The 40 best free apps for Android

The 40 best free apps for Android

Everyone loves free stuff. And there’s plenty of it on Android, with an insane number of free apps available in the Google Play store. But most of them are rubbish: a frustrating mix of non-official rip-offs, shonkily designed bedroom projects and, in the worst cases, plain old arrgghh-this-doesn’t-even-work-at-all duds. Fortunately, there are gems lurking among the dross, and we’ve rounded up 40 crackers that won’t cost you a cent.

SNAPSEED

We’ve long had a bit of a soft spot for Snapseed. Its intuitive interface was always one of the most tactile on Android; moreover, the huge range of filters and effects made it perfect for all manner of photographic manipulation and fine-tuning. But with 2015’s major revamp, Snapseed became further entrenched in must-have territory. The star of the upgrade: Stacks, which converts each filter you apply into an editable layer.

PRISMA

The idea behind Prisma is to turn photos into works of art, with almost zero effort. You load a pic, and then select a painting or illustration. Styles vary from Munch to manga-style fare, and the results are surprisingly authentic. The only snag is you must be online for Prisma to work its magic. However, any art it makes can be saved to your device or shared with the world. Just don’t get a bit too excited about your artistic prowess and lop off an ear.

RETRICA

There are so many camera apps, social networks pretending to be camera apps, and camera apps pretending to be social networks, that it takes a lot to stand out. Retrica manages to do so due to its straightforward interface, slew of live filters and effects (so you can see what you’re going to get at all times) and excellent multi-shot collage-creation mode. Use the last of those when you’re zooming along in a car and you get some really amazing photo strips.

STOP MOTION STUDIO

Fancy yourself as the next big thing in animation? Sadly lacking the money to buy any equipment or even an app? No matter: with Stop Motion Studio, you only need your Android device’s camera and some bits and bobs to shuffle about your desk. This app’s a cut-down version of the paid app, and so is light on features. Nonetheless, it still enables you to shoot individual frames, arrange and edit them, and then spit out the results to a movie or animated GIF.

8BIT PHOTO LAB

If you only feel happy when digital imagery has edges chunky enough to take off a kneecap, you’ll feel right at home with 8Bit Photo Lab. Import a pic, roll the dice, and the app draws on computing’s history to create something that might once have graced an ancient PC or Game Boy. But this is no mere filter app. Every setting can be tweaked, and alternate output styles (from circles to glitches) await discovery.

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP FIX

Until the (unlikely) day Adobe sees fit to release its desktop products in full on mobile, we’ll have to make do with the company carving off bits and squirting them into apps. Photoshop Fix is, though, a suitably impressive bit, if you’re in the habit of retouching and restoring photographs. The basics – cropping and adjustments – aren’t anything you can’t get elsewhere. But Photoshop Fix’s Heal and Liquify tools are something else, respectively knocking out imperfections and enabling drastic effects.

ANIMATIC

One of the greatest things about smartphones is how the right app can make complex tasks far more approachable. Animatic is an animation tool designed for anyone. You scribble on the canvas, add a new frame, see the previous one faintly so you can line things up, and then scribble some more. A few dozen frames later and you’ll (hopefully) have an animation you can play and export as a movie or GIF. Nothing you create is going to trouble Pixar, but the scribbly, sketchy quality of Animatic output is full of character.

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR DRAW

On the desktop, Adobe powerhouse Illustrator is most known for enabling creative types to fashion anything from logos to elaborate illustrative fare. Illustrator Draw brings much of the tech to Android, but is mostly concerned with creating freehand artwork. This is an impressive desktop-oriented app, in terms of feature set. There’s a layers system for separating elements or tracing over an imported photo, a 64x zoom, multiple configurable pen tips, perspective grids, and shape stencils to temporarily plonk on the canvas when you fancy some accuracy.

