If you are navigating an android device, here are the latest Apps that are trending this month as developers are pushing the envelope on a daily basis trying to improve and enhance our smartphone and tablet experiences.
- Acture is a digital wellbeing app for reducing screen time. You simply turn on the app when you want to focus on things other than your phone. Every time you pick up your phone during that period, the phone asks you why you want to use it and you have to tell it. Later, you can review your responses to see why you keep using the device. It’s a bit of a self accountability method as you can criticize your decisions later on. The app has excellent execution and does what it says.
- Adobe Photoshop Camera is Adobe’s newest app. It’s a camera app with a bunch of filters like most camera apps these days. Photoshop Camera does let you see real-time effects before you shoot the picture and it can do some extra stuff like auto-tone, a bokeh-style portrait mode, and more. It’s obviously made for Instagram. The app is fairly easy to use even if you have to download some filters from Adobe after the fact. The app is otherwise free to use.
- Argent is a cyrptocurrency app and it has the potential to be one of the great ones. It’s technically a cryptocurrency wallet and you can use it to keep track of your Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum. However, you can also explore DeFi and Ethereum Dapps and swap currency straight from the app. You can also buy currency with Apple Pay or a debit card. It boasts above average security as well. We hope it gets support for more payment methods, but it’s otherwise a home run.
- Citra Emulator is a new emulator for the Nintendo 3DS. It boasts the usual emulator features like save and load states along with some graphical enhancements. This one also supports camera, microphone, and motion controls along with external game controllers. In terms of compatibility, it supports hundreds of games and it worked fine with all the ones we tried. The pro version adds a dark theme and some additional texture filtering if you want it. This one is still in early access beta so there are bugs, but it’s coming along quite nicely.
- GameClub is a subscription game service and it’s actually not half bad. You sign up for $4.99 per month and then download a bunch of Android games. You can play the games offline with no advertising and no in-app purchases. The game list isn’t all that impressive yet, but there are some good gems there, including some old favorites. You can also enter in games you already own and use the app as kind of a library manager. It’s good, but not great. However, it has the potential to be great if it can keep expanding its library.
- Lockscreen Widgets brings back an old feature. It’s a lock screen replacement app that lets you put widgets on your lock screen. It works very much like old lock screen widgets did. You can put one widget per page. You can then re-order pages as you see fit and tap the widget with three fingers to hide it. It’s not a complicated app and it’s likely niche in this day and age where many skip the lock screen with biometrics. However, those who want a return to the good old days can give this a try. It runs for $1.49 with no in-app purchases or ads.
- Microsoft Family Safety is a parental control app. It’s similar to Google Family Link, but for Microsoft accounts instead of Google accounts. The app lets you do things like set web and search filters on Microsoft Edge browser, set screen time limits on Xbox and Windows PCs, and get a daily summary of your child’s actions on those platforms. It’s not the best for mobile use, but Google Family Link covers that nicely already. Microsoft’s is way better for non-smartphone use.
- Soli Sandbox is for the Soli chips in Pixel 4 devices. The app lets you open prototype Soli modules and try them out on your device. This is primarily a developer device for testing and, to be honest, this probably should have come out a lot sooner. However, its existence gives us home for the Soli chip because we don’t think Google would launch something like this if people were only going to use it for a few months. In any case, those with a Pixel 4 and also have access to some Soli prototypes can use this app to play around a bit.
- Split Apps is an Android customization app for fans of the multi-window experience. It basically takes two apps and creates a shortcut to open both at once in split screen mode. That’s about all this app does. You open it, pick two apps, and the app creates the icon on your home screen. It doesn’t with all apps and games because some can’t be opened in split screen mode. Additionally, some older, more sluggish devices may struggle a bit with it. It should work for apps though.
- Wavelet is an equalizer app unlike any other. It does a lot of the basic stuff and includes various presets, a nine band equalizer, a bass booster, a reverb preset, and even a virtualizer. The app’s claim to fame is its 2,400 pre-calculated presets on a headphone by headphone basis. So let’s say you own a pair of Sennheiser HD 650s. You can tell the app to adjust the sound based on those headphones specifically and it tries to get everything as Harman target as possible. This one is something different in the equalizer genre, a genre that really needed something different.
