free + $1.99/£1.99 IAP

Flowx isn’t actually a new app, rather a rebranding of WeatherBomb, but it’s worth your attention if you don’t know about it.

Yes, it’s a forecast app, but it’s more interested in showing you how weather systems move than simply telling you whether it’s going to rain.

The app gives you a map and then you can choose whether to track precipitation, cloud, wind speed, temperature, pressure or wave height. Then zoom in or out with a pinch and swipe slowly to see how these conditions are predicted to change over a period of hours or days, by watching for example clouds or storms move across the map.

You can add arrows to give you a clearer picture of the direction weather systems are moving in, key details such as the temperature are shown at all times, and you can customize the units of measurement.

Flowx probably won’t replace your normal forecast app, in fact the app description even suggests you use Flowx alongside a more conventional weather app, but if you want deeper insight into weather patterns it’s a fascinating addition to your app arsenal.

And if you get really into it an IAP of $1.99/£1.99 per year or $4.99/£4.99 as a one-off will remove adverts, give you 10 days of data instead of 7 and ensure you get future features.

Free + $1.99/£1.69 IAP

If you’ve got any interest in Space Flight you probably know that launches of shuttles and satellites are happening all the time. The thing is keeping track of them all can be tricky, especially as various different space agencies are responsible for organisation.

Space Launch Now keeps track of launches, so finally you don’t have to. It has a calendar of all the upcoming take-offs, along with details and a link to the live stream of the launch where applicable.

You can also see details of different space vehicles, information on previous launches, and search for specific events if you know what you’re after.

Most of the features are free, but if you’re a serious shuttle-head you can pay $1.99/£1.69 to automatically have upcoming events synced to your calendar, get weather details from the launch pad for historical and upcoming launches, and get dynamic pictures of launch vehicles as a watch face for your Android Wear device. As well, of course, as supporting the developer - which should never be overlooked as a reason to pay.

Free + $2.99/£2.89 IAP

There are lots of apps for discovering and building a watch list of films, but CineTrak is more feature-packed and polished than most.

For one thing, you can make a list not just of things that you want to watch, but also have a second list of the things you’ve seen, so you’ll never again get halfway through a movie only to realize that you’ve watched it already… but it was just really, really forgettable.

You can also rate the movies you’ve seen, and the app builds up a third list with all of your ratings. Movies can be searched for by name or genre, or you can check out what’s coming soon, and results are shown as big poster-like images.

Tap on one and you can see a film’s length, release date, synopsis, trailer, cast and crew and its ratings both from users of the app, and from other sources, including IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

You can also find reviews from other CineTrak users – or add your own, and if you’re looking for something similar the app has you covered there too, with a list of similar films.

The app also builds up stats based on your watch list, telling you how many films you’ve seen and how long you’ve spent watching them.

All that’s completely free, but for $2.99/£2.89 you can remove adverts, get curated lists, staff picks and unlock the ability to collect achievements. If you use CineTrak a lot, that’s probably worth paying.

Free + $2.49/£2.19 IAP

The quick settings that you can reach from the notification shade on Android phones can be enormously useful, saving time when you want to toggle often used features, but the features you use most may not be the ones available on this screen. If that’s the case, you’ll want Shortcutter Quick Settings.

This lets you add new shortcuts to the quick settings screen, with 63 options available in all. These cover expected things like the flashlight and NFC, but also far more unusual options like a random number generator, and one you can tap to launch straight into typing out a new tweet on Twitter.

As well as adding shortcuts to the quick settings screen, Shortcutter also has an optional swipe-out sidebar, or you can add shortcuts to the home screen or app drawer.

The core app is free but it’s well worth paying the $2.49/£2.19 IAP, as this unlocks additional quick settings to give you a more fully-featured experience.

Free

Avoiding sunburn can seem like a dark art at times. It doesn’t always need to be that warm or sunny to get burned, and everyone’s different in terms of how much UV they can take. It’s also not always clear how often you should reapply sunscreen, but with UVLens you need never get burned again.

The app tells you the UV index now and throughout the day, so you can plan the best time to be outside. And based on the current index, combined with what you tell it about your skin (the tone, whether you have many freckles etc), it will estimate how quickly you’ll burn and what if anything you should wear to prevent damage – be it sunscreen, sunglasses or a hat.

