Fill Your Phone with Free Apps
You already pay enough for your phone, especially with the price of some Android flagships climbing north of $800. (Looking at you, Galaxy Note 8.) Throw in a monthly data plan, and it's easy to understand why you'd want to slash spending from your mobile budget. Why not start with apps? Many of the best options available through the Google Play store are free. The true challenge is sorting the must-downloads from the ones that will just waste space. Here are 40 of our favorite free Android apps.
Facebook for Android is quite similar to what you'd find on Facebook.com, but catered to smartphones. Share photos from your Android gallery, post updates on your wall, comment on the posts of your Facebook friends, share links and other media, and much more with the free app. The app is under constant tweaking, with additions such as editing posts and comments continuously being added. The experience wouldn't be complete without the Facebook Messenger app, which handles Facebook's chat and call features.
Memrise
A 2017 Google Play Awards winner, language learning app Memrise uses a variety of tools to help users pick up basic conversational fluency with a number of languages, such as Spanish, Japanese and French. Memrise combines gamified learning techniques with what it calls "elaborate encoding" to help you recall vocabulary and info through the use of "mems", mnemonic devices such as etymologies or associations to help you lock in information. The free tier of the app comes with a variety of courses; a pro tier adds expanded features such as chatbot-assisted learning, speed review, and listening and native speaker video exercises.
CastBox
Podcasting platform CastBoxcombines a clean and navigable interface, a good selection of podcasts, and powerful podcast audio searching to deliver an excellent mobile podcatcher. Users can sign in with Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter, and then search and subscribe to podcasts, download episodes for offline listening and sync their subscriptions across multiple devices. You can stream podcasts through Chromecast or Amazon Echo, and a premium tier removes subscription limits, allows for homepage customization, and puts you on priority for customer support and new features.
Quik
GoPro's Quik is a hard and fast AI-assisted video editing app that intelligently splices together your pictures and videos into short and snazzy videos. You select up to 75 photos and video clips from your internal memory or cloud storage, and the app intelligently selects highlight moments and photos. You can then tweak visual effects, text overlays and titles. Users can choose from 80 free songs to sync with the video, or add their own music, and the app will sync slide transitions to match the music's beat. Videos can be saved in 1080p or 720p quality at 60fps, which you can then share across a variety of social media services or save to your device.
Venmo
Person-to-person payment app Venmo is a service from PayPal that lets you conveniently make and share payments with anyone you want. Pay anyone with a Venmo account instantly with money you have in your account, or you can link your bank account or debit card. It’s great for anyone who routinely has to pay out or collect from various sources — or even for divvying up a restaurant tab. With the app’s data encryption protecting your financial information, you’ll have no worries about security.
Pinterest is a fantastic online resource for a variety of interests and hobbies, with users able to pin or save images, links, and other resources to topic-related interest boards. Check out the community's pins and boards for projects, ideas, inspiration, reference, and whatever else you might need, or share your own material and create your own board for the vibrant online community.
AccuWeather
AccuWeather provides users with timely and detailed weather forecasts, from 15-day outlooks to the hyperlocal MinuteCasts. Forecasts come with animated weather info, radar maps, detailed summaries, and push notifications for extreme weather alerts in the US. Extra features include AccUcast, a system for crowd-sourced warnings on hazardous weather and road conditions, as well as customizable forecast details, weather-related videos, and Android Wear support so that you can get forecast info at a glance on your smartwatch.
Waze
Waze is a godsend to many motorists, providing accurate, time-saving turn-by-turn navigation that takes advantage of traffic data and crowdsourced incident reports. Users select their destination, and then Waze uses mapping data and traffic information pulled from a variety of sources including official data as well as your fellow Waze users to automatically create a recommended route, complete with turn-by-turn directions. The app is remarkably adaptive, automatically adjusting routes based on the latest traffic info, as well as shifting routes on the fly should you miss a turn. In addition, Waze can display crowd-sourced incident reports, the cheapest gas stations along your route and other extras.
IFTTT
If you find yourself wasting a lot of time with repetitive internet tasks, or just want to automate tasks on your phone, try IFTTT. The app comes with a variety of pre-built "applets" that automate tasks like backing up photos to cloud accounts, messaging your roommate or family if you're near the grocery, or having your smart lights turn themselves on when you return home from work. In addition to the pre-built applets, Users can also build custom tasks from these applets and services, combining multiple tasks and triggers in an "If This, Then That" structure (from which the app takes its name).
Avast Mobile Security & Antivirus
Avast's Mobile Security & Antivirus is our favorite mobile security suite for Android devices, offering comprehensive antivirus protection as well as numerous extra features, like Wi-Fi vulnerability protection, malware scanning, call blocking and app locking. Avast's free offering is already feature-packed, but premium subscribers get even more tools such as a privacy advisor, a customizable blacklist and extra tools for rooted Android devices.
Greenify
Are you plagued with pesky battery-hogging apps that run in the background? Greenify them. Greenify puts an app in a state of hibernation, unable to access system resources or run background processes. However, Greenify allows you to run an app normally in the foreground when explicitly called on by the user without any extra fuss. If you've got memory or battery hogs that keep draining your phone's resources, don't bother with a task-killer when you can just Greenify it. Just don't do that to your alarm clock, messenger, email app or anything with important notifications unless you want them to stop working.
Google Photos
Google Photos (which already comes stock on some Android devices) is a fantastic cloud photo storage service, offering unlimited storage space for high quality photos, as well as up to 15GB of original resolution photos in your Google Drive space. In addition to the generous online storage, Google Photos also features a smart search tool for finding familiar objects, places, pets, people and events, as well as an album assistant and basic photo editing tools.
Lastpass
Passwords and login credentials are a peculiarly internet age hassle. Thankfully password managers such as Lastpasscan keep that hassle in check, serving as a mobile password vault that encrypts and stores your logins and automatically fills them in when using apps or signing on to websites. In addition to keeping track of your logins, Lastpass can generate strong passwords and store encrypted data; it also supports fingerprint scanners. LastPass recently made cross-platform syncing free to all users, so you can now sync your password vaults between your Android phone or tablet and other devices such as your PC, Mac, or iPhone.
Discord
Discord has quickly become one of the best go-to apps for gamers looking to communicate and coordinate both in and out of game. Featuring robust voice and text chat features, Discord allows users to create and join group servers and organize discussion around named text and voice channels for easily compartmentalized discussion threads. Users can engage in voice chat or send text and photo messages plus invite links to servers for their contacts. While the service is free, Discord also features a premium Nitro subscription for $4.99 a month that offers features like animated avatars, custom emoji and expanded upload limits for photos and files.
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