If, like me, you like to keep your Android phone screen bare save for a few really useful apps, you’re probably very picky about which apps you’ll willingly download onto your device.
Maybe you looked at our list of the best mobile games and only picked one, or Google’s own list of the best Android apps and decided you might download a few down the line, but not right now. Home screen real estate is precious, and not all apps deserve it.
But I’ve picked out seven that most definitely do. I’ve been using Android phones for years, and I’ve slowly been growing a roster of really handy apps that help me go about my day-to-day life.
No, this isn’t going to be another generic list that includes a weather app, a streaming service, a game, a photo editor, and so on. You probably already knew you needed those apps, and downloaded them as soon as you set up your Android phone.
Instead, these are seven apps you probably didn’t even know you needed in your life until you saw them listed below. Let’s get into it.
1. JustWatch
I’ve recommended JustWatch to people countless times, and now that list grows.
In the convoluted world of streaming services, JustWatch makes things simple. If you type in the name of a movie or TV show you want to watch, it’ll tell you where it’s streaming (if anywhere). Whether it’s on Netflix, Prime, one of the best free streaming services, or digital rental stores – you name it, JustWatch will know it.
This app is best used for people who, unlike the average streaming service user, know exactly what they want to watch. No more jumping between streaming platforms trying to find that one John Wayne film or that old Korean epic you watched in school.
JustWatch is best paired with the apps for the streaming services themselves, as you can jump straight from JustWatch to see the movie or show you’re after.
2. Skyscanner
An app I wish I didn’t use as much as I do is Skyscanner.
Skyscanner is an aggregate flight app that helps you find cheap flights. You put in where you’re travelling to and from and when, and it’ll find you the cheapest flights across various airlines. It also has hotels and car rental information.
It’s something I’ve used for travelling loads before, but the danger comes when you use it idly. There’s a flexible dates function, so you can see when it’s cheapest to go to a chosen destination. There’s an Everywhere flight destination option, which tells you the most affordable destinations over your chosen dates. And there’s also a price-drop section, to tell you when certain flights become more affordable.
Skyscanner’s functions are all really useful for holiday-goers, but it can instill a really strong wanderlust if you use it for fun, planning holidays you’ll never go on, and daydreaming about trips to exotic-sounding locales. Still, it’s fun to dream!
3. Paprika
Paprika may seem like a great app for aspiring or dedicated bakers or chefs, but it’s also good for people like me, who can’t write a good shopping list to save their lives.
At its core, Paprika is a recipe manager app. Its full title is, in fact, Paprika Recipe Manager. This means you can pull together recipes from around the web to see in one place.
But there’s a lot more to it than that. You can maintain a list of the ingredients you have at home and create grocery lists based on the ingredients you need for your recipes. You can plan when you’ll eat each meal. And when you’re cooking, there are functions like measurement conversion, timer,s and automatic crossing-out that make the process really easy.
If you even occasionally find yourself in front of the oven, over the stove, or hunched around a chopping board, Paprika is a great app to use.
4. Coolors
Coolors is a really simple app that’s complex in its ramifications. Put simply, it’s an app that randomly generates a color palette of five colors that go well together. You can choose certain colors to use and lock them, so the app creates a range around them.
I started using Coolors to pick color schemes for photography and videography, but quickly graduated to using it for another purpose. When I’m picking an outfit and have one item of clothing I want to wear, I’ll lock that item’s color in the app, and let Coolors draft me up a color scheme around it.
This helps me pick an outfit that has some degree of coordinated color styling going on – something I’m not necessarily a dab hand at normally. You can use the app to create a scheme based on a photo you’ve taken, too, which is super useful.
Coolors could also help you decorate your home, improve some artwork, or better understand the color scheme of a film you’re watching. Honestly, there’s a lot to it!
5. Too Good To Go
Too Good To Go: an app that’s been a stalwart on my phone to let me taste the nicer things in life, despite not strictly being able to afford them.
This app lets restaurants, bars, convenience stores, and other similar establishments list their unsold food or drinks at the end of the day for sale at a discount. Typically, this is done via food bags of random assorted items, though it depends greatly on where you’re buying the food from.
By buying Too Good To Go bags, you can taste restaurant-quality meals without the price, and the randomness of it all also brings a bit of fun. You can filter by vegetarian or vegan options to avoid meat, too (though sometimes I’ve ordered bags from shops that don’t quite understand that ‘vegetarian’ means ‘no meat’).
I’ve used Too Good To Go to buy bags of soon-to-expire veg that I’ve turned into a curry, burritos from stores near their closing hour, bags of donuts from fancy cafes, and leftover sandwiches from coffee shops. But my absolute favorite remains bakeries, which can sometimes give you loads of fresh bread and cakes. And remember, this is all much cheaper than if you’d bought something from these stores yourself, even if the food is only a few hours old.
6. Spin the Wheel
What started as a joke download for me quickly became a way of life, and I’ve convinced at least one friend to download Spin the Wheel off the back of me using it. Perhaps that’ll change with the publication of this article.
Spin the Wheel is simple. You add in a list of entries, press ‘Spin’, and the wheel will randomly select one, complete with all the flair of a wheel spinning around colored segments before landing on an option with some pomp.
I use this app all the time. For movie night, if we can’t settle on what to watch, we’ll add a few options and let fate decide. I’ve used it on multiple bar crawls to add some randomness into who buys each round (in fact, I’ve used it in all manner of drinking games). Once or twice, I’ve even used it to decide what to have for breakfast.
Spin the Wheel adds a bit of fun to life’s minor decisions, and for indecisive people, I can imagine it being really useful.
7. Splitwise
I’m ending this list with a financial app that more and more people around me have begun using to share payments. Splitwise is an app that basically eradicates “I’ll get that” or “this is my round” conversations when you’re at a restaurant, bar, or cafe.
The way it works is that every time you make a payment you want to split with someone, you add it to a shared profile you have with that person. Splitwise will add up all the payments to work out who owes whom money, and by how much, saving you all the headache-inducing math.
I’ve used Splitwise when travelling with a friend to save individual repayments for each hostel, dinner, or rounds of gas; with my partner so we know who’s bought more dinners or drinks; with my flatmate for obvious reasons. It’s a really useful way of saving time instead of endlessly calculating the split yourself.
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tom.bedford@futurenet.com (Tom Bedford)
