12 Best Android Apps Available Right Now

By Betty Bassett

Android evolves more every year, but apps remain just as important as ever. Here are the best apps you can get right now.

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. The crème de la crème. These are the Android apps that stand alone at the top of an ever-growing pantheon. These apps have become ubiquitous with Android, and if you’re looking for the good stuff, it’s assumed that you’ve used some of these apps already. There are a ton of amazing Android apps out there. However, there are a few that stand out above the rest. These apps are useful to just about everyone, no matter what their use case may be. Without further delay, here are the best Android apps currently available.

Most people should be relatively familiar with most of these apps. They are the best, after all, and people tend to gravitate toward the best. 

The best Android apps available right now:

1Weather

Google Drive

Waze and Google Maps

Google Search / Assistant / Feed

LastPass

Pocket Casts

Poweramp

Tasker and IFTTT

Textra

TickTick

YouTube and YouTube Music

Zedge

1Weather

Price: Free / $1.99

1Weather is arguably the best weather app out there. It features a simple, paginated design that shows you the current weather, forecast for up to 12 weeks, a radar, and other fun stats. Along with that, you’ll get a fairly decent set of lightly customizable widgets and the standard stuff like severe weather notifications and a radar so you can see the storms approaching. There is also a video element with two or three-minute weather updates for your region. The UI is logical and reasonably easy to navigate as well. The radar occasionally hangs while loading, but it’s usually not too big of a deal.

The free version has every feature with some mild, inoffensive advertising. The single $1.99 in-app purchase removes advertising. Most will also likely enjoy the range of weather fun facts as well when you open the app. We have a list of the best weather apps and widgets if you want more options.

Google Drive

Price: Free / $1.99-$299.99 per month

Google Drive screenshot 2020

Google Drive is a cloud storage solution available on Android where all new users get 15GB for free permanently upon signing up. You can, of course, buy more if needed. What makes Google Drive so special is the suite of Android apps that are attached to it. They include Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Keep. It just covers so many bases, and it’s so cheap that it’s impossible not to recommend it to just about anybody.

Google Maps and Waze

Price: Free

Google Maps virtually owns the navigation apps scene and it remains one of the best Android apps ever. It gets frequent, almost weekly updates that seem to only add to its incredibly generous list of existing features. Aside from the very basics, Google Maps gives you access to places of interest, traffic data, directions to things like rest stops or gas stations, and you can download maps for offline use.

If you add to that the Waze experience, which includes tons of its own features, you won’t need another navigation app. Ever. Google also owns and operates Waze so we list them together. Both navigation apps work on Android Auto and usually, they work better than car navigation systems. Of course, we have more GPS apps options as well here if you need them.

Google Search / Assistant / Feed

Price: Free

This is one seriously powerful app. It also works on most Android devices. You simply download the app and then enable it. From there, you can ask it whatever you want. It also supports a variety of commands. You can control smart home products, ask it just about any question, and it can even do simple math problems for you. It’s included with a variety of products such as Google Home speakers.

There is also a second Google Assistant app for those who want a quick launch icon on the home screen. The hardware stuff costs money, but Google Assistant is free. 

LastPass

Price: Free / $12 per year

LastPass is one of those must-have Android apps. It’s a password manager that lets you save your login credentials safely and securely. On top of that, it can help generate nearly impossible passwords for you to use on your accounts. It’s all controlled with a master password. It has cross-platform support (premium version only) so you can use it on computers, mobile devices, tablets, or whatever.

There are others, but LastPass seems to be one step ahead most of the time. Additionally, the premium version is reasonably inexpensive. You can also grab LastPass Authenticator to go along with it for added security. There are other options for great password managers here and some free LastPass alternatives if the new, more restricted free version isn’t doing it for you. LastPass also has an authenticator app for additional security.

Pocket Casts

Price: Free / $0.99 per month / $9.99 per year

Pocket Casts is one of the most popular podcast apps. It received some ire years ago for moving to a subscription model. However, changes since then have made the app more or less usable by anyone, even without a subscription. The app houses a ton of podcasts, good sharing options, and you can set things like auto download and playback speed. The UI is clean, easy to read, and easy to navigate. There isn’t much Pocket Casts does wrong.

The subscription is mostly optional and includes cross-platform support, more themes, 10GB of cloud storage to store podcasts, and more. We used to be quite against subscriptions, but since most podcast players now do it. I'm able to use this without the subscription without much issue. Podcast Addict and CastBox are other excellent options in this space, and we have a list of even more great podcast apps here.

Poweramp

Price: Free trial / $4.99

Poweramp is one of Android’s most popular and functional local music players. It has basically all of the features, including hi-res audio support, Android Auto, an equalizer, gapless smoothing, and support for virtually any audio codec you can find. The UI has a tiny bit of a learning curve, but it’s one of the better-looking music players as well with optional themes in the Google Play Store.

There are other great music apps here, but the top slot is arguably Poweramp’s title to lose. 

Tasker and IFTTT

Price: $2.99 and Free, respectively

Tasker and IFTTT are two of the most powerful Android apps. They are automation apps where you can create various triggers to perform actions when specific things happen. For instance, you can use IFTTT or Tasker to automatically turn your Philips Hue lights on at night and off in the morning. Generally speaking, Tasker is the power-user option and has a much steeper learning curve than IFTTT. IFTTT is not only easier to use, but there are a boatload of fun things you can do with it. 

Tasker is free on Google Play Pass. IFTT is free for most stuff but there is a subscription if you want a few extras. There are some other great Android tools and utility apps, but none of them can step up to Tasker and IFTTT.

Textra

Price: Free / $4.49

Textra is arguably the best and most stable texting app for Android. It comes with a variety of themes, most of which are editable by you. It does basically everything you need an SMS app to do without much hassle. It even has a tutorial built-in that makes it work with Android Auto better than most other texting apps. We like it for its simplicity. It’s better than most OEM SMS apps and we’d easily recommend it over most of those.

Messages by Google (Google Play) is another great option and it even has the ability to stream your texts to your computer (via web browser). We have a full list of excellent SMS apps here as well if these don’t work for you.

TickTick

Price: Free / $27.99 per year

TickTick isn’t as popular as other to-do list apps. However, it may be the best one. It covers the basics like recurring tasks, reminders, push notifications, various organizational features, and categories. The app also lets you share tasks and entire categories with other people. This makes it great for family use, small teams at work, or other such groups. It’s also great for stuff like grocery lists, honey-do lists, or any other list.

You get all of the features for free, albeit in a somewhat limited capacity, such as two reminders per task (premium makes that infinite). Some other excellent options in the space include Todoist and Microsoft To-Do. 

YouTube and YouTube Music

Price: Free / $12.99+

We don’t typically recommend streaming services to people. After all, everybody has their own preferences and there are plenty of great options out there. However, we really like the combination of YouTube Music and YouTube. For one price, you get unlimited music from YouTube Music with more than enough tracks to compete with Spotify and Apple Music. However, you also get ad-free YouTube along with background video play and offline downloads..

Zedge

Price: Free / $0.99 per month / $4.99 per year

Last, but certainly not least on our list is Zedge. This is a wallpaper, ringtones, notification tones, and alarm tones app that gives you an unbelievable number of options to customize the most basic parts of your device. On top of having an exhaustive collection of things, Zedge also promotes various items during holiday seasons making it easy to theme your phone up for Christmas, Halloween, and other holidays.