Jay’s big list of Android apps

This is a partial list of the applications on my phone. I’ve annotated most of the apps. Many of these applications are payware; sorry I haven’t yet gone through and marked which are free, which are Free or open-source, and which are commercial. This list of apps and Market links was originally generated by ShareMyApps, and extensively annotated and hand-edited.

Apps in boldface with a star in front of them are apps I particularly recommend (although a few of them may be fairly special-purpose or technical tools).

• Games
• ★ Andoku
  Sudoku game with lots of options
• ★ Angry Birds
• ★ Angry Birds Rio
• ★ Angry Birds Seasons
• ★ Carcassonne
  Territory-control board game
• Catan
  Settlers of Catan board game
• ★ Chess
• Coloroid
  Puzzle game
• Crush The Castle
  Trebuchet game vaguely similar to Angry Birds
• ★ Dead Space
  First-person shooter; great graphics; very demanding of hardware and battery
• Doom
  Port of classic Doom first-person shooter.
• Droidel
  Droidel, droidel, droidel, I made you out of bits...
• Flickitty
• Galaxy NGC3D
  Space-battle game
• Gem Miner: Dig Deeper
  Simple tile-based exploration and resource-management game
• ★ Glow Puzzle
  Puzzle game
• Gunman Clive
  Side-scrolling shooter with interesting graphics
• Hunky Punk
  Three text-based adventure games. Warning! Use the spacebar to scroll; trying to use the touchscreen to scroll will cause it to crash.
• MarsDefender
  Space-battle game
• Minesweeper
• Neon Zone
• ★ Osmos HD
  A game where you control a circle that tries to gobble up other circles amoeba-style and get bigger. Very creative, with great graphics and audio. Highly recommended.
• Plasmeriser
  Basically a graphics demo
• ★ Replica Island
  Platform scroller with cute characters; recommended
• Scrambled Net
  description
• ★ Shift
  Creative jump-and-run platform game with a twist; ported from a Flash game of the same name
• Sniper vs. Sniper: Online
  Shooting game
• ★ Solitaire
  The nicest Solitaire app I’ve found for Android; landscape-only
• ★ Speedx 3D
  Creative game of avoiding obstacles at high speed
• STComm
  You can pretend your phone’s a Star Trek communicator! Will wonders never cease?
• Through the Desert
  Implementation of the Through the Desert territory-control board game
• ★ World Of Goo
  Game of constructing towers, platforms, bridges, and the like out of squishy gooballs. Also available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. (Playable on a phone, but works better on a large screen.)
• Utilities and tools
• *Nix Sync
  Backs up contacts, SMS, etc. to SD card. Flaky.
• 3D Level
  Uses accelerometer to turn your phone into a carpenter’s level.
• ★ AirDroid
  This is pretty awesome! It runs a web server on the Android device that lets you access all the data on your phone conveniently from your computer. (Computer and phone need to be connected to the same network, or phone has to have a publicly-routed IP address.) Downside: The web interface is pretty demanding of your desktop computer (it’s evidently lots of Javascript). WebSharing, below, does a bit less but is a lot faster.
• ★ AK Notepad
  Note-taking application that lets you synchronize your notes to/from , so you can view, create, and edit notes either way. (There’s also a dedicated catch.com app that supports photo and voice notes as well as plain text, but I couldn’t stand it.)
• androidVNC
  Lets you connect to a VNC server. If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t need this app.
• AndroSS
  Tool for taking screenshots. The ability to configure it to take a screenshot whenever you shake the device is pretty handy.
• AppBak
  Creates a file listing the apps you have installed that can later be used to reinstall them; useful if you frequently re-flash your phone.
• AppExtractor
  Lets you extract apps from full-ROM backups (Nandroid/ClockworkMod); requires rooted device.
• AppExtractor Key
  Unlocks extra features of AppExtractor.
• Backup Contacts
  Backs up your contacts to a text file (in CSV format) on your SD card. Useful for backup (assuming you copy the file somewhere safe) or with appropriate munging for bulk-import into some other addressbook tool. (Synchronizing your Android addressbook with Google Contacts gives you another way to do this, of course.)
• ★ Barcode Scanner
  Lets you scan barcodes such as UPC codes or QR codes; also lets you share things like contacts or URLs as a barcode on your screen that somebody else can scan. If installed, various other apps can use it for scanned input.
