We often hear a lot about the superiority of iOS’s app ecosystem but in reality Android has a lot of first-rate apps that you won’t find on the iPhone. So for any Android fans who want something to brag about to their iPhone-touting friends, I’ve scrounged up a fresh list of seven terrific Android apps that iPhone users can’t get on their devices. Let’s go over them below.
OUR PREVIOUS LIST: 7 terrific Android apps you won’t find on any iPhone
Twilight
Thankfully, this has nothing to do with the awful teeny-bop vampire movies. Instead, it implements a feature that iPhone users won’t get until iOS 9.3 brings Night Shift. Here’s the description:
Are you having trouble falling asleep? Are your kids hyperactive when playing with the tablet before bed time?
Are you using your smart phone or tablet in the late evening? Twilight may be a solution for you!Recent research suggests that exposure to blue light before sleep may distort your natural (circadian) rhythm and cause inability to fall asleep.
The cause is the photoreceptor in your eyes, called Melanopsin. This receptor is sensitive to a narrow band of blue light in the 460-480nm range which may suppress Melatonin production – a hormone responsible for your healthy sleep-wake cycles.
In experimental scientific studies it has been shown an average person reading on a tablet or smart phone for a couple of hours before bed time may find their sleep delayed by about an hour.
The Twilight app makes your device screen adapt to the time of the day. It filters the flux of blue light emitted by your phone or tablet after sunset and protects your eyes with a soft and pleasant red filter. The filter intensity is smoothly adjusted to the sun cycle based on your local sunset and sunrise times.
Get more from Twilight
1) Bed reading: Twilight is more pleasant on the eyes for night reading. Especially as it is able to lower the screen backlight far below the ability of the backligt controls on your screen2) AMOLED screens: We have tested Twilight on an AMOLED screen for 2.5 years without any sign of depletion or over-burning. If properly configured Twilight causes less light emission (by enabling dimming) with more equal light distribution (dark areas of the screen such as the status bar get tinted). This may in fact increase your AMOLED screen life time.
Anticipate
A clever app designed to help you browse the web even faster by reducing page load times.
Anticipate is an open source web browsing tool that finds and prepares for links on-screen so they load much faster when you open them (similar to what mobile/desktop Chrome does when you’re browsing in them).
When a link is found, Ancitipate does the following using Chrome Custom Tabs*:
– DNS pre-resolution of the main domain
– DNS pre-resolution of the most likely sub-resources
– Pre-connection to the destination including HTTPS/TLS negotiation
– Pre-render the page**The preparation allows this demo –https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/images/customtab/performance.gif – to be realized.
To scan for links on-screen, Anticipate uses an accessibility service. You can customize the blacklist/whitelist of in which apps it will scan for links. You can also monitor which links are being pre-loaded with a floating window.
Hound Beta
Hound is a voice-enabled personal assistant app that we’ve seen wipe the floor with Siri, Cortana and Google Now in the past. It’s still in beta but it’s really worth checking out because it can answer questions that no other voice assistant can.
**Currently invite only**
Available in US only at this time. Need a code? Request in-app or athttp://www.soundhound.com/houndSay it. Get it.
Hound is an app that you speak to, and it understands what you are looking for or trying to do. It’s like a voice-enabled search engine. It’s also like a personal assistant.
Being the fastest and easiest way to get the information, entertainment, and communication services you want, Hound is built for a hands-free world, from the ground up.
You will find yourself opening Hound to do what you used to type and tap for, because now you can simply Hound and get it faster.
Popular Features:
• Weather
• Navigation
• Local Search
• Hotel Search + Expedia booking
• Make phone calls
• Web searches – speak what you’re looking for instead of typing
• Video search
• News search
• Photo search
• Stock Lookups
• Flight status
• Date and Time
• Alarm and Timer
• Music search
• “SoundHound Now” – activate a music recognition search or a Sing/Hum search
• Mortgage Calculator
• Word and phrase translation
• Wikipedia
• Play interactive games
• … and moreYou can go hands free by saying, “Ok Hound”
What makes Hound amazing?
Hound’s Speech-to-Meaning engine delivers unrivaled speed and accuracy. Speech recognition and natural language understanding is done simultaneously and in real time. Compared to traditional approaches that perform speech recognition first, then send the result to a search or understanding engine, Hound does it immediately. You experience speed and accuracy.
You can speak naturally. No need to speak in fragmented keywords. Hound has the ability to handle natural language sentences, including details, specifics, and multiple criteria (think, for example, of describing the hotel you want to find to have a gym, free wi-fi and be less than $200 a night). Hound can even understand exclusions and negation (for example, if you want to find a place for lunch, but since you’ve had Chinese all week, you can say “show me restaurants nearby, excluding Chinese places”). This empowers you to really get what you’re searching for, quicker and with a great experience.
Trackendar – Calendar Tracker
A one-stop location for tracking all events in your daily life, not just important meetings or appointments.
This app helps you to track common events, habits and chores. Presents them on a nice monthly view so you can see at a glance what’s been going on and provides reminders so you don’t forget to log what happend each day.
With this you can track:
★ Occurrences: Simple events like reading, taking out the trash, changing the cat’s litter box, etc.
