Apps all android phones should have

15 Apps Everyone Should Have In the Phone

The app market is flooded with more than 2 million apps, and new ones debut all the time. We’re all familiar with popular options like Facebook and Google Maps, and there are plenty of pointless apps too. What about little-known apps that provide real value, though? There are some surprising options out there, and we’ve hand-picked 10 of the most notable ones for your convenience.

1. Horizon

Isn’t it annoying when people post videos that were recorded while their smartphones were being held vertically? This cuts off the image and makes the picture look much smaller. If you constantly forget to hold your smartphone vertically while recording a video, this is the app for you. Regardless of how you hold your phone, it records the video in landscape – or horizontal – format.

2. Sleep Cycle Power Nap

All naps aren’t created equal. Research shows that a short, quick nap – or power nap – is far more refreshing than a long sleep during the middle of the day. This app helps you avoid oversleeping by playing a gentle alarm when the appropriate length of time has passed. Handily enough, it also includes a recovery nap mode and a single sleep cycle mode that lets you go through one full sleep cycle so you don’t wake up in the middle of REM sleep.

3. PaperKarma

Today it’s easy enough to keep spam out of your email inbox. What about the paper junk mail that fills your real mailbox, though? There’s finally an app for that! With PaperKarma, you just snap a photo of whatever unwanted mail you receive. As long as it’s addressed directly to you, the app will automatically contact whoever sent it to have you removed from their list. The best part is that it really works.

4. Nu Skin TR90

If you want to manage your weight better this is the app for you. It not only helps you track of your waistline, it lets you track your food intake and record your exercise activities too. In one swoop, you can keep track of your most important health-related tasks to stay as fit and healthy as you can be.

5. Sleep Talk Recorder

Ever been told you talk in your sleep? Not convinced? Give this incredible app a whirl. It only triggers when sound is detected, so you don’t have to play back an entire, night-long recording. You’re sure to be amazed and surprised by the things you say while you’re fast asleep.

6. Action Movie FX

This fun app lets you add cool special effects to your videos as you record them. From missile strikes to car crashes, it lets you quickly and easily add a little more excitement to any video you record with your smartphone. For a minimal extra fee, you can download a huge array of additional effects too.

7. Any.Do

Stop jotting your to-do lists onto paper. With Any.Do, everything you need to take care of is right there in front of you. In fact, its “Moment” feature shows you at a glance what needs to be handled in the immediate future. You can finally get rid of that nagging feeling that you’re forgetting something important by using this app.

8. RunPee

Nothing is worse than missing a crucial part of a movie because you have to go use the bathroom. Thanks to RunPee, you never have to worry about this anymore. Just turn on the app when the movie starts, tell it which movie you’re watching and it will alert you to the optimal times to go.

9. Venmo

Make share payments with just about anyone for free with this clever app. You can also send requests for payments from practically anyone. Quick and easy to use, this app is sure to become one of your favorites in no time.

10. Walk Up Alarm Clock

Tired of oversleeping from hitting snooze again and again? This app will change your life. Once the alarm sounds, it won’t stop until you’ve walked at least 10 steps. You can adjust the number of steps to up to 100, so it’s sure to work no matter how deep a sleeper you are.

11. RadarScope

If you want to see what’s really happening with the weather this app will provide you with the best and most up-to-date radar views of the world around you. If you want to read what the weatherman reads, this is it. If you’re an enthusiast about the weather, this app is for you.

12. Tunein Radio

Have access to over 100,000 radio stations, including all of the sports stations in the world and listen to how your favorite team is doing. This is not only the ultimate sports lovers app, but it’s the ultimate music lovers app, too.

13. SafeTrek

At certain moments in your life you may feel like your life is at risk. It can be walking to your car late at night, or even just being in the wrong part of town at the wrong time. With SafeTrek all you have to do is press a button that says, “Hold until safe” and if something happens just let go of your phone and it will call the police automatically and notify them where you are. This app is better than pepper spray and it has been receiving 5 stars across the board. It’s considered one of the best safety apps.

14. Qwiki

Do you have a newborn? Chances are you’re taking a ton of photos. Qwiki helps you pick out the best pics. After all you don’t want to post every photo, then your friends get slightly annoyed.

15. Countdown +

Exciting events come all of the time in life. If you want to keep track of them and count down to them, this is the perfect app for you.
After downloading these apps, you’re sure to agree that they’re among the cleverest little-known apps you’ve ever used.

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Rick Delgado

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Rick Delgado

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How to Make Private Browsing on Safari Truly Private

There comes a time when we may be searching online and don’t want the browser to remember our footsteps. The reasons don’t always have to be what we obviously think of as the main reason; for example, sometimes, you may not want Safari to remember your passwords or prompt you to enter your password when surfing the web.

Whatever the reason, we may think that we are totally in the clear with Private Browsing on Safari and the other browsers on a Mac. However, a quick Terminal command can bring up every website you’ve visited. How do you do this? Also, how do you clear your tracks for good? We will provide both answers and more today.

What Does Private Browsing Do?

