Favorite Android apps I wish my HTC phone came with instead of the piece-of-shit pre-installed apps
tl;dr These are my favorite smartphone apps. Yes, I know that’s an awful lot to write about something as mundane as what apps I have on my phone. Congratulations. Now you know how it feels to live inside my head.
Long story: I’ve owned a smartphone now for the good part of six months, and even though I bitch about it to no end, I also begrudgingly have to admit that it has features that convinces me that, yes, this is “the future.” Whatever that future means. But as communication tools become more global and more instant, I’m fundamentally on board with this pocket computer thing. It’s not just a phone anymore. It’s like that little tricorder we always wanted when we were kids, only it calls your parents, not an orbiting spaceship.
One of these advances I like very much is apps, although apps are hardly anything new — we’ve been using them for decades now, ever since we invented this thing called the computer, except we used to call them “programs.” And yet everyone treats them like they’re a brand new thing. But hey, they’re still neat and people download them like crazy, because they basically mean you can turn your little tricorder into just about anything — including, probably, a device that goes “bleep” while it tells you how many carbon atoms are in your bologna sandwich.
This turned out to be a fairly long introduction to what I really wanted to write about, which was just another boring list of “these are my favorite apps.” But with a twist. Regular readers know I have had absolutely no end of grief with my phone (the HTC WildFire S, for those of you just tuning in) because it comes with a very limited storage capacity — a meager 150 megabytes — and, to add insult to injury, a bunch of HTC apps that are really unequivocably piss-poor that you can’t uninstall.
Pictured: the enemy.
So this is a list of apps that I wish came with my phone instead of those horrible pre-installed HTC apps.
And yes, every app on this list is free.
Social media
My phone comes with the most horrible social media apps ever. Facebook is a tired, slow app that barely works, and Peep is the Twitter-app from Hell: this thing won’t even start unless you have 20+ megabytes free internal space (almost impossible). Tweetdeck is a much better app for both purposes — it’s really won me over, because it’s fast and versatile. It’s not perfect — I still dearly miss the ability to post to Facebook Pages — but it’s miles better than the HTC apps.
No one supports Google+ yet, so there’s really no other choice than G+’s own app on that front. It’s a bit of a mess, to be honest, and it takes up a ridiculous amount of space. But it has one cool feature, which is that it auto-uploads pictures you’ve taken with your camera phone to a private gallery, ready for sharing, whenever it has wi-fi access. That’s a huge time-saver and reason enough for me to keep it around.
Wordpress and Tumblr also have good apps — the former especially because it lets you keep local drafts and essentially write posts off-line; useful for when your service provider has screwed you yet again and revoked your life-giving access to the on-line world.
Also, if you like IRC — and I do — then there’s a peculiar thrill that comes with installing AndChat and watching it connect to your favorite server. Not least because it does so in a very charming green-text-on-black-background fashion.
Browser
The pre-installed browser is alright, I guess, but Dolphin Browser is just ace in so many ungodly ways. For one, it’s got tabbed browsing. For two, it’s fast. For three, this is not how you do one of these lists, is it? For four, it’s got an instant quick-dial start-up screen with eight slots for your most frequently visited sites. Which is neat, because the Facebook and Google+ mobile sites are actually better than their dedicated apps.
Search
Yeah, Google Search is alright. But Quick Search has every search engine imaginable built into it — including, but not limited to, Google, Allmusic, iMDB, Wikipedia and even Snopes.com — and it has the courtesy to ask whether it should kill its own process when you exit it.
Calendars and tasks
Google Calendar has this nifty feature where you have a check list of tasks. I’m sorry if this was painfully obvious to you, but Google has a habit of hiding really neat and useful features, such as this sub-feature, Google Tasks, in obscure places, and I’ve seen my share of “oh, it can do that, too?” reactions to know not to assume too much when it comes to just how awesome Google are in terms of usability.
Anyway, for my mobile needs, I tried Astrid Tasks for a while because it could sync up with my Google Tasks, but — and I suppose I should feel embarrassed by this, but I’m not — it’s not exactly the most attractive app.
Any.Do is very attractively presented, with an almost austere 2001-ish muted blue/white skin and lovingly rendered Helvetica font, but that’s not its best feature. (Actually, they could have cut a little back on it, because it comes at a price: a whopping 7 megabytes. Yes, I’m starting to develop twitching O.C.D. when it comes to how much space apps take up.)
Pictured: the future, circa 1969.
Not only does it let you sync up tasks with your Google Calendar, it also lets you divide them into levels of importance — as in “today,” “tomorrow,” “next week” or “later” (the latter of which should have just been called “whenever”). Only one thing missing, as far as I’m concerned: being able to sync it up to more than one Google profile. Oh, and taking up less space.
For an actual calendar, the built-in Calendar app is pretty good. It syncs up to multiple Google accounts and even pulls birthdays from Facebook — which, although annoying, is one of those “can save face” features I’m very fond of. The widget, however, is painfully slow, and takes up an entire home screen — which is not very cool. So the Smooth Calendar widget is an absolute godsend, because it only takes up 1/4 of space (a vertical bar) and tells you the date and week number right up front. Now that’s service.
Camera and gallery apps
I’m not too picky about my camera apps, to be honest. It’s just harmless fun for me. Although I can get tremendously fucked off at the time it takes for my dumb-ass phone to register that, yes, I really want to take a picture of that moving object, thank you, and could we hurry this up, please, before it moves so far off into the horizon that it reaches the shores of Asia?!