• Better Terminal Emulator Pro
  Terminal emulator. I didn’t like this as much as ConnectBot, but it installs a set of command-line tools I found handy on the phone.
• Chrome to Phone
  Lets you send URLs to your phone from the Chrome web browser on your desktop. There’s also a plugin for Firefox that works with this app.
• ★ ConnectBot
  Terminal emulator and SSH client. Lets you SSH to other hosts (and/or explore the Android command line on your phone). Good keypair handling; lets you create keys for authentication.
• DiskUsage
  Tool to let you figure out what’s taking up space on your SD card. (I like GridSize, below, a little better.)
• Drive
  Google’s docs-in-the-cloud app (incorporates the former Google Docs)
• droid VNC server
  VNC server for Android. Stopped working on my phone after an Android ROM upgrade; was handy while it worked.
• Duck Duck Go
  Alternative search engine for Android. I installed this while grumpy over Nymwars, but never remember to use it.
• ★ FDroid
  App repository for Free Software (in the FSF sense) on Android. Pretty clunky and with a pretty small selection compared to the Android Market, but a good thing to try first if you’re looking for Free Software.
• GPS Status
  Shows you the current status of your GPS signal/lock, and lets you apply some tweaks. Potentially useful if you have trouble getting a lock.
• ★ GridSize
  Tool to let you figure out what’s taking up space on your SD card. (I like this a little better than DiskUsage.)
• GScript
  Tool for storing and running shell scripts on your Android device. If you don’t write shell scripts, this probably isn’t for you. I used it to create an icon I can tap to synch podcasts I’ve downloaded and photos I’ve taken from my phone to my server.
• HappyChar
  Lets you find, copy, and paste arbitrary Unicode characters; useful if you want to be able to tell people how much you ♥ them from an Android app.
• httpmon
  Monitors web servers and tells you when they’re unreachable; can be configured to send SMSes.
• Network Discovery
  Network tool; gives you information about local WiFi networks.
• OI About
  Plugin for other apps.
• OI File Manager
  File browser.
• OI Insert date
  Plugin for other apps.
• OI Notepad
  Text editor.
• OI Safe
  Encryption tool; can be used on its own or along with other apps such as OI Notepad.
• Pocket
  Tool for encrypting little snippets of information; useful, e.g., to store account information. There’s a desktop version and it can synch the (encrypted) data to Dropbox.
• ★ QuickSSHd
  SSH server for Android, so you can SSH from your desktop to your phone. There’s public-key authentication support. Useful along with scp or rsync as a way to get things off (or onto) your phone.
• ROM Manager Premium License
  Unlock key for ROM Manager, a tool for installing/upgrading third-party ROMs. (ROM Manager itself isn’t listed here because it was bundled with my ROM, CyanogenMod 7.)
• ★ Root Explorer
  File (and database) manager aimed at rooted phones.
• ★ ShareMyAppsDonate
  The app I used to start this list; generates a list of all your installed apps with Android Market links and lets you share it. The link is to the donation version with no ads, but an ad-supported free version is also available.
• ★ SMS Backup+
  Synchronizes text messages (and call log entries, optionally) to Gmail. Lots of options. I wish I had had something like this on the pre-Android phone I was using when plumtreeblossom and I
came up with the term-of-endearment “honeywuzzle”; that phone died and I don’t have that fateful SMS.
• Spare Parts
  Lets you tweak some settings that aren’t exposed in the standard, such as default font size. (Haven’t used lately, since CyanogenMod lets you set most of this itself.)
• ★ TeslaLED
  Flashlight app (lets you turn on the LED flash). There’s also Torch, which seems to have been bundled with CyanogenMod since it’s not in this list, which has a couple options such as brightness and flashing.
• Tethering Widget
  Widget that lets you turn on and off USB or WiFi tethering from the home screen (provided your phone/plan already supports it).
• Text Edit
  Text editor.
• Unicode Map
  Browser for Unicode characters. Lets you copy and paste, but if you mostly want to store canned Unicode sequences for future use, HappyChar (above) is probably more useful.
• UPM
  Universal Password Manager (aimed at same need as Pocket). Uses AES encryption.
• ★ WebSharing
  Web server that lets you get at files, video, and audio on your phone; will even play (some) audio (on some browser configurations) directly from the phone. Except for that feature, less featureful than AirDroid, but a lot faster.
