My favorite Android™ apps !

Note

This page is about Android™ apps

For more details, maybe you should first read one of these:

for instance on Android™ on Wikipedia,

or on www.Android.com.

Some lists of applications

There are a few lists of some useful apps, kinda sorted by category.

Note

What is an application?

An application (app) is a program for a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone powered by the Android™ OS.

These programs are distributed as compressed archives, with the apk format, which means "Application PacKage", as the EXEcutable program for Windows™ with the .exe format, or the Disk iMaGe for Mac OS X™ with the .dmg format.

Avis

Might be out-of-date!

This list was written in June and July 2014, so now it might be a little bit out-of-date... I checked it in May 2016, and it was alright.

Apps everyone should have

Dolphin Browser a good web browser,
F-Droid client to keep your apps up-to-date with the F-Droid repository,
File Expert a great files browser, full of nice functionnalities, and with some cool plugins,
Firefox™ portable another web browser, but it might be two heavy for some phones,
GO SMS Pro, a good text messaging client,
Jota Text Editor or Jota +, the best text editor on Android™, with a large panel of programming languages being supported with good syntactic coloration, and even with an easy to use integration with SL4A !
Micro CPU Monitor to always keep an eye on your device's CPU level, to be able to quickly kill a bugged process, before she consume all your device's battery,
Moon+ Reader (free version), a pretty good ebooks reading software,
Perfect Viewer an awesome PDF reader (with this plugin), which also supports some other formats (this other plugin can be required),
Silent Boot to suppress any sound when booting, and to automatically put your device in quiet mode after booting,
Smart Task Bar a cool and small lateral bar, useful to easily access all your other apps without having to exit the current one,
Super Backup is the best solution I found to backup your text messages, your contacts, your call diary, or your apps,
Timer a simple but effective chronometer,
Traduction (Google™ Translate),
TTPod, a very good music player, with some pretty original feature (you can ask it to be quiet after a certain amount of time, for when you go to bed for example),
VLC™ (lite or beta version) an other music and video player,
Wikipedia to quickly access to Wikipédia. It's really a shame that MathJax is not included in the app!

Note

« What about iPhones™? » or « What about Windows™ phones? »

I have not yet got the chance to own and use on a daily basis a phone using either one of these mobile OS, opponents of Android™ on the market (and this is not a reason of faith or ideology or whatever, just a coincidence).

However, it should be easy for you to look for in the Apple™ "App Store"™ or the Windows™ "Application Store" to find apps similar to the one presented here.

Apps for geeks

Android™ Assistant (free version) is a good admin utility program, useful for instance to clean the cache, kill a bugged process, or quickly desinstall apps,
Android™ System Infos is another one of the same kind,
APK Manager is a tiny but well designed app, to simply and quickly manage all your other applications,

CSipSimple (and this codec pack) is an amazing app to use the VoIP, similar to Linphone,
Gmote is a good remote controller for your personnal laptop, to be used with this small client,
Irssi ConnectBot is the best app to use SSH to connect to another laptop or server,
Linphone another good app to call and videochat with VoIP,
Notification Toggle for Android™ v2 (2.2 to 2.3.8),
Pokedextra, a good and complete pokédex™,
ROM Toolbox Lite (free version) is another well designed admin toolbox, mainly for rooted devices,
"Symbols" ou "SymbolsPanel" are useful to insert special caracters, in text messages for example,
Terminal Emulator is the best terminal emulator for Android™,
Unified Remote is another remote controller application, to use your smartphone as a remote for your laptop, with this Unified Remote client,
Voice Notify is a small accessibility service that speak every incoming notifications (using "text to speach"),
VuDroid is a pretty good document reader, which accepts not only PDFs but also DJVU.

Apps for McGyver's fans

Army Survival Guide, but it should be a good idea to read before going on an aventure !
IP WebCam to use a smartphone's camera as a webcam, works well with a local hifi hotspot generated from your computer (or from your smartphone),
Magnetic Field Log to read raw data from magnetic field captor (as beautiful as useless),
Network Info II to read precise data about the different wireless network your cellphone is connected to (and especially geolocalisation, with 3G, 4G or hifi, and you can get it much faster than with a heavy cartography app),
Open Food Facts to know what's in your dishes,
Wifi Analyzer to read very precise data about the local hifi networks.

