Your cellphone is largely your individual assistant — and like every aide, it wishes the proper set of gear to do its activity successfully.
The excellent news? As an enlightened Android cellphone proprietor, you have got no scarcity of efficiency-enhancing choices. In contrast to (ahem) positive different cell platforms, Android grants you the chance to customise and keep watch over the core consumer interface so it is completely adapted to your wishes and the best way you love to get issues performed. And whilst the extra complicated UI-adjusting gear have a tendency to be focused on the power-user crowd, you wouldn’t have to be a card-carrying geek to benefit from what they provide.
Behold: seven complicated apps that’ll empower your favourite high-tech helper and make allowance it to succeed in its complete productiveness prospective.
The entire apps indexed right here have smart and accountable privateness insurance policies, as supplied via their builders. They do not require any permissions past what is suitable for his or her functions or have interaction in any means of eyebrow-raising knowledge practices.
1. Niagara Launcher
Certainly one of Android’s most efficient performance benefits is the versatility it will give you along with your cellphone’s house display screen setup. Undeniable and easy, you do not have to stay with a static grid of bland icons for each app possible.
As a substitute, you’ll in finding a custom Android launcher that is ideally suited in your taste and optimized for the best way you’re employed.
And an app referred to as Niagara Launcher is an ideal instance of the ability that provides you.
Niagara Launcher is a decidedly other tackle the usual smartphone house display screen setup. As a substitute of unveiling you a jumbled mess of icons and widgets, Niagara cuts the muddle and encourages you to create a unmarried small listing of the apps you in truth get admission to maximum frequently. The whole lot else will get tucked away into an alphabetically scrolling menu that is from your hair but simple to get admission to when you wish to have it — via swiping your finger up or down on each side of your display screen.
Fundamentals apart, Niagara has some extremely considerate options for ergonomic performance. You’ll arrange any of your primary app icons to incorporate on-demand and interactive get admission to to similar notifications, shortcuts, or even widgets, all obtainable with a sideways swipe. And talking of widgets, you’ll additionally now stack multiple Android widgets inside the launcher’s top-of-screen house for instant at-a-glance perspectives of vital information.
Niagara Launcher is unfastened with an non-compulsory $10-a-year or $30 lifetime improve for ongoing get admission to to its extra complicated choices.
2. Simple Drawer
It doesn’t matter what launcher you could be utilizing, a cunning little app referred to as Easy Drawer will assist in making it as rapid as will also be to seek out and open any app in your cellphone.
The best way Simple Drawer works is understated: If you position its widget on your house display screen, you can see a distinct keyboard that is still visual and in a position for fast-finding motion. Each time you wish to have to open an app that is not in an instant in entrance of you, all you do is faucet the app’s first letter inside of that keyboard. In a break up 2d, Simple Drawer will pull up a listing of all apps that start with that letter — no looking or scrolling required.
You’ll set regularly used apps as favorites, too, which makes them in an instant to be had on the peak of the Simple Drawer interface. You’ll additionally at all times get admission to your favorites via tapping a distinct middle icon inside the Simple Drawer keyboard — and you’ll pull up a listing of lately used apps via tapping a clock icon in that very same house.
This is the place issues get particularly attention-grabbing: Along with serving as a launchboard in your apps, Simple Drawer can expedite the way you in finding and phone any of your contacts. If you turn on the best choice inside the app’s settings, its keyboard will pull up contacts via letter with the velocity of lightning and display ’em above its common app effects. And a unmarried faucet of any touch can both start up a choice or a textual content, relying on which choice you favor.
Simple Drawer is unfastened with an non-compulsory $2 improve for its top class model, which provides in some additional customization choices.
3. Pixel Seek
Why prevent with apps? Inject a splash of scrumptious performance into your cellphone’s whole seek setup with a sensible ‘n’ saucy app referred to as Pixel Search.
And do not let its title idiot you: Whilst the app is modeled after (and builds on) the robust common seek gadget provide on Google’s Pixel merchandise, it really works on any Android tool — regardless of who made it. And it will deliver an important improve to each Pixel homeowners and any individual utilizing a non-Google-made Android system.
Briefly, Pixel Seek will give you a wiser, quicker, extra environment friendly means of locating just about the rest in your Android tool. With only one faucet on its widget or shortcut, you’ll seek no longer just for apps but in addition for explicit purposes inside of apps, like composing a brand new e-mail or developing a brand new report — one thing the usual Pixel seek gadget does not even do.
In a similar fashion, Pixel Seek can pull up contacts, conversations, and recordsdata or folders out of your native garage. And it means that you can seek the internet itself in addition to seek for explicit information from inside apps — a location in Google Maps, for example, a video in YouTube, or an merchandise from the Play Retailer — all from that very same unmarried spot and with a unmarried streamlined question.
Pixel Seek is totally unfastened to make use of for now, despite the fact that it does glance love it might in the end give a boost to some means of in-app upgrades.
