My favorite Android™ apps !

Voir aussi

My new list of apps (2020).

Note

This page is about Android™ apps

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

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.

Avertissement

Might be out-of-date!

This list was written in June and July 2014, so now it might be a little bit out-of-date… I checked it in July 2017, and it was alright. However, I am not using all these apps anymore (my phone in 2017 has way less memory than the one I used in 2013 !).

Applications « for the confinement » in 2020

À faire

Finish this list!

Apps everyone should have

  • Dolphin Browser a good web browser, (old)

  • F-Droid client to keep your apps up-to-date with the F-Droid repository,

  • File Expert a great files browser, full of nice features, and with some cool plugins, (old)

  • Firefox™ portable another web browser, but it might be two heavy for some phones, (old)

  • GO SMS Pro, a good text messaging client, (old)

  • 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 e-books reading software, (old)

  • 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, (root)

  • Smart Task Bar a cool and small lateral bar, useful to easily access all your other apps without having to exit the current one, (old)

  • 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, (old)

  • Traduction (Google™ Translate), to not be too lost in translation,

  • 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), (old)

  • VLC™ (lite or beta version) an other music and video player, (old)

  • Wikipedia to quickly access to Wikipédia. It’s really a shame that MathJax is not included in the app! (old)

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 uninstall apps,

  • Android™ System Infos is another one of the same kind, (old)

  • APK Manager is a tiny but well designed app, to simply and quickly manage all your other applications, (old)

  • Clip Stack is a copy-paste history manager, perfectly well designed! Very handy if you like to send the same text message to several people (by changing bits!).

Apps for McGyver’s fans

  • Army Survival Guide, but it should be a good idea to read before going on an adventure! (old)

  • IP WebCam to use a smartphone’s camera as a webcam, works well with a local Wifi hotspot generated from your computer (or from your smartphone), (old)

  • Magnetic Field Log to read raw data from magnetic field captor (as beautiful as useless), (old)

  • Network Info II to read precise data about the different wireless network your cellphone is connected to (and especially geo-localization, with 3G, 4G or Wifi, and you can get it much faster than with a heavy cartography app), (old)

  • Open Food Facts to pretend you are interested about knowing what’s in your dishes, (old)

  • Wifi Analyzer to read very precise data about the local Wifi networks.

A few videos games

  • Chess is a good app to simply play Chess against the computer, (old)

  • 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, (old)

  • Mojo GBA is an excellent Game Boy Advance™ emulator!

  • Mumble client is a client for Mumble (and this description is not a tautology…), (old)

  • 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), (old)

  • 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). (old)

Apps for scientists

Apps for secrets agents (or paranoid people)

  • AdAway to remove almost all advertisements in other apps, especially the ads for the Google Ads service, (root)

  • AFWall+ a complete and ready to work firewall, in order to limit your data use, and forbid some apps to access the Internet, (root)

  • Gibberbot ou ChatSecure to use Jabber in a secured and encrypted way, (old)

  • Gnu Privacy Guard to use GPG, (old)

  • Network Log to check which apps access the internet at every single moment. Can be used to check that AFWall+ is running as desired, (root)

  • Obscura Cam to take pictures without adding any meta-data to them, (old)

  • Orbot, a TOR client to access the web anonymously, (root)

  • Orweb 2, a browser to use with Orbot, (root)

  • RecForge Lite to record sounds and conversations, (old)

  • RedPhone: Private Calls to secure your phone calls (only with other users of the same app RedPhone), (old)

  • 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. (old)

Misc.

  • La Boite à Kaamelott is a French application containing many oral quotes from the famous Kaamelott TV show, it’s basically a lighter version of the awesome website Kaamelott Soundoard,

  • QR Reader, even if we all know that QR codes are useless, (old)

  • QuickOffice or OfficeSuite 7 to read or modify OpenDocument documents (like Word™), (old)

  • 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, (old)

  • WordPress™ to read or write on your WordPress™ powered blog. (old)

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™.

Voir aussi

Aptoide

It is another good alternative to Google™ Play, like F-Droid.

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.