April’s coming to an end meaning we get to reflect on some of the best Android apps to hit the Play Store during the month.
The first app on the list is called Skimcast. It’s an app designed for the busy users out there who love to read various news articles but don’t necessarily have the time to read them in their entirety. What this app does is produce document summaries between 1 and 99 percent of the original document length. You get to decide how long. It uses algorithms to produce a summary of what is on your screen. So my favorite function is the ability to copy and paste the URL into the app so that it can skim down the article that you select and condense a rather large article into a couple of paragraphs to ultimately save you some serious time.
There are some other features like the ability for the app to read it out loud. Overall, the app works fairly well but I can imagine it will improve over time.
Boomerang is an app kind of like Netflix but made for cartoons. It has a ton of classic cartoons that you can stream for a monthly fee. Although this sounds like a sponsor, I can assure you that they are not paying us to say this. I just grew up watching Bugs Bunny, Scooby Doo, Tom & Jerry, and many other cartoons. I might be biased but I think if you’re a cartoon junkie, you could totally justify the $3-$5 per month membership.
Flick Launcher is an open source launcher inspired by the Pixel launcher, which is one of my favorite launchers in the wild. The launcher is still in development but it features app shortcuts, gestures like double tap to sleep, swipe up and down to open an app. There’s a fingerprint app lock functionality. It supports icon packs. You can even customize icon sizes and there’s just much more functionality in this launcher.
If you’re willing to put up with the occasional software issues due to a big underdevelopment, then check out Flick Launcher.
Invert is a puzzle game for fans of brain teasers like Reverse Seed, Go, Sudoku, and Rubix Cubes. The game mechanics include flipping certain patterns of tiles by pressing on the screen. The goal is to make all tiles the same color using as few moves as possible and while under the time limit so there’s a lot of challenging components to this. The puzzles are very fun but do be warned: it can get pretty challenging the more you progress.
The Learning Lock is one of the most unique lock screens I’ve ever seen. It clearly is designed for those concerned about privacy as it uses machine learning to detect anomalies in your pattern unlock sequence. So if it detects suspicious activity like someone has picked up your phone and is trying to unlock your phone, it will ask for a backup pin for them to enter; in which case they probably won’t know and won’t be able to unlock your phone.
BixRemap is short for Bixby Remap. If you have a Galaxy S8 or S8+ and you don’t use or like the Bixby Digital Assistant, you can use this app to remap the dedicated Bixby button on the side of the phone to open something more useful like the Google Assistant. After you enable the usage data access and start the service, it will automatically remap the Bixby button to open up Google.
It’s a wonderful app to have especially since Bixby isn’t even working fully right now.
Walls for Reddit is an app that will let you browse through the wallpapers submitted to Reddit and the various sub-Reddits. There are thousands of very attractive user-generated wallpapers to choose from and there are useful tabs that lets you filter out many of the best wallpapers. If you like to change your wallpaper frequently, then by all means, download this app.
Blocky Castle is a very addicting game with neat visuals. You play as some sort of pet and hop around from left to right, all while traversing up a castle. There’s not really much more I can say than that. It’s just a fun game and it’s one of my favorite released in April.
The Halo Icon Pack made it on the list because of the visually appealing icons and because it’s free. This icon pack works with all the popular launchers. They are high quality icons and they feature a soft color palette that looks very modern and elegant. If you don’t like the looks of this icon pack, then don’t download it. But if you do, there’s a link down below to do so.
The last app on the list is a classic. It’s called Pictionary, which was recently updated on the Play Store. You can choose your game mode such as Quick Draw or Turn Based. Quick Draw, for example, lets you play 2 vs 2 in real time against other real players. If you’ve never played Pictionary, basically the goal is to guess what someone else is drawing before the time runs out. Usually, that’s a team member. It’s a lot of fun and I love the online element of this game.
With that last one, those are 10 of our favorite apps from April 2017.
