Superfast broadband and a powerful router aren’t the only things you need to ensure a fast, stable internet connection. One other potentially major factor is making sure you’re on an uncongested Wi-Fi channel, and Wifi Analyzer helps you do that. It can tell you what channel your network is on and also which nearby networks are using,…

Chances are there are a number of things you’ll want to know in the morning before you start your day. They might include the weather, the latest news or any reminders you’ve set for the day, among other things. With Clockwise Smart Alarm you can hear all these things as soon as you wake up. Simply set…

Marvel Pinball is by Zen Studios. That’s a developer on Google Play. They do really good pinball games. This one is just a standard pinball game with Marvel-themed pinball machines. The game includes a bunch of boards to play with and more are available as in-app purchases. The game also has Android TV support, multiple…

Guardians of the Galaxy TTG is an action-adventure title by Telltale Games. It’s one of the few Marvel games that aren’t freemium. You play through a story with the characters from the movies and comics. It features point-and-click mechanics, puzzles, and branching story decisions. The graphics are pretty good, too. It’s a tad buggy. However,…

Gameloft seems to have the marketed cornered on Spider-Man games. They have three decent Spider-Man games. They are The Amazing Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Spider-Man Unlimited. All three have freemium price tags.  However, The Amazing Spider-Man series is a little less obnoxious about it. All three games are action-adventure titles with the kinds…

Future Fight is another very popular Marvel game. This one is an action RPG. Like most freemium Marvel games, this one also includes character collecting mechanics. Each character is upgradeable.  Players can get both super heroes and villains if they prefer. It’s a bit of a fan service dump and cash grab. At least this…

Contest of Champions is one of the more popular Marvel games. It’s a character-collecting title. Your goal is to collect as many Marvel heroes as humanly possible. The game also features light fighter game mechanics, an online multiplayer mode, and a sort of campaign mode to follow. The combat mechanics are also okay. The downside…

Desygner lets you unleash your inner graphic designer on your phone or tablet, but with an intuitive interface and thousands of templates it’s simple enough for beginners to use. You can combine text, shapes, images, stickers, backgrounds and more to create logos, posters, adverts, PowerPoint-like presentations, postcards or any number of other things where images and…

PhET Simulations are interactive simulations designed to demonstrate and teach you various aspects of science and maths, such as forces and motion, the area of shapes, fractions, atoms, gravity and more. The simulations and the concepts they’re teaching vary in complexity, but generally we’d say they’re suitable for teenagers and above, and are also handy tools…

If you’re anything like us you need all the help you can get when it comes to remembering to do, basically, anything. To-do lists and the like help, but you need to remember to look at them, while calendar reminders only pop up at certain times. Memory Helper on the other hand appears whenever you wake…

Smoothies tend to be both tasty and healthy, and the selection on Daily Blends are also all vegan and gluten-free, but should appeal even if you don’t have those requirements. The Daily Blends app has over 100 smoothie recipes, split into categories such as energizing, workout, dessert and kid-friendly, and you can also search based on the…

Google decided to not play nice with the new Amazon Echo Show. They pulled YouTube support earlier this week. Google allegedly gave no warning or notification. Google’s return statement indicated that Amazon’s implementation didn’t adhere to the terms of service. In short, the two companies are in a bit of a disagreement. We imagine it won’t…

You might think you have a good idea of what Recent App Switcher does from the name, and you’d be half right. One of the things it does is give you an easy way to switch between recently used apps, in this case by pinning them to a bar on your notifications screen. Of course, the recent…

Weather forecasts are usually a bit dull – you might think that’s unavoidable – but What The Forecast?!! disagrees, as it provides a sentence of humorous commentary alongside every forecast. There are well over 6,000 of these humorous phrases in the app, and you’ll always get one appropriate to the current forecast, and it will usually be…

There are a number of thesaurus apps on Google Play and some are free, but if you’re regularly writing – or looking words up – on your Android device, then Chambers Thesaurus is one of the best options, and worth the outlay. It has entries for almost 40,000 words, along with around 400,000 synonyms and antonyms, and…

Pokemon Playhouse is a Pokemon-themed kids game. Children can move around the game and interact with a bunch of different Pokemon. It’s a wildly simple title. There isn’t any reading or math skills required to play. It’s not even educational. The game is just there for fun. Nothing about the game is difficult. However, that…

DirectChat is a nifty little chat companion app. It doesn’t send messages on its own. The app does allow other chat apps to use chat heads. That includes instances where it may not be supported.  Thus, you can have them with WhatsApp, Hangouts, Allo, or whatever it is that you use. There are some customization…