You can also tell the app the type of sunscreen you’ve applied and what activity you’re doing, and then it will tell you how soon you should re-apply, and can even alert you when it’s time to.

UVLens is a simple, easy to use app that makes the effects of UV - and how to combat them – far clearer.

Free + various IAP

There are many apps aimed at motivating you to walk more, but Walkr is more gamified than most. Like a standard pedometer it tracks your steps, as well as making a rough estimate of how many calories you’ve burnt, but Walkr also has you exploring a galaxy.

Your steps are converted into energy which fuels your spaceship, allowing you to blast off to new solar systems and discover new planets.

These planets have cute illustrations and unique wildlife which you can feed by building food factories. Feeding the wildlife in turn gives you currency which you can spend on more buildings and ship upgrades.

And there are also missions to undertake, leaderboards to compare your progress with friends, and achievements to unlock.

Walkr can take a bit of learning as the tutorial only covers the very basics, but once you get to grips with it it’s surprisingly engaging.

It’s also essentially free, but you can speed up your progress with various IAP. We don’t recommend that, since it’s a bit of a cheat and the whole point of the app is to get you moving more. You might, however, want to spend $1.99/£1.56 to remove adverts.

Free + various IAP

If you’re an outdoor adventurer then Komoot is for you, as whether it’s hiking, cycling or climbing you can use the app to plan routes.

Enter a start and end point, an activity and a fitness level, and the app will present you with an appropriate route.

However you can also manually change the route to your liking and view information such as the total distance, estimated time it will take and even a breakdown of the types of surface you’ll be traveling on, how far up and down hill you’ll go and what the highest and lowest points are.

And the map itself highlights parks and other scenic areas, so you can make sure your routes pass through the most interesting places.

That’s way more detail than a typical mapping app would give you, and once you’ve planned a route you can get turn by turn navigation and save it for future use.

You can also add photos to routes and share them, so friends and family can see where you’ve been or attempt the same journey. And Komoot has global maps, so you can use it wherever you are.

The only downside to Komoot is that you only get one region for free and regions usually only cover a single city or county. After that you’ll pay $3.99/£3.99 for each of them, or $29.99/£29.99 for the whole world.

Free

Finance manager apps tend to be quite dry, which in turn can make you less likely to use them, but Fortune City turns the whole business of tracking your income and outgoings into a game.

You manage a cute little city, with new buildings added each time you add an income or expense, each of which you can do in several taps.

Workers can be hired and assigned jobs, buildings can be upgraded, and if you’re diligent in your tracking your city can flourish.

If friends are using the app too you can compete with them and visit their cities, and everything is backed up to the cloud, so you won’t lose your progress if you change phone.

But, like any good finance tracker, you can also see graphs and charts of your spending and income, to get a clearer picture of where your money is going, and there are dozens of achievements to work towards, many of which require saving and careful money management.

$49.99/£47.99 per year

If you spend your days knee deep in email you’re going to want the most powerful email app around, and that’s arguably Newton Mail.

It’s packed full of features, many of which you’ll find elsewhere, but you’ll be hard pushed to find them all in a single app.

These include support – and instant push notifications – for all types of email accounts, from Gmail and Outlook, to Exchange, Yahoo Mail, Office 365 and more.

You’ll also get read receipts, the ability to schedule emails, and snooze emails so they’ll pop up again at a more convenient time. You can even snooze to desktop, so they’ll appear at the top of your inbox next time you log in from a computer.

Sender profiles give you more information about the people emailing you, pulling in data from LinkedIn and other social networks, and you can unsubscribe from newsletters with a single tap and set up customizable gesture controls.

Newton Mail also works across devices and platforms and you can connect various apps, such as Evernote, Pocket and Todoist, allowing you to add emails to them without leaving your inbox. There’s even an Alexa skill, if you want Amazon’s AI assistant to read and manage your email.

And those are just the headline features, there’s too much to cover here. Sadly there’s also a but coming: unlike most email apps, Newton Mail isn’t free. You can try it for two weeks and after that it costs $49.99/£47.99 per year. Pricey, but if you live in your inbox it could prove invaluable.

