It’s commonly stated that fewer Android users pay for apps than iPhone users. There are many reasons for this, but the quality of apps is not one of them. There are thousands of high quality paid apps on the Play Store in every category.
Here’s our pick of the essential Android apps that are worth buying.
Fleksy Keyboard
The are so many third party keyboards that are worth a look, but Fleksy is our current favourite. Its strength is its simplicity—the stripped down keyboard allows the keys to be larger, margin them easier to type on. Gestures are used for adding full stops and commas, while you can access more punctuation and a numbers quickly with a long press on the keyboard. The corrective element still has room for improvement —SwiftKey still has it beat in that area—but for sheer speed Flesky is hard to beat.
Pocket Casts
Pocket Casts is not only the most beautiful podcast app for Android, it is also the best. The super-fast performance instantly updates all of your podcast subscriptions, it syncs perfectly across multiple devices (including between Android and iOS), and has all a vast range of features that make the most comprehensive app in its class.
Zombies, Run!
If you need a decent fitness app then you won’t be short of options on the Play Store. What most of them cannot do, though, is give you motivation. Zombies, Run! combines basic fitness tools with an interactive story about the zombie apocalypse. As you run occasional radio reports interrupt the music you’re playing through your device, giving you updates on the unfolding story. The only way to survive is to keep running.
Press
RSS may not be as popular as it once was, but if you’ve got a lot of websites you like to keep up to date with then Press is the most elegant tool you will find. Press is a very simple app that puts all the focus on the content. Managing all your site feeds is easy, and posts are rendered in a highly readable format. With dark a light themes it has a style to suit everyone.
Titanium Backup PRO Key * root
If you have rooted your phone, chances are the first app you installed was Titanium Backup. This free app is the de facto standard for backing up your data on a rooted device. It’s well worth paying to unlock the pro features. You get far more backup and restore options, the ability to migrate data across different ROMs, cloud support for syncing backups to services like Dropbox or Google Drive, and much more.
reddit sync pro
For us reddit sync pro is the best Reddit app for Android. It has a beautiful UI, with several layouts to choose from including a very nice cards view, and is fast and easy to use. The pro version is essentially the same as the free one, but you get an ad-free experience—worth it alone if you spend as much time in the app as we do—along with the warm feeling that comes from knowing you’re supporting a developer that is doing some great work on the Android platform.
Today Calendar Pro
A calendar app needs to be pretty special to make it worth actually paying for one, given how many awesome free calendar apps already exist. Well, Today doesn’t have many extra features above and beyond what you get from Google Calendar, but it is incredibly pretty (and with a forthcoming Material Design update will get svn more so) and comes with the classiest selection of widgets for both your home screen and your lockscreen. For an outlay of just 50p it is well worth it.
Soccer Scores Pro – FotMob
With the new football season just around the corner now is the perfect time to get your hands on the ultimate football scores app. FotMob has more than five million users and is well established as one of the best scores apps around. It supports over 100 leagues, provides push notifications for matches involving your favourite teams, and has all the tables, stats and news that you need. Also available in an ad-supported free version.