Another Lost Phone: Laura’s Story is the next game in the Lost Phone franchise. The player finds a lost phone belonging to a woman named Laura. They must dig through the phone to find out why she disappeared.  The player digs through various apps to investigate her life, her contacts, her messages, and even her…

Google Family Link is an app for parents. It allows parents to monitor their children’s activities on their smartphone. They can also do things like lock the phone down during certain times of the day. Thus, you can lock the phone when it’s bedtime. Parents have to make a linked Google account for each kid.…

TouchBar for Android is inspired by the feature of the same name for the MacBook Pro. It adds a little shortcut bar to the bottom of your screen, which you can reveal or hide with a swipe up from the bottom left corner, or set to stay visible permanently. The bar gives you quick access…

Ava won’t be for everyone, but if you’re deaf or hard of hearing, or know someone who is, it could be enormously useful. The core feature is simply that it listens to what’s being said and shows it on the screen, so if you’re deaf or hard of hearing you can have Ava listen to someone…

Box breathing is a breathing technique used by the Navy Seals, sports professionals and others, which involves taking long deep breaths and holding them. It has a number of supposed benefits, from reducing stress and anxiety, to improving blood flow, awareness, focus and attention. While we’re not sure how sound the science is for all…

Apple doesn’t make many Android apps. In fact, it only makes three, and two of them are music apps. But it’s the third that’s the most interesting, because Move to iOS is designed to make swapping Android for iOS as easy as possible. Apple’s app was introduced in iOS 9, and it’s available for iPhones…

You’re probably well aware of how customizable Android is, and may even have dabbled with custom icon packs to change up the look of your apps, but what if you want to go a step further and actually create icons of your own? Well, then you probably want Adapticons. This app, as the name suggests, lets…

In the age of the web, magazines can feel like a dated concept, but Readlydoes a decent job of bringing them up to date by offering a Netflix-like subscription service. We say Netflix-like, but while most of the content on there is far from brand new, you have access to the latest issues of thousands of…

1. Automatic Setup You won’t notice this until you restore your iOS device or add a new one, but in iOS 11 you can now get all the key information – iCloud Keychain passwords, Wi-Fi logins, system preferences – from an existing iOS device. It works in much the same way as pairing an Apple…

​The iPhone X is one of the most exciting phones released this decade – but not because it offers anything particularly innovative or new.  It’s exciting because it’s the most radical redesign of an iPhone yet, tying together a number of key trends in the industry and adding in a level of polish that will…

Want to learn something new? Udemycould be a good place to start. This website and app has over 40,000 video courses across more than 12,000 topics, covering everything from yoga and meditation to psychology, photography and web development. Courses are of varied lengths and aimed at various different levels. Some are just a few hours…

Chromecast, AirPlay and the like are great, but not all services support them, which is where an app like Tubiocomes in. The app lets you cast web videos and music from your phone or tablet to your smart TV and other smart devices, including Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Nexus Player, Android TV, Xbox One…

Your phone’s status bar can show you how much battery you’ve got left or how strong your signal is, but what if you want to be able to see how much memory your phone has left, how many unread messages you have, the battery temperature or your CPU usage? For those things and many more…

Blackpills is a video streaming service a bit like Netflix, except, well, not really (bear with us). Like Netflix it has a variety of shows across a number of genres (all of which are fiction in this case), but unlike Netflix it’s all original content, so you won’t see these anywhere else. Blackpills is also designed…

Gratus is a simple app designed to remind you of the things you’re grateful for. When you open the app it asks you to write out something you’re grateful for and optionally add an associated image. You can build up a collection of these, which you can then view whenever you need a reminder that there…

Twitter might be one of the biggest social networks around, but its official app leaves something to be desired. Thankfully there’s a whole world of third party options and Flamingo for Twitter is one of the newest and best. Despite still being in beta it already feels slick and polished, with a material design inspired…

Our phones might be smart but for the most part our clocks aren’t yet and even most alarm clock apps are disappointingly basic, but Sleep as Android proves that there’s a lot more an alarm clock can do than just wake someone up. You can set it to wake you up after just 15 or…

One of the great things about Android is how customizable it is and icon packs are one of the best examples of that. The Urmun Icon Pack gives you access to over 3790 high quality icons, each of which offers a stylish alternative to the standard app icons to freshen up your home screens. It…

Stop motion clips let you bring worlds to life on zero budget and Motion is a slick, simple way of creating them on an Android device. All you have to do is line up a shot, then press the shutter button to save it. Rinse and repeat until you’ve built a full clip, then you can…