Free

Chances are that at some point in time you’ve come across a file type that your media player of choice can’t play. With Timbre, that’s no problem, as the app lets you convert audio and video files to and from almost any file type.

It supports MP3, WAV, FLAC, M4A, AAC, PCM, AIFF, Ogg, WMA, ALAC, MP4, AVI, FLV, MOV, WebM, MKV and MPEG files for both input and output, which also means you can convert a video file into an audio format. But file conversion is just one of Timbre’s skills.

It can also be used to cut audio and video files, which is handy if there’s a part you don’t want. You can also combine multiple files into a single one, split an audio file into two parts, change the bitrate of an audio file, and remove audio from a video.

None of these are tools that you’re likely to need often, but Timbre is a free, simple solution that’s great to have to hand for when you do.

Free + IAP

8Bit Photo Lab is a photo filter app that takes you back to simpler times. Times when games didn’t have near-photo-realistic graphics and Android was just a glint in Andy Rubin’s eye.

Simply snap or import a picture and pick a color palette from over 40 options, such as Game Boy or Commodore 64. Your photo will then instantly transform into something you might have seen on a screen from that era.

But that’s just the beginning, you can also add effects such as noise and checkerboard patterns, change the resolution and aspect ratio, tweak the contrast, saturation and brightness, and add 8-bit stickers, such as a mouse cursor, or little characters that look like they’ve come straight out of a game from the late 80s.

Essentially, 8Bit Photo Lab is like Prisma for anyone who prefers old-school video games to modern art, but it’s a well thought-through app.

Once you’ve tweaked an image to perfection you can add exactly the same filter to other photos with a swipe, for example, and while you get plenty for free, you can unlock lots of extra options with an IAP, including the ability to turn your creations into animated wallpapers.

Free

Your home screen is probably a busy mass of apps, folders and widgets, so the last thing you need is an intricate image adding to the chaos. Instead, a minimalist wallpaper can often look far more striking, and there’s no shortage of them in Minimalist Wallpapers.

In fact, there are thousands of them, with new ones added each and every day. They’re sorted into various categories such as ‘nature’ and ‘abstract’, while the latest 500 can be viewed separately, so you always know what’s new.

You can save your favorites to easily return to later – which is especially handy if you ever change phone and lose all your downloaded wallpapers.

That’s all free, and while there is a one-off $0.99/£0.69 IAP to remove adverts we didn’t actually experience any while using the app. So while you won’t need to pay for the app, if you enjoy using it then it’s not a high price to have a different view on your phone whenever you want it.

$2.99/£1.99

Most meditation apps require a subscription to access the bulk of their guided meditations, but not Buddhify.

A one-off payment of $2.99/£1.99 gives you unlimited access to the entire app, including over 80 guided audio meditations, amounting to over 11 hours of content.

These vary in length from 5 to 30 minutes, and are divided by locations (such as at home or in the park), activities (such as eating or work break) and moods, so there’s sure to be at least one to suit your current needs. And if not there’s a solo meditation timer.

The app isn’t quite as attractively designed or content-rich as some rivals like Simple Habit and Headspace, but it’s a whole lot cheaper.

$1.99/£1.99

There are certain phone features that you might want to adjust or turn on for specific apps. For example, you might want GPS or Bluetooth on when using a sports tracker app, but not the rest of the time.

With Autoset you can do that, having GPS – or whatever else – enabled automatically when you launch a relevant app, and disabled when you close it.

Similarly, you can tweak settings, for example having the screen go brighter automatically when you launch Netflix.

You can also create time-based profiles, if for example you want your phone to switch to silent at midnight.

For the most part these are simple toggles, which you can set and forget, and there are lots to choose from, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data, GPS, mobile hotspot, rotation, screen off time, brightness, sound mode and media volume.

Free + $0.99/79p IAP

You’d think it would be impossible for a new weather forecast app to make a mark at this point there are so many of them, but Today Weather – Forecast at least has a shot.

Like many of the best weather apps it lets you choose your forecast source (currently offering Accuweather, Weather Underground, Dark Sky or Weather.com – with more likely to be added).

Then, it wraps the forecast up in an attractive skin, with daily weather-appropriate images, and packs in loads of information, such as the forecast for the next 15 days, the dew point, humidity, UV index, air quality index, phase of the moon, and the position of the sun in the sky - along with sunrise and set times.

