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My Favorite Android Apps

I've been an android user for a long time and droid fan for even longer. I love fiddling and tinkering with my phone and as such try out a lot, and I do mean a lot, of apps. I keep some and discard others while some I use for a long time before finding a better alternative. 

So these are some of the apps I use either on a regular basis. They may not be popular or have the most 'features' but they do what I want them to do.

1. Fabrik


Library View
Reading View
This is the most visually appealing ebook reader on Android right now. Not only is the reading view fully customizable (font, line spacing, alignment, theme, size of font etc), it looks pretty good out of the box. If you want to get started reading right away, this is the app for you. The other major feature is the dead-simple syncing it offers through Dropbox. Link the app to your dropbox and it'll upload your books there. From then, every other device you use this app on, will open up the books from here with the additional benefit of syncing. So if I start reading on my phone, I can continue from the the exact same page on my tablet. Hallelujah!

Two days after downloading this app, I paid for it.  It is that good.

2.  Calibre Companion

For anyone who does any kind of serious reading, Calibre is a must have. And if you have Calibre, then Calibre Companion for Android is a must buy. Yes, it is a paid app, but believe me when I say it is worth it. This app does 2 things and it does them well -

a. It can connect as a wireless device to your calibre library, so you can push books from your computer to your mobile device (esp useful if you have a lot of books to send) OR

b. It can connect to the Calibre content server to pull books to the device, which is useful if you just want your next read.

And it does it all without wires. That's right, no wires. Didn't I say it was worth paying for?


3. AirDroid

This is another app in the wireless camp. This app has a lot of features - it can transfer files between your phone/tablet and laptop, you can use it to send texts from your desk without touching your phone, you can fiddle with call logs, contacts, batch uninstall apps and more (too many to write about). 

But it is indispensable to me in 2 situations:

a. How many times have you wished that a URL you copied on your laptop was available on your phone? Or a piece of text you selected on your device could be pasted in your laptop browser? AirDroid takes care of it. Every time I want a paste a long password (which I keep on my laptop) into an app on my phone, this app is what I use. In other words, AirDroid syncs clipboard content between your mobile device and computer.

b. When I need pictures/videos from my phone on my laptop (or vice-versa). Immediately. Not when Google Instant Upload decides to sync again, not when I can find my USB cable from the jumble of wires under the table.

This is probably the most feature filled app of the bunch & it's free!
 4. Zooper Widget
This is a picture of the current home screen on my phone. Looks good doesn't it? I love having widgets on my home screens, yet could never find widgets that showed me useful information & look good doing it. So I played around with a lot of apps like minimalistic text, uccw, clokr which promised to let me create my own widgets. The problem? Either it is too difficult to make my own widgets (uccw esp) which forced me to download pre-made templates or it would be easy to use but extremely limited in what it can do.

Zooper widget solved that problem beautifully. The home screen on the left was made with just 2 widgets - one for the vertical date series and another for the weather and location. And I made them both inside of 10 minutes!

Try the free version and if you like it, it's definitely worth shelling out for the paid version which lets you save templates and removes the ads. 


Also, buying apps you like is the only way to encourage developers to make more. So go ahead, start buying your favorite apps!

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Location: Warren, MI, USA

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