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best android apps
With over two million apps in the Play Store, Android is home to one of the biggest app stores in the world. Soon they’ll even be on your favorite Chromebooks as well. In this year’s annual Lifehacker Pack, we’re picking the must-have downloads for every category of app you could ever need. The Lifehacker Pack is a yearly snapshot of our favorite, essential applications for each of our favorite platforms. For our always-updating directory of all the best apps, be sure to bookmark our Android App Directory. To-do list managers come in more flavors than Skittles, but one of these three should work for just about everyone. Google Keep keeps things simpler and as straightforward as possible, while Wunderlist is packed with great features. Whatever your preferences, one of these to-do apps should work for you. You can schedule messages, snooze them for later, and even set up recurring messages. Google also offers a similar app that works directly with your Gmail account called Inbox. This app allows you to bundle related emails together, snooze emails, or pin them as to-dos. It also surfaces important information in your emails like links to package tracking info, reservations, and more.

Inbox also plugs into your Google account to show you your Google Now reminders directly in the app. Inbox is an entirely different way to approach email. Calendars need to display a lot of information in a small space. In this, Today Calendar excels. The unique split view shows you an overview of your month on the top half of your phone with an agenda for the selected day on the bottom half. It also has quick actions that allow you to call numbers, pull up addresses, or email an attendee with one tap. Nothing beats its speed, simplicity, and ubiquity. However, if you like to stick to Google’s ecosystem, Google Drive offers a bit more flexibility for storing your files when it comes to integrated apps. With Google’s suite of document editing apps to accompany Drive, you may even use both in tandem (as many of us do). You can even combine it with Pocket to reduce clutter while still saving everything.

Unfortunately, Evernote recently upped its paid subscription price and limited users to two devices. If you can’t live with that, Microsoft’s OneNote is a powerful alternative that can store your notes and help you organize your digital notebooks. Habitica (formerly known as HabitRPG) takes this concept and applies to real life instead of World of Warcraft. Create habits or repetitive tasks you want to perform and it will give you experience points for completing them. If you fail to do so, you’ll lose health points. The app is one of the best ways to productively gamify your life. Now, it includes a ton of useful features. You can view tabs open on other devices, hide your activity with incognito mode, and use experimental features like a stripped-down “reader” mode. You can also use Chrome’s data saver mode to keep your downloads light. With that manufactured advantage, though, Twitter’s app has come a long way. It supports multiple accounts, lists, and plenty more. If you want to try an alternative (and don’t mind jumping through Twitter’s annoying token limit hoops), Falcon Pro and Talon both offer a ton of features for power users while letting you customize your experience.

Since Twitter’s token limit can get in the way, we’ve included both just in case one isn’t available to new users at the moment. It supports group messaging, has Google Voice integration, video chat, SMS, stickers, and plenty more. Facebook has also built Messenger into an extremely powerful tool with nearly all of those features, plus the ability to send voice recordings, search for images and GIFs, integrate with third-party apps and even send money. Best of all, everyone you know is probably already on Facebook and using Messenger to begin with. That may cause some to worry a bit. Still, until Google officially kills the project or merges it with something else, it has more features for a single free service than any competitor. Recording your calls, texting over WiFi or your tablet, calling from the desktop, phone call forwarding are all part of Google Voice’s robust arsenal. The company stirred up a bit of controversy last year by introducing a paid pro plan for things like universal copy and paste, or to send more than 100 SMS messages a month, but it’s still pretty killer.

You can use it to mirror your phone’s notifications, connect with IFTTT channels, and more. It’s almost impossible to list all the amazing things Google Now can do (although we’ve tried), but the short list includes voice commands, reminders, travel time, package tracking, and tons more. Just be sure to train Google Now well. Google Maps for Android includes a ton of excellent features like integrated search history, local traffic incidents, and more. This year, Google’s also made it way easier to add stops to your route and find gas prices. And all of this is on top of Maps already being our favorite map application. The app comes with live-updating widgets, animated radar and cloud cover maps. Dark Sky, the awesome up-to-the-minute weather app also came to Android this year. 3/year to get the absolute latest data, but the experience is well worth it if you need timely weather updates.