A few videos games

Chess is a good app to simply play Chess against the computer échecs,
GBC A.D. is a good Game Boy Color™ emulator (of course, it does not include any roms),
Inotia™ III and Inotia™ IV are two pretty good hack-n-slash game,
Mojo GBA is an excellent Game Boy Advance™ emulator!
Mumble client is a client for Mumble (and this description is not a tautology...),
Pixel Dungeon is a pretty good rogue-like, well conceived but impressively difficult,
SNesoid or Snes9x Ex are two good emulators for Super NES™ (a tablet is more appropriate),
Zenonia™ 1 Free, Zenonia™ 3, Zenonia™ 4 and the last one Zenonia™ 5 are good hack-n-slash, similar to Inotia™ (only the 2nd one is not free).

Apps for scientists

AddiPlot and droidplot allow you to make graphics with GNU octave ,
aGrep to (try to) use a grep-like command, to look for a text pattern in a bunch of text files,
Andie Graph is an emulator for Texas Instrument™ calculators, from TI-79™ to TI-84+™ (of course, you have to use your own roms),
Banque Exos MP CCP is a pretty good app to work you mathematics, with hundreds of exercises, for prep school level "MP" (created by the author of http://mp.cpgedupuydelome.fr/),
Detexify is an Android™ client for Detexify on KireLabs.org, an awesome web-service to recognize a LaTeX symbol thanks to hand-writting recognition technology (you know, that pretty cool technology which read your cheques, and is a pioneer problem in automatic machine learning),
Git is the best Android™ client for Git (more details here on Wikipédia), the Git version management system,
Grapher is a simple app to draw scientific curves and graphics,
Hacker's keyboard is a software keyboard (ie not a material keyboard), especially designed to be used with a SSH client, or any command line app,
handyCalc is an excellent calculator for Android™, with very advanced functionnalities,
OCaml Toplevel for Android™ is an awesome client for OCaml (made by Romain Vernoux, a comrad of 2011 batch of the Computer Science departement at ÉNS Cachan),
GNU octave and its plugins, to use GNU Octave on your phone (but do not use it to cheat during your exams, of course!),
Python™ for Android™ is a good solution to use Python™ from everywhere, because that's cool!
SL4A is an app designed to use certain scripting language, as Python™,
TryHaskell is a client for the website http://tryhaskell.org/, simple but efficient,
VerbTeX is a client for an online LaTeX compiler. Not perfect, but it works.

Apps for secrets agents (or paranoid people)

AdAway to remove almost all advertisements in other apps, especially the ads for the Google Ads service,
AFWall+ a complete and ready to work firewall, in order to limit your data use, and forbid some apps to access the Internet,
Gibberbot ou ChatSecure to use Jabber in a secured and encrypted way,
Gnu Privacy Guard to use GPG,
Network Log to check which apps access the internet at every single moment. Can be used to check that AFWall+ is running as desired,
Obscura Cam to take pictures without adding any meta-data to them,
Orbot, a TOR client to access the web anonymously,
Orweb 2, a browser to use with Orbot,
RecForge Lite to record sounds and conversations
RedPhone: Private Calls to secure your phone calls (only with other users of the same app RedPhone),
TextSecure: Privacte Messages to secure your SMSs (only with other users of the same app TextSecure). WhatsApp started recently to use the same secured protocol.

Misc.

QR Reader, even if we all know that QR codes are useless,
QuickOffice or OfficeSuite 7 to read or modify OpenDocument documents (like Word™),
Skype™, even if it could be a good idea to prefer Linphone or an other clone which has the advantage of being free, open source and more secured,
WordPress™ to read or write on your WordPress™ powered blog.

How to use Android™ without a Google™ account ?

Other repos

Among many apps repositories, my favorite is F-Droid, mainly because it's completely free and focused only on Open Source apps.

For instance, there is the page for AFWall+, the best firewall on Android™.

Direct download

apk-dl.com is a wonderful website, designed to simply download apps from the official Google™ Play repository without having to log in with a Google™ account.

For instance, there is a direct link for Jota Text Editor (one of the best text editors on Android™, for which I designed the syntactic coloration configuration files for OCaml and rST !).

Old version

The first version of that page was in French, on the Wiki of the CRANS association.