Between Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and dozens of other services there are numerous ways to legally watch content that don’t require you to go anywhere near a TV schedule, but with different libraries and different payment models finding the specific things you want can sometimes be a chore. JustWatch simplifies that process by letting you search for…

File managers aren’t exciting, but they are useful, especially if you have a lot stored on your phone. Google Play is full of options, but Solid Explorer File Manager is one of the best for a variety of reasons. For one thing it’s not limited to just displaying local storage, as you can also link…

There’s no shortage of apps for digital artists, but Infinite Painter is one of the most feature-packed, with dozens of brush presets and the ability to create your own, along with layers, blending, editing tools and more, plus the option to export your images as JPEG, PNG, PSD or ZIP. But as well as being…

The problem with weather apps is that, for the most part, they only use one source for their data, but Climendo uses lots, and then works out what the most likely weather at any given time is. The complete selection of weather providers that it uses includes AccuWeather, Weather Underground, NOAA, Met Office, Foreca, Dark…

Remixlive is a great music maker for people who don’t know how to make music. It provides you with a grid of pads (24 on mobile, 48 on phablets and tablets), each of which contains a sample, with different grids fitting a particular style of music. That second point means that everything broadly fits together,…

SIMPLE HABIT Meditation apps are meant, among other things, to relax and de-stress us, but if you’re anything like us they run the risk of doing the opposite, becoming chores that we feel guilty for neglecting. Simple Habit doesn’t completely solve that problem, but it gets some way there, by offering short 5-minute meditations, that…

We all need a little help relieving stress sometimes, and Pause aims to provide that assistance through the simple act of following a dot around the screen with your finger. As you do so soothing sounds play, and a colored blob gradually grows around the dot. Within a few minutes the app promises to lessen…

Duolingo is the king of free language learning apps, but if you’re prepared to spend a bit of money Mondly arguably has it beat. The app has lessons for dozens of languages, including some missing from Duolingo, such as Japanese, and there’s a range of different content, designed to help you read, write and speak…

Redshift is an essential app for anyone with an interest in the night sky. Using your current location, the app will highlight the planets, stars and constellations that should be visible to you, and with a tap you can fly out to them, viewing 3D models of the night sky. With 100,000 stars, 70,000 deep…

Never feel like you have enough storage space on your phone? Then SD Maid could be for you, as beyond being a file explorer it also has tools to help you identify what’s taking up space and what you can get rid of. Its ‘CorpseFinder’ tool searches for directories or files that have been left…

Your phone’s screen is one of the biggest drains on a battery, but if your handset has an AMOLED display (like most Samsung handsets and a number of others do) then there are things you can do to minimize the drain. While LCD screens light up the entire display no matter what you’re viewing, AMOLED…

Flowx isn’t actually a new app, rather a rebranding of WeatherBomb, but it’s worth your attention if you don’t know about it. Yes, it’s a forecast app, but it’s more interested in showing you how weather systems move than simply telling you whether it’s going to rain. The app gives you a map and then you…

Avoiding sunburn can seem like a dark art at times. It doesn’t always need to be that warm or sunny to get burned, and everyone’s different in terms of how much UV they can take. It’s also not always clear how often you should reapply sunscreen, but with UVLens you need never get burned again. The app…

The quick settings that you can reach from the notification shade on Android phones can be enormously useful, saving time when you want to toggle often used features, but the features you use most may not be the ones available on this screen. If that’s the case, you’ll want Shortcutter Quick Settings. This lets you add…

There are lots of apps for discovering and building a watch list of films, but CineTrakis more feature-packed and polished than most. For one thing, you can make a list not just of things that you want to watch, but also have a second list of the things you’ve seen, so you’ll never again get halfway…

If you’ve got any interest in Space Flight you probably know that launches of shuttles and satellites are happening all the time. The thing is keeping track of them all can be tricky, especially as various different space agencies are responsible for organisation. Space Launch Now keeps track of launches, so finally you don’t have to. It has…

From the company behind the popular ES File Explorer app comes a new tool, this time aimed at freeing up space on your device. ES Disk Analyzer can find and delete duplicate files, compress images (and suggest large or rarely used ones that you might want to compress), highlight the size of cached files in apps and clear…

Whether you just have a grocery list, or to-do lists for work, chores and every other part of your life, Wunderlist has you covered. The app is built specifically for list making, so it’s not a multi-purpose note taking app like Evernote, but it creates more effective to-do points as a result. Any list you create automatically…

ADW Launcher has long been one of the best launchers available on Google Play to change the look of your phone, and now the company behind it is back with ADW Launcher 2. This isn’t one for fans of minimalist, simple interfaces as ADW Launcher 2 is all about customization. You can change the style of…