• ★ Where's My Droid Pro
  Lets you send a special text-message to your phone to turn it on and make it ring; has lots of other features useful for mislaid/lost/stolen phones. Useful in conjunction with a Google Voice account, which lets you send text messages from a web browser; I’ve found where I left my phone a couple times that way.
• ★ WiFiKeyboard
  Lets you use your desktop keyboard (and a web browser) to enter text in Android apps. From your computer’s perspective, it looks like the Android device is a web server with a page you can type into. From the perspective of the application on the device, it’s just as if you were typing on the device’s own keyboard.
• Communication and information
• ★ AccuWeather Platinum
  Useful for deciding what to wear in the morning
• Allrecipes
  Recipe browser
• CNN
  CNN portal app
• ★ Facebook
  Facebook client; a bit limited compared to the web interface, and kind of slow, but I still use it.
• ★ FetLife
  Recommended if you’re kinky, anyway.
• Firefox Beta
  Port of Firefox web browser to Android. I like the idea, but still almost exclusively use the built-in browser.
• Gmail
  Gmail app; the UI is good.
• Google Reader
  Google Reader (RSS feed reader) app. I haven’t used it much.
• Google+
  Google+ social media app; Google’s attempt to take on Facebook. I hate Facebook, but I hate Google+ more. The fact that Google controls both Google+ and Android makes for tight integration, though.
• ★ Jabiru
  Jabber (instant-messaging) client with multi-user chat support.
• ★ K-9 Mail
  Excellent IMAP/SMTP mail client.
• ★ MIT Mobile
  MIT portal app. Can notify you of MIT emergencies.
• ★ NASA
  NASA portal app.
• Plume
  Twitter client. I eventually switched to the official Twitter client from Twitter, which I found easier and less tedious to use.
• Plume (premium unlock key)
  
• Radar Now!
  Weather-radar app.
• Sparse rss
  RSS feed reader (for blogs, news feeds, etc.).
• ★ Translate
  Google Translate. Nifty feature for Chinese (and perhaps other languages): You can now draw characters on the screen to enter them. (Probably only works if you get the stroke-order right.)
• ★ Tumblr
  Client for the Tumblr social media-sharing site. (Tumblr seems to be somewhere in the middle of the space defined by Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook.)
• White House
  Official White House portal app, news, video/audio, and (very rarely) alerts.
• Photography and images
• Brother iPrint&Scan
  Useful if you have a Brother multifunction machine with WiFi; lets you print things from your phone (somewhat clunkily and with some limitations) and lets you scan things from the scanner to your phone.
• ★ Camera ZOOM FX
  Alternative to the Android camera app; suports software zoom (i.e. cropping), and optical zoom on some devices. Lets you upload to various services (Facebook, Flickr, etc.) from within the app. Also has lots of effects I don’t use.
• ★ Flickr
  Flickr client. Good uploading interface; less ideal (if I’m remembering correctly) browsing interface. Recommended if you take photos with your phone and Flickr’s where you want them to end up.
• Instagram
  Take square photos with a bunch of retro effects and share them.
• ★ Paper Camera
  I haven’t used this much, but it looks pretty fun: It takes pictures with various effects such as halftone, pencil-sketch, comic-book, or line drawing (and lots more).
• Photo Tagger
  Edit or remove EXIF data in your photos, such as location and description. Interface didn’t work for what I wanted to use it for, unfortunately.
• Postagram
  Tool for the Postagram service, which lets you send (physical) photo postcards (for pay, of course).
• ★ QuickPic
  Improved photo viewer with lots of options. One interesting feature is that you can designate certain photo folders as hidden, which (assuming everything works properly) hides photos in them from other apps as well. You can choose to show hidden items in QuickPick (cleared when you quit the app), but this prevents you or others you hand your phone to from stumbling across the hidden photos by accident. I’m sure I don’t know what sorts of things this would be useful for, but I dunno, maybe you’ve got photos of documents with your credit-card number or something on your phone.
• WireGoggles
  Sort of like one of the effects in Paper Camera, this lets you take photos (or videos) with an interesting sort of line-drawing or wireframe effect.
• Audio and video
• Album Art Grabber
  Tries to find album art online for audio files that don’t already have it; helps music players display an appropriate image when playing your songs.
• ★ Amazon MP3
  Client/player for the Amazon MP3 store.
