30 Best Android Apps Of 2018

Shutterstock2017 saw a nice bunch of useful and inventive apps hit the Play store, and a number of our older favorites got some notable updates too. We’ve rounded up 30 of our favorites from our testing through the year - scroll through our list, find your must-haves and be sure to let us know which ones you’re rocking on your own device into the new year. Practically all Android phones come with a file explorer, but if you’re not happy with your current choice, Files Go is worth a look. Trips was already great for automatically collating your travel tickets and bookings into one place and recommending places to visit, but it’s now even more powerful, thanks to a couple of nice updates from earlier this year. It now captures bus and train tickets as well and adds them to your itinerary. Trips also now lets you share the reservations for your journey, including hotel booking and travel tickets, straight from the app via email.

It also plays nice with custom lists that you’ve created in Google Maps or Search, and there’s an option to merge multiple trips into a single adventure. If you’re heading out of town for the holidays, this is a must-have on your phone. If you’re getting to grips with English, or looking to improve your grammar when writing emails, reports, and messages, Grammarly Keyboard can help. It suggests improvements to your input as you type and make automatic corrections as well, so your text reads better - while also giving you a chance to learn from your mistakes on-the-fly. My only gripe is that it doesn’t allow for gesture-style typing, a la Swype and SwiftKey, but it’s still plenty useful for folks who want to fix their grammar. Datally is designed to give you control over apps to prevent them from chewing through your data plan - both during active use and while running in the background. Once you’ve spotted data-hungry apps, you can choose to restrict their consumption, or make a note to ditch them for more efficient alternatives.

Additionally, the app also comes with a public Wi-Fi finder that will guide you to locations where you can hop online for free. How handy is that, There are now a bunch of different apps for applying art-style filters to your photos, but I’m yet to see that offers effects as tasteful as Porta’s. They work especially well on landscapes and urban scenes, but they look pretty neat on portraits as well. You’ll want to fiddle with the sliders a bit to get just the right filter strength to suit your pictures, but it’s easy to get the hang of, and generate some high-quality results. This is Facebook basically Messenger without a bunch of (mostly) unnecessary bells and whistles. For folks who are low on storage space and RAM, it’s a great choice. You’ll lose out on voice and video calling, and the ability to send GIFs (boo), as well as some useless bloat like Messenger Day (aka Stories), bots and games (yay). That seems like a small price to pay for massive savings on space: Lite takes up just 17MB, less than a tenth of what Messenger requires on your phone.

You should also find more than 100MB of RAM freed up when you make the switch. In the event that it’s not available on Google Play in your country, you can grab it from APKMirror. Clue’s beautiful period tracking app has been around for a while, but I only learned of it recently when our own Rachel Kaser recommended it for this roundup. In addition to a fantastic interface that’s informative and easy to scan, it helps you track your fertility accurately, and share your menstrual cycle data securely with people you trust. This year, the app also updated its pill tracking functionality with handy reminder notifications and a new design to show which days you’re at greater risk of getting pregnant if you’ve missed a pill. Wish you could hire a bot to handle your WhatsApp messages when you’re busy, Can’t Talk’s got you covered. Just set up a custom message, and toggle auto-reply on: when someone pings you on WhatsApp, it’ll automatically send out your text and let you know the task’s been taken care of with a silent notification. It only worked with WhatsApp in our testing, but support for other services is likely on the cards.

There are loads of apps for voice and video calling nowadays, but if most of your contacts are still on Skype, Microsoft’s Lite version of the service is worth a try. It weighs in at just 13MB, while bundling essential functionality as well as a few additional features, including an SMS inbox and a mobile data usage monitor. That should help you save some storage space on your phone, as well as offer a smoother experience on older devices. BBC’s revamped recipe book brings more than 10,000 recipes spanning a wide range of cuisines, courses, and techniques, in a new easy-to-read interface - making it a one-stop shop for all your cooking reference needs. Once you’ve signed in, you can search through and view the lot of them, complete with nutrition information, beautiful photos, step-by-step instructions, and complementary dishes for each recipe. Oh, and it’s completely free. Bonfire is Facebook’s take on instant group video chats that’s aimed at millennials. It’s great for people invested deeply in the social network’s ecosystem, as it makes it easy to invite your Facebook contacts, and share screenshots of your conversations straight to Instagram.