Plus, Today Weather has a selection of different widgets available if you’d rather see the forecast on your home screen. All of that is free, but you can get rid of the adverts and add a weather map with an IAP.

$4.99/£4.99

It’s all too easy to get bogged down with negative thoughts and stress, but Five Minute Journal makes you start every day focused on the positive, by having you write three things that you’re grateful for.

It also has you think ahead and write three things that you’ll do to make today great, which makes you plan ahead in a positive way, and holds you more accountable to actually doing those things.

Then, you add a daily affirmation, and in the evening write three great things that happened, so you can see the day in a positive light. But it also asks you how you could have made the day better, so that, perhaps, you’ll make the next day better instead.

It’s nicely presented, reminds you to add an entry at the beginning and end of each day, lets you add photos, and stores your past entries, so you can be reminded of days past.

Five Minute Journal is a small thing, and if anything it takes less than five minutes to fill out, but it’s based on proven positive psychology research and in its physical form has an army of fans who believe in it, so if you could use a bit more happiness in your life it’s well worth giving a try.

Free + monthly subscription

Fitonomy is something of an all-in-one health and fitness app, not just offering workouts, but also healthy recipes and articles to inspire and inform.

But it’s the exercise that’s the focus, and the workouts within the app are almost all designed to be done at home or outdoors with minimal equipment, so you don’t need to go to the gym.

For free you can pick from a handful of basic workout courses, which give you a guided workout each day. You can also view animations of every exercise in the app, split into categories based on which body part they exercise, which is handy for learning new exercises.

Each animation uses a 3D model of a person that you can zoom into and rotate, giving you a clearer look at the exercise than a video would, and making them a great tool for checking that you’re doing an exercise right.

But to get the most out of Fitonomy you might want to subscribe to one of its premium plans. These cost different amounts depending on the plan and how long you commit to, but they start at $4.99/£4.49 per month.

There are a range of plans with different focuses, but they all include workouts that get more intense each time, along with daily recipe suggestions, making for an experience that’s a bit like having a personal trainer in your pocket.

$1.99/£1.99

No matter how good your smartphone camera is your images can still be ruined by unwanted additions, be it people in the background, a trash can in your landscape or blemishes on your own face.

TouchRetouch is here to help, by removing anything that you don’t want in your shot. You can get rid of unwanted objects by highlighting or circling them, and simply tap a blemish to remove it.

There are additional tools to clone or mirror parts of the image, and video tutorials to help you get more out of the app – though most of the features are fairly self-explanatory.

Results aren’t always perfect, with the app trying but not always entirely succeeding to hide the seams when you cut someone out, but you don’t have to save any changes you’re unhappy with and it generally does a surprisingly good job, all with only a few taps from you.

Free + optional $3.99/£3.99 monthly subscription

Fitness trackers are all the rage, but the abilities of basic ones can largely be replicated by smartphone apps, for little to no money.

Pacer Pedometer is a prime example of that. As the name suggests, this is a pedometer, and like your average Fitbit it will run 24/7, tracking all of your steps automatically.

It does a pretty accurate job of it too, and you can make it more accurate by adjusting the sensitivity. You can also set goals, and have your step count permanently displayed on the notifications screen, so it’s never more than a glance away.

As well as steps, Pacer also tells you how far you’ve walked, how much active time you’ve had, and makes a stab at estimating how many calories you’ve burned.

You can also track your weight and BMI, connect with friends and motivate one another. That all comes free, and should be enough for most people, but for $3.99/£3.99 per month (or less if you pay for a year upfront) you can also get rid of adverts, join groups and access an AI weight loss coach - the last one being the reason most would pay the subscription for.

$1.99/£1.49 

We all need a little help relieving stress sometimes, and Pause aims to provide that assistance through the simple act of following a dot around the screen with your finger.

As you do so soothing sounds play, and a colored blob gradually grows around the dot. Within a few minutes the app promises to lessen your stress and increase your focus, and though it sounds gimmicky it works in our experience.

Supposedly it’s based on the principles of Tai Chi and mindfulness practice, as well as being scientifically tested and validated with EEG (electroencephalogram) technology. But credentials aside it’s just a great way to find some calm on a busy day.