4. Edge Gestures
Android is increasingly more a gesture-centric operating system — however you wouldn’t have to restrict your self to the gestures Google will give you for purchasing round your cellphone.
It doesn’t matter what more or less tool you might be utilizing or what Android version it is operating, you’ll create your individual customized Android gestures for particularly environment friendly navigation with an outstanding app referred to as Edge Gestures.
Edge Gestures permits you to create as much as 3 gesture-sensitive sizzling zones in your display screen — at the left, at the proper, and alongside the ground of the show. So, for example, it’s essential to set the app to take you again to your house display screen anytime you long-press anyplace at the upper-left aspect of your display screen, have it open Android’s Review house every time you swipe up on that house, and feature it act because the gadget Again key every time you swipe proper on it.
You’ll create identical kinds of movements for adjusting your display screen’s brightness, opening your notification or Fast Settings panel, and toggling Android’s split-screen mode. You’ll additionally permit a “pie keep watch over” choice that provides a tiny translucent button onto any sizzling zone you turn on. Urgent and maintaining that button will then pull up a pie-shaped semicircle of your favourite shortcuts, and you’ll swipe to any of ’em for simple on-demand get admission to to these apps from anyplace.
All of this makes for a extra herbal and ergonomic phone-using enjoy, particularly on a tool with a bigger display screen — the place it usually takes an excellent quantity of finger yoga to succeed in the highest or backside spaces of the show.
Edge Gestures prices $1.50. And should you actually wish to take complete good thing about the whole thing it may well be offering, you will want to imagine the subsequent app on this assortment along it.
5. Popup Widget 3
Give your customized gestures some additional pop with Popup Widget 3 — a thoughtfully crafted app that works hand in hand with Edge Gestures to summon some spectacular Android-exclusive powers.
Created via the similar developer as Edge Gestures, Popup Widget 3 permits you to stay any common Android widget at finger’s achieve, it doesn’t matter what you might be doing in your tool. You simply attach the widget to an motion — like swiping over to the proper out of your Edge Gesture sizzling zone — after which every time you carry out that motion, the widget will seem as a floating field over no matter else is in your display screen.
That implies it’s essential to pull up and scroll via such things as your inbox, your newest textual content messages, or your individual notes just by swiping your finger at the aspect of your display screen — with out ever having to modify apps or interrupt your workflow.
Popup Widget 3 prices $1.50.
6. Panels
Need an much more flexible type of on-demand get admission to to the rest, anytime? An app referred to as Panels is simply the software for you.
Panels, as its title suggests, permits you to create customized panels that pop up whilst you carry out explicit gestures alongside the perimeters of your cellphone’s show. Very similar to the Edge Gestures and Popup Widget 3 combo, it’s essential to have it pull up a floating window with a widget whilst you swipe in your display screen in a definite means — however past that, you’ll additionally use it to create complicated panels with your individual customized mixes of widgets, apps, shortcuts inside of apps, and contacts for instant common get admission to.
Panels may also provide you with a whole app drawer so you’ll scroll via all of your put in apps and open any of ’em from anyplace in your cellphone, with no need to first head again to your house display screen. It could do the similar with contacts, too. The chances are nearly unending.
Panels is unfastened with an non-compulsory $2 improve to take away some boundaries, liberate additional choices, and do away with commercials inside the configuration interface.
7. Typing Hero
Ultimate however no longer least is likely one of the maximum potential-packed Android performance gear of all — a strapping secret weapon that may prevent heaps of time and switch you right into a text-summoning smartphone sorcerer.
The app is known as Typing Hero. It permits you to retailer any collection of prewritten words — the rest from a phrase or sentence to a complete paragraph of textual content — after which summon the ones words anytime, anyplace, and feature ’em right away inserted into no matter you might be writing.
Typing Hero works by way of macros. The ones are particular key phrases you place up that then turn into into your saved words. So, for example, you may:
- Make it in order that typing *a reasons your complete trade mailing cope with to seem in no matter textual content box you might be typing in
- Arrange *d to pop in instructions to a navigationally challenged location you end up sharing with shoppers continuously
- Or create a key phrase like #thank you that’d insert a generic thanks message you ship out robotically
Past that fundamental form of textual content substitute, Typing Hero can do a little lovely wild stuff involving variables or even movements in your cellphone. You could have a inventory e-mail reaction with a clean house the place you’ll fill in a selected recipient’s title, for example, or perhaps an area for an afternoon and time for a gathering. Anytime you kind within the command to name up that snippet, Typing Hero will pop up a sort prompting you to fill within the blanks — and after you fill the data in, the app will end sending the message for you in a single fell swoop.
I am tellin’ ya: That is one critically robust app. And it will give you a qualified degree of desktop-like productiveness you completely may not in finding on another cell platform.
Typing Hero is unfastened with a $20-a-year or $60 lifetime subscription for get admission to to all of its maximum complicated choices. With all of the mins it is certain to avoid wasting you, that would possibly simply be cash smartly spent.
This newsletter was once at the start printed in July 2017 and maximum lately up to date in June 2023.
Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.