When activated, Private Browsing on Safari prevents your browsing history from being kept in the history tab of the application. Along with this, it doesn’t autofill information that you have saved in the browser. In this mode, you essentially become incognito and any references of previous use is essentially hidden when you are in private mode.

For example: if you are on Facebook or filling out a form and some information or your login is already filled in in the spaces provided, this is called autofill. It’s activated by simply clicking Safari next to the Apple symbol in the menubar and selecting Private Browsing, then clicking “OK” to the prompt.

The reasons behind private mode differ for each individual. While we won’t go into all of those reasons, one thing that is important to remember is that private browsing doesn’t forget the websites you visit. As we will see later on, Macs keep a second copy of the websites you visit in either mode. If you are in frantic mode looking for a solution to this, look no further.

The Terminal Archive

While Safari does a good job of keeping your search history out of prying eyes in the history tab, there is a less-than-obvious way to view a full list of visited websites on Mac. This is done in Terminal; the command-line emulator that allows you to make changes to your Mac.

Terminal is located in the Utilities folder on your Mac. Once activated, simply add the command:

dscacheutil -cachedump -entries Host

Once you hit “enter”, a list of the visited sites appear. Showing only the domains, the sites appear in a format of:

Key: h_name :(website domain)ipv4 :1

However, there’s no need to fear—there is a way you can clear this information from Terminal with a command that’s just as simple.

Clearing Your Tracks

Just as simply as you were able to enter the command to view the websites, you can clear the cache that Terminal showed you with the comamnd:

dscacheutil -flushcache

As the command denotes, this literally “flushes” the domains from Terminal. This does not prevent the record from continuing to be recorded for future sites, however, so if that’s an issue for you, repeat this process regularly.

Other Browsers and Private Browsing

Other browsers have this form of privacy mode for their service. They promise many of the same things as Safari, but they do not have the same Terminal issue due to how this command only presents websites visited on Safari (the browser Macs come shipped with).

If you use Firefox, you’ll notice that its private mode is also known as Private Browsing. Chrome calls private mode Incognito, while Internet Explorer refers to it as InPrivate Browsing. Opera is the newest to the scene, denoting it as Private Tab. Safari is the oldest well-known browser with this feature.

As you can see, despite Private Browsing not being 100% private, Terminal allows for your browser to be. In what ways has Terminal helped your life or allowed you to become more productive? Let us know in the comments below.

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15 most useful apps for Android

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Adobe apps

Price: Free / Up to $52.99 per month

Adobe has some of the most useful apps out there. Their apps generally range from photo editing to utility and include apps like Adobe Acrobat (PDF reader), Adobe Lightroom and Photo Express (photo editing), Illustrator Draw (drawing), Scan (document scanner), Premiere Clip (video editing), and many, many others. Many of these apps fill niches that other third party apps simply don’t. In addition, they are all good enough to hold spots on our lists for all of those things. All of them are free to download. Some of them may require an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to get all of the features, though.

AirDroid

Price: Free / $1.99 per month / $19.99 per year

AirDroid is one useful app. It lets you connect your PC to your Android device and vice versa. You can share files, get notifications, quick reply to a few messaging apps, and more. AirMirror and AirDroid: Remote Support are two plugins that add to the functionality in various ways. This is among the best ways to connect all of your devices together. It also works on Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows. There is a subscription for all of the features. However, you can try the free version first to see if you like it. Pushbullet is a good competitor to AirDroid as well.

CamScanner

Price: Free / $4.99-$6.99 per month / Varies

CamScanner is probably the best document scanner app on mobile. You use the app to scan documents into your phone and convert them to PDF format. You then send that document through email, save it to your device, and you can even fax it for a nominal fee. This is one of the few apps on the Play Store that can do all of those things and definitely the best of those. It seems to hit all the check boxes you’d want in an app like this. You can use most of the features for free or you can pay for a subscription if you intend on using it very heavily. In either case, this is probably the best app in its category. It’s especially useful during tax season and for business people.

IFTTT

Price: Free

IFTTT is easily one of the most useful apps ever. It’s an app that creates commands to carry out a set of basic tasks automatically. What’s great about the app is the sheer number of services, products, and other apps that have IFTTT supports. You can have it turn on your smart lights in your home, save images from Instagram and upload them to Dropbox, and there is even some Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa stuff available. It doesn’t take very long to learn and can automate a lot of otherwise mundane tasks on your phone. The list of things this app is capable of is so long that it’s absurd. It’s definitely useful, trust us. Plus, it’s free!

Google Assistant / Google Search

Price: Free

Google’s app is definitely one of the most useful apps ever. It contains two basic things: Google Assistant and Google Feed. Google Assistant answers basically any question, sets up reminders, turns smart lights on and off, and even pulls up songs or videos for you. Google Feed is, well, a feed with tons of stuff, including weather, news, and news. It slowly curates new stuff based on your search history and interests. You can also tune it to your likes specifically as well. The two together with Google Search in one app is a potent combination that few other developers can even compete with. This single app houses Google Assistant, Google Search, and Google Feed. All of them are useful.