Free + $9.99/£9.99 monthly subscription 

Meditation apps are meant, among other things, to relax and de-stress us, but if you’re anything like us they run the risk of doing the opposite, becoming chores that we feel guilty for neglecting.

Simple Habit doesn’t completely solve that problem, but it gets some way there, by offering short 5-minute meditations, that you can easily fit in at any point during your day.

Other meditation apps have short sessions too, but there are usually only a few of them, mixed in with longer meditations, while they’re all short in Simple Habit (though we do have to point out some stretch beyond 5 minutes to cater for those that do want a bit more relaxation).

Simple Habit also has a variety of different teachers to guide you, so if you don’t get on with one (or just get bored of their voice) there are plenty of others to choose from.

The rest of the app is as you’d expect, with meditations designed around specific life circumstances, goals or moods, and a simple interface that doesn’t get in the way.

Like Headspace, most of the meditations are locked behind a subscription, but you can listen to a handful for free to see if Simple Habit is for you.

Free with ads or $3.99/£3.49 

The problem with weather apps is that, for the most part, they only use one source for their data, but Climendo uses lots, and then works out what the most likely weather at any given time is.

The complete selection of weather providers that it uses includes AccuWeather, Weather Underground, NOAA, Met Office, Foreca, Dark Sky, SMHI, YR and World Weather Online – though only the most accurate ones for your location will be used.

You can see hourly or ten day forecasts, complete with the likelihood of each being accurate, or you can dig down to the individual forecasts from each weather provider, to see how they vary.

Climendo lacks some of the more detailed information found in other apps – such as humidity and UV index -  but if you just want accurate information on whether or not you need an umbrella then this app is up there with the best.

$7.99/£6.26

There’s no shortage of apps for digital artists, but Infinite Painter is one of the most feature-packed, with dozens of brush presets and the ability to create your own, along with layers, blending, editing tools and more, plus the option to export your images as JPEG, PNG, PSD or ZIP.

But as well as being packed full of features, Infinite Painter also takes the time to show you how they all work, with detailed tutorials and guides, although the interface is so simple that you should be able to muddle your way through most things anyway.

A lot of the features are hidden behind a paywall, with it costing $7.99/£6.26 to unlock everything, but the app includes a free seven-day trial, letting you try everything out before you decide whether you want to put money down, which if you’re a fan of digital art you probably will, because you get a lot for your money.

£3.99/US$4.99 (around AU$6.79)

Nova Launcher Prime has been around for a long time and thanks to regular updates and a wealth of features it remains one of the very best Android launchers available.

It's enormously customisable, allowing you to change your phone's theme and home screen transitions, add a scrollable dock, choose what direction the app drawer scrolls and even add widgets to the dock.

As bloated as it might sound Nova is actually a slick, speedy launcher, which looks a whole lot like stock Android until you start fiddling with it.

There's a free version available too, just called Nova Launcher, but Nova Launcher Prime gives you access to gesture controls, among other features that aren't found in the free one, so it's worth investing in, given that the home screen is one of the things you'll interact with most on your phone.

£2.49/US$3.99/AU$3.99

There are any number of podcast apps for Android but Pocket Casts is easily one of the best. Its slick, colourful interface helps it stand out from the drab designs of many competitors and it's feature packed, with Chromecast support, auto downloads, sleep timers and more.

There are even tools to improve the listening experience of podcasts, such as the ability to remove silent sections to speed them up or toggle video podcasts to audio only. There are cheaper and even free alternatives to Pocket Casts, but you more than get your money's worth with it.

£3.30/$4.99/AU$6.09

The idea behind Plex is that it assimilates your existing media collection and serves it up, through one standard interface, via the cloud.

It's a bit of a struggle to get going as you need a free account on Plex's servers to access your stuff, but once it's all up and running it offers streaming and transcoding of files, meaning everything ought to play everywhere. It's attractively designed too and even lets you sync your media for offline viewing, so it's not always dependent on an internet connection

It supports Chromecast too, so if you've bought into Google's own media-managing dream, then you're going to get a lot of use out of this app.

£4.99/$4.99/$AU9.25

A hefty price, but can you put a price on not dying of obesity at age 52? That fitness promise is what you pay for with the RunTastic Pro. It is able to map you, track you, automatically cheer you on, generate live feedback and more, also covering interval training and letting users create their own regular routes to attack again and again.