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP SKETCH

Much like stablemate Adobe Illustrator Draw, Adobe Photoshop Sketch utilises the smarts of an Adobe desktop app to provide you with a seriously impressive Android-based fingerprinting environment. This one’s all about natural media – scribbling with digital takes on thick acrylic paint, pastels, inks, and watercolours. The app excels in terms of features, with a layers system, configurable brushes, and you being able to stash favourite tools and colours in the toolbar.

PICSART PHOTO STUDIO & COLLAGE

There’s an awful lot going on in PicsArt. It seemingly wants to simultaneously be Snapseed and Prisma, although it’s not as good as either of those apps. So why’s it in this round-up, then? Collages – that’s why. Fire up PicsArt, select a bunch of snaps and a layout, and you can fiddle around with placement, borders, effects, and dividers, and then hurl the end result at your social network of choice.

PIGMENT

It turns out that colouring in is good for relieving stress – although that’s not the case when you spill paint all over the furniture or accidentally grind pastels into the rug. Fortunately, Pigment provides a safe digital alternative – and one far beyond its contemporaries. This isn’t just a rubbish tap-to-fill pretender. Instead, you get a range of tools to use – markers; brushes; fancy gradients – and can even choose whether the app helps you ‘stay between the lines’.

GOOGLE MAPS

Chances are, you’ve already got this beauty installed on your Android device. If not, what are you waiting for? Google’s mapping app is the best around, with excellent routing by car, public transport, or bike/foot. But it’s more than just a massive map. You get Street View for nosing around selected spots by way of panoramas, fast access to information about local amenities and entertainment, and an offline mode.

CITYMAPPER

Citymapper is all about zipping about by the best modes of transport possible, and dozens of cities are supported. It figures out where you are and plugs into all available transit information, enabling you to rapidly plan journeys via train, bus, bike, or ferry. Journey overviews enable you to compare how many calories or bucks you’ll burn, along with discovering which are ‘rain safe’, and those that’ll require you to hang around for ages before getting going.

GOOGLE EARTH

Google Earth used to feel like Google Maps wrapped around a massive ball. But it’s now ideal for anyone who fancies doing tourism, but who’s too lazy to get out of a chair. You can scoot about the planet by way of search, a randomised ‘feeling lucky’ option, or Voyager tours. The tours enable you to gawp at bits of NASA, modern wonders of the world, or where the dinosaurs bought it.

GOOGLE TRANSLATE

We’ve seen a few clever translation apps in our time, but Google Translate now crushes them all. It offers (sometimes clunky) word-for-word translations of over 100 languages with input via text, handwritten words or symbols, spoken words or even text recognition via the camera. It can then give you the translation in the form of text or speak it for you.

WEATHER UNDERGROUND

This one’s ideal for weather geeks and anyone who just wants to know whether walking the dog will result in them getting drenched. Select a location and the app flings data into a bunch of tiles you can shuffle about, depending on your needs. Current conditions always stay at the top along with a day/hour/summary forecast; below those, you can delve into dew points, a lovely sunrise/sunset animation, air quality details, and local webcams.

RUNKEEPER

If you’re putting yourself through a fitness grind alone, this virtual back-patter will help spur you on. It tracks all your runs, walks and rides, then does the maths to tell you (and the entire world via social media) how many calories you’ve burnt, how far you’ve gone and generally how heroic you’ve been over the past week or so. The in-app purchase model keeps it all nice and tidy too, so even in the basic free format it’s a very neat app to use.

ZOMBIES, RUN!

For most people, it’s a drag to slog along local streets in trainers that have seen better days. But you can spice up your jogging with Zombies, Run! It’s more or less a post-apocalyptic Walking Dead-style scenario smashed into Runkeeper, sending you out on vital missions that rather suspiciously always involve running. Periodically, zombies will show up, and unless you up your pace, they’ll tear your face off.

TAOMIX 2

When everything’s getting a bit much, TaoMix 2 takes you to a calm place by filling your ears with meditative noise. But this isn’t some noodly new-age app – the interface is all neon minimalism. It’s nicely tactile, too: you drag sound discs to adjust your mix, long-press and drag to change their prominence, and then flick a ring-shaped playhead to create a constantly evolving soundscape.