But it’s got other things going for it, such as the “good for a laugh when you’re really bored and/or stoned” self-portrait feature and a timer you’ll never get to work before everyone who were supposed to be in the shot get bored and walk off somewhere.
The Gallery app is pretty good, too, with a surprisingly adept image effect gallery designed to make it even more apparent that, yes, your photos were taken with a camera the size of a kitten fetus.
The only thing we don’t get here in Android Land is the amazing, jaw-dropping, eye-popping wonders of that astounding marvel in the photography world known as Hipstamatic — the go-to app for every iPhone photographer who wants to take photos that look like they have been buried in a sand pit for 30 years. If we want our photos to have that bafflingly alluring “fucked up on purpose” feel, we have to resort to FXCamera. It has four different camera settings and you’ll never use three of them, because the fourth one — the head-scratchingly named ToyCam — is the one that makes your photos look like Hipstamatic pictures. (Well, sort of.)
This is the drug-fueled lens through which Hipstamatic users see the world. FXCamera almost does the exact same thing. If you want to see what drug-fueled lens I view my world through, check out my photo dumping ground on Google+.
Thankfully, FXCamera comes with a feature that lets you put a shortcut to the ToyCam directly on your home screen, allowing users to skip an entire 3/4 of programming effort in one fell swoop.
SMS messaging
You’d think a phone would at least come with a decent phone app, but the built-in HTC SMS app is infuriatingly slow. I don’t know what it is about these HTC apps. Because another thing you might be foolishly thinking is, “Why can’t the company that built the fucking thing make apps that take full advantage of the awesome processing power it contains?” I got nothing.
What I do get is a very unsatisfactory widget that takes even bloody longer, and a surprisingly buggy writing screen that will sometimes, quite unhelpfully, bring up old drafts of half-written messages that I told it to forget about long ago, or just make the cursor lag like a leprous mule to the point where you find yourself not so much tapping keys as clawing fervently at them.
That is, unless you install GoSMS Pro. Despite being oh so pro, it is also oh so free. And it’s an absolute darling. It’s fast, it’s got a list of customizable options a mile long (and they’re all fun to play with), and it’s got a widget to die for: this little baby sits there, quiet and compact (only 2/4 of the screen, as opposed to HTC’s app which is another “lebensraum” affair that eats up the whole screen), and you can customize it so it only displays unread messages. This, my friends, is an absolute godsend to anyone who has ever uttered the words, “What? I didn’t get that message!”
Music
Okay, the on-board music app is fine. For local music. But I just wanted to mention that if you like your music streaming, then forget Spotify.
Dood’s Music Streamer taps directly into Grooveshark for your free listening pleasure that’s surprisingly fast (it just streams the mp3 directly), easy-to-use (the playlist system is a breeze), no frills, just the thrills and chills. I’m saying all this because if the rat bastards (you know who) finally succeed in killing Grooveshark I hope they realize they’re killing a part of why I love music.
Other
If you, like me, aren’t very good at remembering things, particularly the important ones, then you like leaving notes for yourselves. I don’t mean in the obsessive Memento kind of way, but … yeah, actually, I do. Which is good, because that’s just what SeNotes lets you do: it’s a widget that lets you staple little post-its to your home screen for easy reference. I tried a bunch of “note” apps before I settled on SeNotes, because the others came with too much bullshit in their baggage. SeNotes is easy and your shit is right there, on your home screen, where it can nag you until you’ve memorized whatever the hell it says and you can finally drag its yellow ass to its merciful doom.
Google Goggles is one of those apps that makes you convinced this little thing in your hand is not really running on microchips but on fucking magic. It’s that app we’ve all heard about that scans the label of a wine bottle or the cover of the book and then instantly recognizes the label, then shoots back Google search results for it. It also translates a few Spanish phrases (though not in real-time — that’s that other app we’ve all heard of) and, oh yeah, it’s a QR-code reader. So I keep it around because a) the QR-reader is cool, and it lets you save codes you’ve scanned for future reference, and b) the other scanning-labels things is one of those “check out my magic wand” show-off apps, like Apple’s Siri, that has no practical application whatsoever … except this one actually kind of does. Unlike Siri.
That sad chipmunk kills me.
And if you, like me, are going prematurely grey from constantly worrying about whether your phone will actually turn on or go into a catatonic whining fit because it’s run out of disk space yet again, you’ll want the power to poke around this thing’s files. You want a dog that cares; a dog like Lassie. You want something like ES File Explorer, which is not just a cool file explorer. It also comes with a kick-ass media player which is great for streaming content.
Games
I can’t believe there aren’t any decent adventure games for smartphones. Okay, there’s Beneath A Steel Sky and the Monkey Island reduxes on iPhone. But that just leaves them on my wife’s phone where she grows bored with them before she gets past the intro screen. And even if there were any cool graphic adventures for my Android phone, I probably wouldn’t have room for them anyway.
That’s why, if I were ever stuck on a deserted island with nothing but my piece of shit phone for company, I’d be singing the praises of whoever developed Twisty. Simply put, it’s an engine that plays Z-Engine games, and that sound you just heard were a bunch of bearded old adventure game geeks hooting approvingly in unison. For the rest of you, that means it plays old Infocom games, like Zork, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and a host of user-created adventures that have been silently coming out under the radar because Interactive Fiction never really died; it just got really, really old.
Other than that, I play Wordfeud, but if I were stuck on an island I would probably use it to get help instead of trying to place an unruly letter Q somewhere. And I like Hexxagon because I used to play it incessantly as a kid, but sad that it’s only a single player game.
In conclusion …
And that, my friends, is why you don’t want to ask me about my phone at parties.