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Google Drive suite

Price: Free / $1.99-$299.99 per month

Google Drive and its suite of apps are the most popular productivity apps on Android. The full collection includes Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Keep, and Google Photos. Between these apps, you have a full-fledged office suite complete with a note taking app, cloud storage, and a place to back up all of your photos and videos for free. Google Drive comes with 15GB of storage for free. You can increase the cloud storage space with a monthly subscription. The whole package are some of the most useful apps we’ve seen.

Google Translate

Price: Free

Google Translate is the go-to translation app available on any platform. It has received a number of updates over the years, including the ability to use your camera to point at something and have it translated in real-time. There is also a neural network powering the platform that helps make translation even more accurate. It has a slew of additional features as well, including the ability to translate a two way conversation in real-time. Microsoft Translate and a few other translate apps are getting better, but Google Translate is still king of the roost.

LastPass Password Manager

Price: Free / $2-$4 per month

LastPass is a password manager app. There are many of these in Google Play and most of them work fairly well. However, we like LastPass because it stays current with Android updates and also has a second authenticator app for additional security. The app generates passwords, saves your passwords to various sites, and helps you login quickly when you need to. It adds a layer of security to your life. The subscription costs are also quite reasonable. There are other really good password manager apps as well. However, we like that LastPass is always among the first to integrate new Android features quickly so it gets the spot for now.

Microsoft Apps

Price: Free / Varies

Microsoft has been killing it on mobile the last couple of years. The company definitely has some of the most useful apps out there. Some of the better ones include Microsoft OneDrive (cloud storage), the Microsoft Office suite (word documents, spreadsheets, presentations), Microsoft Launcher, Microsoft Authenticator (security), Office Lens (document scanner), Remote Desktop, Xbox and Mixer (gaming), Your Phone Companion (phone-to-PC), and several more. Additionally, they have some up and comers like a to do list app that is slowly getting better. They are also working on direct Android screen mirroring on Windows 10 and some other useful things. Cortana exists on this list too, but it’s just average as far as virtual assistants go for right now.

Reddit

Price: Free / $5.99 per month

Reddit is a very useful app and website. It has a virtual ton of subreddits that cover all sorts of topics. You can find advice, tutorials, and information about basically anything. There are a lot of trashy people and topics on Reddit. However, a little tact and some patience and you can avoid most of the nonsense. Anyone with an interest should check out the subreddits for that interest. You may find some really cool stuff you didn’t previously know about. There are also a ton of third party Reddit apps. Many prefer the third party ones over the official app, but the official app works too.

More useful apps here:

Solid Explorer

Price: Free trial / $1.99

Solid Explorer is a file manager and browser that does a great job. It’s built around Material Design and that makes the app very easy to use. On top of the usual file browsing, you’ll also have the option to access your cloud storage services if you use them. On top of that, you’ll be able to access FTP, SFTP, WebDav, and SMB/CIFS clients. There is even root access if you need that. It’s a powerful app that is also simple to use. You’ll have to pay for it after the 14-day trial, but everyone needs a file manager and this one is a good one.

Tasker

Price: $2.99

Tasker is one of the most powerful apps. Tasker allows you to create automated activities that do a variety of things. It’s difficult to express what this app can do because it can do virtually anything. The app comes with 200 built-in actions that you can use or you can build your own. There are also a ton of apps with Tasker support along with plugins to expand functionality. There is a large learning curve. This is definitely not the easiest app to use. However, it works great once you figure it out. This is kind of like a power user version of IFTTT. Tasker is also free with Google Play Pass if you have it.

TickTick

Price: Free / $27.99 per year

TickTick is among the best to do list apps and also one of the most useful apps. You put tasks in and the app reminds you to do them. In addition, you can set it up for things like grocery lists and other stuff. The app also features collaboration. You can share tasks between the members of your household or job if needed. It also comes with a calendar, widgets, and note taking features. The free version comes with more than enough for casual use. The paid version is really only needed for extreme business use cases.

WiFi Analyzer

Price: Free

WiFi Analyzer is an open-source WiFi analyzer. It lets you see your WiFi connection as well as other connections in the general area. There are a number of reasons why you’d need something like this. You can see if your WiFi is sharing a channel with other WiFi networks (which can affect connectivity and speed). You can also identify nearby WiFi networks, graph signal strength, and other activities. This can help diagnose WiFi problems in the event you have issues. This is especially useful for those who stream live TV or use live stream gaming services like Google Stadia.

YouTube

Price: Free / $12.99 per month

YouTube is probably the most useful app on mobile. Sure, most use it for music videos or product reviews. However, there is a healthy and huge underbelly of tutorials, lessons, lectures, explainers, and other videos. I once learned how to change the headlight bulbs on my 2005 Chevy Equinox with a YouTube video. There aren’t a ton of things that it doesn’t have. The app is free if you don’t mind advertising. You can pay $9.99 per month to remove ads, enable background play, and get a complimentary subscription to Google Play Music. It’s a pretty good deal.

Thank you for reading! Try these out too:

If we missed any of the most useful apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!

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