★ Habits: Same as occurrences but for when you also need to track when something didn’t happen, like smoking, sticking to an excercise schedule, etc.
★ Values: Again like occurrences but also including a numeric value, like weight, time expent writing, etc.Note: Reminders are supposed to be used so you just don’t forget to log events, not for you to remember to do them it in the first place… This is a tracking app, not a scheduling app.
Pander – Food Delivery
If you order food through your phone a lot, Pander is a great app if you don’t want to clog up your storage space by installing a ton of separate restaurant apps.
Harness the variety of restaurant options available, without having to trudge through tons of menus – let Pander learn what you like, and then build meals tailored specifically to you with just one tap. One more to confirm, and you’re done – a perfect, individualized meal, from a chef (err, app) that continuously learns what you like.
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Ordering food shouldn’t feel like a chore – but it does. Even if you decide on exactly what you want, and manage to navigate the endless list of restaurants, you still have to trudge though confusing menus to pick out a meal for yourself. And that’s even before worrying about details like delivery minimums.
No longer.
Pander takes care of all the details, making sure you don’t have to waste any effort. We learn a little about your tastes, and then use that information to analyze hundreds and thousands of restaurants. From there, every time you open the app, we’ll suggest a few delicious, personalized options. All you do is tap one – and that’s it! We’ll find restaurants that match, choose the right dishes, make sure you hit any order minimums (but stay within your budget!) and place the order – all while you sit back and get ready to eat.
And if you’re not sure what you want, or don’t feel like wasting time deciding, you can even hit our signature blue ‘Pander To Me’ button – we’ll use our knowledge of your taste profile to go ahead and order the perfect meal for you.
The best part about all this? The more you use it, the better Pander will get, as we learn more about the kinds of food you like. So stop wasting time and energy on ordering food – sit back, relax, and let us Pander to you.
Greenify
If Android 6.0 Marshmallow’s Doze mode isn’t enough for you, then you should really check out this app aimed at improving your device’s battery life.
Never should your phone or tablet become slower and battery hungrier after lots of apps installed. With Greenify, your device can run almost as smoothly and lastingly as it did the first day you had it!
Greenify help you identify and put the misbehaving apps into hibernation when you are not using them, to stop them from lagging your device and leeching the battery, in an unique way! They can do nothing without explicit launch by you or other apps, while still preserving full functionality when running in foreground, similar to iOS apps!
Please report bugs in the XDA forum (http://goo.gl/ZuLDnE) or G+ community (http://goo.gl/MoszF).
Greenify NEVER EVER collects your personal data despite the capability of accessibility service, it just takes advantage of it to automate things.
IMPORTANT: Greenifying an app implies that you are aware that all the background functionality (service, periodic task, event receiver, alarm, widget update, push message) of this app will become out of service during the hibernation except when you are using this app.
NEVER greenify alarm clock apps, instant messaging apps unless you don’t rely on them. Please do verify the impact of greenified apps on which you heavily rely.
Compared to other popular tools aimed for the similar purpose, Greenify offers the following advantages:
◆ Unlike the “Freeze” feature in “TitaniumBackup Pro” that totally disable the app, you can still use your app as usual, share content with it. No need to freeze & defrozen it.
◆ Unlike “Autostarts”, you can benefit from almost all of its advantages, without needing to deal with the complexity and risk of obscure app components, and never lose functionality when app is actively running.
◆ Unlike any “XXX Task Killer”, your device will never fall into the cat-mouse-game of stealthy-running and aggressive killing, which unnecessarily consumes more battery juice.
Note: Greenify does need a background running service for auto-hibernation to work. It is designed and implemented in extremely lightweight, with an average RAM footprint less than 5M, and nearly zero CPU and battery consumption.
DoggCatcher
Yes, podcasts are still very popular and DoggCatcher can help you manage all your favorites in one convenient location.
Manage your podcasts and news feeds with the first Android Podcatcher.
Highlights
-New material redesign
-ChromeCast and Android Auto support
-Easy to subscribe new podcasts
-Light/Dark theme
-Auto download and cleanup of media files
-Offline playback of audio and video podcasts
-Customizable audio playlists
-Supports devices of all sizes
-Highly configurable
-Build in variable speed playback
-Home screen widget for easy access to playback controls
-Podcast categorizationAutomation
-Automatically updates podcasts on your schedule
-Automatically download new media
-Automatically deletes mediaAdd podcasts by
-Browsing Top 100 DoggCatcher podcasts
-Personalized recommendations
-Searching podcast and news directories
-Importing from OPMLIntegrated Audio/Video Player
-Plays downloaded audio/video
-Streams audio over network (wifi/cell)
-Remembers play position of media file
-Plays video formats supported by Android – http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.htmlPlaylists
-Audio playlist for continuous playback of new media
-Video/News playlists for easy navigation of new mediaCommunity and support
-Frequently updated – http://mantis.doggcatcher.com/changelog_page.php
-Very active user community in forums – http://www.doggcatcher.com/forum
-Support via forums and emailOther
-Battery/data plan friendly – can limit downloads based on network/power connections
-Media download queue can be viewed and managed
-Bluetooth support (A2DP/AVRCP)
-Supports authenticated feeds (username/password)