Voice coaching keeps you motivated and on track and a leaderboard provides extra incentive to go faster and further. It's also great for finding new routes to run, as other users can post theirs to the app. It's serious stuff for competitive people and a seriously good tool for getting or staying in shape.

Free

IF was formerly known as IFTTT, which stands for "if this then that", concisely summing up what this app does. It powers up your Android device in all new ways, letting you automate various functions.

You can create simple statements such as "if my location is home, turn on Wi-Fi", or "if I snap a screenshot email it to me". As these are all simple two-part statements they're easy to create and they can also be shared with the wider IF community. That also means there are tons of pre-existing 'recipes' to choose from, so you might not even feel the need to create your own.

£8.06/$9.99 (roughly AU$13.24)

FiLMiC Pro has been on iOS for a while and it's so good that it was even used to make the arthouse feature film 'Tangerine'. Now it's arrived on Android and it's every bit as impressive here.

As a premium video camera app it doesn't come cheap, but it gives you far greater control over your footage than most alternatives.

There are standard, manual and hybrid shooting modes, with options to adjust the temperature, tint, exposure, ISO, shutter speed, focus and more. You can also shoot in slow or fast motion and a variety of different resolutions and aspect ratios, including the likes of Cinemascope and letterbox.

Shooting your film isn't the end of the fun either, as FiLMiC Pro lets you alter the exposure and saturation after you've captured your footage. Then, there are a variety of encoding and sharing options. So you can save it in the quality you want and easily upload it to the cloud and social networks.

£0.77/US$0.99/AU$1.16

There are plenty of photo editing apps, but while most offer filters and effects few allow you to alter the perspective of a photo in the way SKRWT does.

There are no stickers here, no makeup modes and no real effects. Instead there are tools to shift the perspective, change the ratio and correct lens distortion.

You can also flip, rotate, mirror and crop images, but SKRWT isn't interested so much in modifying photos in unnatural ways, as in making them look exactly as you envisioned when you took them.

It's a professional tool, but it's easy to use and you can always undo your changes if you don't like them.

£2.99/US$2.99/$AU5.53

Tasker is one of the first, and best, task managers for Android. It does it all. Turns stuff on or off depending on location, manages multiple schedules for changing phone state depending on the time of day, even letting users have their phone automatically reply to text messages if it's set to a quiet state.

In many ways it's like a more powerful and more impenetrable version of IF. If you're brave enough to learn its ways there's a lot here, with the promise of total automation by combining triggers such as an app, day or time, with actions, variables and conditions.

Tasker is so powerful it can even be used to create whole new apps. It's complex, vast, and you'll wonder how you lived without it.

£4.42/US$6.50/AU$7.97

Phones get lost and sometimes even stolen, that's just a fact of life, but with Cerberus they can be a whole lot easier to get back.

The app duplicates many of Google's Android Device Manager abilities, such as tracking, ringing, locking and erasing a handset. But it goes much, much further too, allowing you to sound an alarm, display a message on the screen, take pictures, videos and screenshots to identify the thief, record audio and a whole lot more.

It's a comprehensive service and while it comes with a one off cost it will more than pay for itself if you ever need to use it.

£7.69/US$12.09/AU$15.22

If you never want to run out of things to listen to again, TuneIn Radio Pro is the app for you. It gives you access to over 100,000 radio stations from around the world, so no matter what your favourite genre is, you'll be covered.

There are podcasts on offer too and you can create a profile, giving you easy access to all your favourited stations.

The Pro version is pretty expensive for an app, but not only does it remove annoying ads, it brings handy features such as the ability to record shows and listen to them at any time, as well as access to over 40,000 audiobooks and advanced social tools for finding and sharing new music.

£7.95/US$12.95 monthly subscription

Modern life can be hectic and most of us could probably do with some calm. Headspace aims to provide that through numerous guided mediations, ranging from ten minutes to over an hour in length.

There are also a number which are focused on helping you flourish in specific aspects of life, such as relationships or fitness, and they're all expertly guided by a former Buddhist monk.

You get access to ten short meditations for free, but to get the most out of it and unlock hundreds of others you'll have to subscribe.

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