REMIXLIVE

We’re all for making music properly, but sometimes you just want to make a noise with a minimum of effort. With Remixlive, you select a genre and then tap away at pads to trigger loops. Everything’s always in tune, and you can record your electronic masterpiece as you go. Want more control? Try the mini mixing desk, with its knobs and sliders, or the FX section with a pad for slathering your tune in delay or a filter.

MUSIC MAKER JAM

Sitting somewhere between music-creator and loop remixer, Music Maker JAM is a great way to get started if you fancy making a noise. Choose a style, assign loops to tracks, and even record yourself yelling over the top, like a repressed diva trapped in a bin. But that’s not all – Music Maker JAM enables you to live mix, create song sections to switch between, and also adjust the key of the loop across any of its beats.

YOUSICIAN

These days, people are just as likely to pick up a tiny plastic guitar as a real one. Yousician takes advantage of the gamification of music, essentially spinning Guitar Hero 90 degrees and having a proper guitar be your controller. You therefore work your way through timing-based exercises that have you strum chords and pick notes at precisely the right moments.

QUIK

The only problem with modern smartphones having superb video-cameras built-in is you end up with loads of videos you never do anything with. Quik gives you a helping hand, largely by being a video editor where you don’t have to do any of that time-consuming editing stuff. Pick some videos and a theme, and Quik spits out an energetic, great-looking short. If you’re not thrilled by the results, tweak cuts, filters and fonts to suit. Or you can wait for Quik to serve up its weekly ‘highlights’ video.

FXGURU: MOVIE FX DIRECTOR

This slightly gimmicky special effects app is nonetheless very clever, verging on useful. It comes with a batch of free effects with additional packs as in-app purchases. You point your phone or tablet at a scene, and then the app records a short video clip with a destructive missile attack or perhaps a hovering UFO superimposed over the live action. Motion tracking allows you to pan as you film, too.

IA WRITER

Although iA Writer is often described as a minimal text editor, it’s perhaps more accurate to call it a focussed one. The main interface is streamlined – plain text, a small additional keyboard bar for adding Markdown, and an optional word count. But this app has plenty of features that make it closer in nature to a desktop app. There’s a focus mode for highlighting the current line, and a night mode when tapping away in the dark and not searing your retinas.

SWIFTKEY + EMOJI

The default Android keyboard is perfectly decent, but SwiftKey’s a popular alternative for good reason. Along with boasting excellent predictive typing, it enables you to more rapidly type by swiping your fingers across the keys rather than laboriously pecking away at them individually. Initially, you might find yourself facing some oddball typos, but with some practice, SwiftKey can hugely speed up your word rate.

DROPBOX

As Android moves closer to home computer territory, syncing photos, music and work documents is increasingly important. As a free service, Dropbox offers 2GB of pleasingly simple online storage which is automatically synced whenever you log in from any of your devices – very useful for occasional file transfers, semi-permanent documents and shared folders. The Android app is nothing fancy but it doesn’t need to be, getting the job done without fuss.

CAMSCANNER

If anyone would claim we currently live in a paperless age, we’d like to laugh in their face, but only after briefly being a bit sad that we don’t actually live without paper. CamScanner at least tries to shift you in the right direction. Using your device’s camera, you can scan notes and receipts, and the app auto-enhances the result to make it clear and sharp. This can then be shared.

CALCNOTE

The problem with most calculator apps is they’re rubbish, and that’s because most calculators are rubbish for anything beyond basic sums. CalcNote’s cunning plan is to be part spreadsheet. That might sound terrifyingly dull, but CalcNote proves hugely useful. You can work with custom keyboards, tapping out multi-line sums with context – as in, actual words alongside the numbers.

FOREST

The idea behind Forest is to use your smartphone less. You set a timer, and if you leave your phone alone, a little cartoon tree grows on the screen. Get tempted by Facebook or play Candy Crush, and you end up with a dead stick. Your daily forests can be compared, and each successfully grown tree nets you some coins. These can be spent on new tree types to grow.