• ★ BeyondPod
  Extremely featureful (and unfortunately therefore somewhat complex) podcast manager; this is a huge fraction of what I use my phone for.
• ★ BeyondPod Unlock Key
  Key for BeyondPod. Without this, it runs in a trial/demo mode.
• ★ Netflix
  Netflix client for phone. Works surprisingly well on 3G; I can reasonably watch shows on my phone, if I’m not losing signal a lot.
• ★ Pandora
  Pandora call themselves “internet radio”, by which they mean you can set up “stations” that reflect your tasts. (For instance, if you like Mozart, you can set up a Mozart station, which will play music that’s similar to Mozart, and then you can refine that station by saying which pieces you like and don’t like when it plays them.) It’s great, although unfortunately it’s decreasing the amount of listening to my own music collection I do. Good way to find new artists, too. (Available for desktop web browsers with Flash, too. There’s a premium for-pay service, but the free offering is pretty good too.)
• Presto
  Plugin for BeyondPod (and some other audio applications) that lets you speed up (or slow down) audio. Useful for speech podcasts; I can comfortably listen to a 50min podcast in half an hour.
• ★ Rehearsal Assistant
  Audio recording app, useful for memorizing lines.
• SoundCloud
  Sharing tool for sound.
• SwallowCatcher (not on the Android Market; link is to about/download page)
  A simple Free Software podcast manager for Android.
• ★ TuneIn Radio Pro
  Player for internet radio streams (including, e.g., lots of NPR stations). Pretty nice interface.
• UHF HORROR
  App that provides access to lot of public-domain horror movies. (Requirements for retaining copyright long-term were stricter into the ’70s, so there’s some surprisingly recent stuff in there as well as all the obvious very old stuff.)
• YouTube
  You know, it’s YouTube. :-)
• Document viewers and book-related apps
• Adobe Reader
  PDF document viewer.
• ★ Aldiko Premium
  Ebook reader for non-DRM-encumbered ebooks (plus Adobe-encumbered ones). Provides access to some free and for-pay ebook catalogues, and you can add your own. Pretty nice interface, except for importing ebooks not downloaded from within the app, which is a pain.
• ★ Amazon Kindle
  Kindle ebook-reader app with access to the Amazon Kindle store.
• ★ B&N Nook
  Nook ebook-reader app with access to the Barnes and Noble store.
• ★ Book Catalogue
  Tool for cataloguing your books; some degree of integration with LibraryThing and other sources of book data like Amazon or public library catalogues. Very nice UI, but I had trouble bulk-importing books from a text file; plan to get back to that project at some point.
• ★ FBReader
  FBReader is a Free Software ebook reader; available for Android and many other platforms. Nice interface. Doesn’t handle the complex layouts sometimes required by technical books (doesn’t usually work well with O’Reilly books; I use Aldiko for those), but works great for anything without a lot of figures and tables (and without DRM, of course).
  • Here’s FBReader’s list of places to get free or commercial books without DRM.
• LibraryThing Scanner
  Tool to bulk-scan barcodes of books and enter them into your LibraryThing account.
• Mapping, location, travel, and astronomy
• Earth
  Google Earth
• Flybys
  Tool for figuring out when satellites are going to pass overhead from your location.
• ★ Google Sky Map
  Sky map with interesting UI; uses accelerometer, compas, and location information to figure out where you are and what direction you’re pointing the phone in, so you can point it at the sky and it will tell you what you’re looking at. Great for ”what star is that, or is it a planet?” Also works for ”I hear Saturn’s supposed to be up tonight; where in the sky is it?”
• ★ Maps
  Google Maps.
• ★ My Tracks
  GPS tracker, lets you log your motion. Potentially useful for tracking runs or walks or finding your car in that huge parking lot.
• OnTheFly
  Flight tracker, can alert you when flights are delayed, change gates, etc.
• ★ OpenMBTA
  MBTA schedule information, updated in real time (so, for some routes, you can tell when your bus/train is going to be late).
• Osmand+
  Mapping application using Open Street Maps (freely-distributable, user-contributed) map data. Good for some locations, not for others. You can load map data on your phone in advance, so unlike Google Maps it doesn’t require data connectivity when using the map (although it will require GPS or other location data for location tracking, of course).
• Street View
  Google Street View.

Generated by ShareMyApps