Must Have Android Apps To Optimize Your Device

Updated on April 3, 2014 Theo more So You Just Got Android! Android is a mobile operating gaining popularity real fast. However, it faces the lack of hardware and software integration. As phone manufacturers combine faster, bigger, and better hardware components to meet the demand of the software, the software developers see these hardware upgrades as opportunity to make applications bigger and better, but also heavier as well. This endless cycle needs to stop, but it is much easier said than done. This list of Android applications are handpicked because of their stability, full-fledged functionalities, and usefulness. Just Out Of Curiosity! What do you mainly use your Android device for, As an Android user, I have been through several updates. Each time, I have to cycle through applications because there were changes that I liked and disliked. The only way to truly to find the best app is to download them all and then see which one performs the best.

After endless hours of doing so to optimize my smartphone, I thought it would be easier just to share the best applications to meet your needs. I focus on several key aspects including stability, functionality, features, and advertisements. This is probably the only PDF reader that is capable of flow text. Kingsoft and Polaris were the office and productivity applications that I tried to use. Only problem is that PDF files are very stubborn. Unlike word processing documents or text documents, PDF files are treated like images when one tries to re-size the display on their screen. Only Foxit, at the moment, is capable of ignoring the formatting and focus only on the text flow layout to fit the screen's width. This is only for simple text based PDF files. It is not capable of handling embedded images. While this isn't perfect, it does a much better job by far.

And yes, it even beats the native Adobe PDF Reader app, which I found very surprising. At only 11 MB, it is much smaller than its Kingsoft, QuickOffice, and Adobe Reader competitors. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, Kingsoft Office has been my go-to office application for the longest time. I vouched for it for the longest time until they lost me as a user. I actually found out how buggy it is after editing a document instead of just using it as a viewer. The problem starts when typing on a zoomed-in document. The cursor tends to jump, more specifically backtrack. No, I specifically checked to make sure that it was not because of my finger placement. I did not accidentally tap another area on the screen causing the cursor to navigate to that region. This is happening on its own. Due to this, Kingsoft is officially out. I went back to Polaris by Infraware, which came pre-installed on my smartphone.

I generally avoid stock applications because they usually are just bloatware that nobody wants. However, this is one of those stock applications that you definitely want. Unlike Kingsoft, Infraware focuses on long term releases. Therefore, you won't see be seeing many updates. It's quite well thought out in this sense that each update releases features that have been thoroughly tested to work and work really well. In some ways, it is similar to Foxit. The flow text view is a must for all smartphones due to the screen size. I highly doubt anyone would want to zoom in on the text and then have to scroll left to right, then up to down. Flow text is definitely a feature to improve readability, but only to non-PDF documents. This is where, as mentioned earlier, Foxit came in. Dropbox won some extra points against Box in the area of stability and performance. I'm a Box user and probably will continue be a user, but I still recommend Dropbox.

When I purchased my HP machine, I received a promotion giving me 50 GB of lifetime storage. It would not make much sense to give up 50 GB to go over to using 2 GB through Dropbox. Yet, I have used several applications including hubiC, Mediafire, Google Drive, SkyDrive (now known as OneDrive), and SurDoc. SurDoc's 100 GB free storage was an eye-catcher at first, but the platform was very slow. Mediafire and hubiC faced accessibility inconveniences. For example, the default or base directory for choosing files to upload is one of no relevance, which really slows you down over the long run. Google Drive and OneDrive are by Google and Microsoft respectively. Unfortunately, they both have experienced their down times, especially Microsoft's OneDrive. It doesn't affect me too much as cloud storage is just a temporary backup of my most important recent projects. Cloud storage is just a backup in case my flash drive fails. However, this may not be the case for many people.