SLACK

It wears the beard of business, and talks about “all your team communication in one place,” and that is a side of Slack. It’s a powerful real-time messaging system, where you can talk all businessy about business things, and almost never drift into a conversation about jetpacks. But Slack also works nicely as a group communications tool for anyone: friends working on a project, or just wanting to talk using a system that’s compatible with multiple platforms and devices.

DUOLINGO

Google Translate may be great, but the long-term aim should be to learn to speak all those languages yourself. Duolingo does an amazing job of making this fun, with a format that’s a bit like a pub quiz machine. It currently supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Ukrainian, Esperanto, Polish and Turkish, and if you ‘play’ it regularly you’ll definitely pick up at least some competence in your chosen language.

FEEDLY

With the demise of Google Reader, the world needed an alternative RSS reader – and Feedly fits the bill nicely. It does pretty much everything you’d want an RSS reader to do, presenting the latest stories from your favourite media outlets and blogs in an attractive, easily browsable list. You’ll find every site you might ever be interested in, plus it integrates neatly with the likes of Pocket and Evernote.

INSTAPAPER

The web, increasingly, isn’t geared towards reading. During long-reads, you’re often bombarded by other things, trying to make you click away. Hence ‘read later’ systems, the original of which is the superb Instapaper. You send content to Instapaper from a browser, and it arrives stripped of extraneous junk, leaving only the article’s text and imagery. Start scrolling and the app subtly shifts to full-screen, providing one of the most pleasing reading experiences on the platform.

LETTERBOXD

If you’ve ever sat through half a cinematic abomination, only to realise with a start you’re a massive idiot because you’ve seen it before, install Letterboxd. With this app, you can search for movies you’d like to see, add them to a watch list, and then rate them when you’re done. There’s a social component, too – beyond ratings, you can write reviews, and turn into a ferocious critic warning people off of making the same mistakes you did.

SAGO MINI FRIENDS

If your Android tablet frequently finds itself in the hands of a tiny person, ensure Sago Mini Friends is installed. This sweet-natured outing features a cartoon critter visiting chums’ houses, and getting involved in all manner of kid-friendly activities. These are supposed to promote empathy – during an eating mini-game, for example, feeding one animal causes the other to look utterly forlorn; although they both emit a massive burp at the end of the meal, which presumably makes everything all right.

ATTENBOROUGH’S STORY OF LIFE

David Attenborough is a broadcasting legend. It’s fitting, then, that this app is a bit of all right as well. It draws on Attenborough’s decades of work travelling the planet and coming face to face with everything from gorillas to ferocious sharks. In all, you can delve into over 1000 of the greatest wildlife moments ever filmed. The man himself shows up in the odd intro, and there are hidden films to find, recorded exclusively for the app.

VLC

Wouldn’t it be lovely if there was one video format to rule them all, like MP3 is to music? Well, dream on… Until that day you’ll be thankful for VLC, which aims to play every video format you’ll ever encounter. If you like to source your movies from varied locations, you’ll find this one of the most useful apps on your phone or tablet. It’s ad-free and doesn’t try to harvest all your personal data either, which makes a nice change.

TUNEIN RADIO

Take a break from the endless banality of UK radio and tune in to a different point of view or musical selection. So long as you have a half-decent data connection, this app will tickle your ears with audio streams from all over the world, browsable by location, genre or what’s trending. It also works as an on-demand podcast player. It’s brilliant for in-car entertainment, so long as you have a data contract that can take the strain.

SKYVIEW FREE

Unleash your inner Brian Cox with this astronomy app, which has you point your Android device at the sky to instantly identify the celestial bodies you’re peering at. The interface gets out of your way when you want to blissfully stargaze without distractions, but a few taps gets you fast access to a raft of features: an AR overlay; paths for tracking objects over time; a night mode; search.