Android apps that deserve a look
Launchers
Nova Launcher is an highly customizable, performance driven, home screen replacement for Android 4.0+
FEATURES • Color Themes • Icon Themes • Scrollable Dock (Keep all your favorite apps on the dock, with up to 7 icons per page and up to 3 pages.) • Customizable App Drawer • Change scrolling style, choose between horizontal paginated or vertical continuous • Scroll Effects • Infinite Scroll • Folder Icons • Backup/Restore • Widgets in dock • Widget Overlapping • Add multiple apps to the desktop or a folder at once • Select hidden activities from your favorite apps
Nova Launcher Prime Features (Paid version):
• Drawer Groups: • Unlimited custom tabs • Gestures • Hide Apps • Dock Swipes • Unread Counts (it works with Tesla Unread)
Microsoft Launcher provides a new home screen experience that empowers you to be more productive on your Android device. Microsoft Launcher is highly customizable, allowing you to organize everything on your phone. Your personalized feed makes it easy to view your calendar, to do lists, and more. Sticky Notes on the go. When you set up Microsoft Launcher as your new home screen, you can either start fresh with your favorite apps or import your current home screen layout. Need to switch back to your previous home screen? You can do that, too!
This version of Microsoft Launcher has been rebuilt on a new codebase to make new features possible, including dark mode, personalized news, and numerous performance improvements (improved load time, less memory use, better battery performance, and fluent animation).
MICROSOFT LAUNCHER FEATURES Customizable icons: · Give your phone a consistent look and feel with custom icon packs and adaptive icons.
Beautiful wallpapers: · Enjoy a fresh new image from Bing every day or choose your own photos.
Dark theme: · Comfortably use your phone at night or in low light environments with Microsoft Launcher’s new dark theme. This feature?is compatible with Android’s?dark mode settings.
Backup and Restore: · Easily move between your phones or try Home Screen setups through Microsoft Launcher’s Backup and Restore feature. Backups can be stored locally or saved to the cloud for easy transfers.
Gestures: · Swipe, pinch, double tap, and more on the home screen to easily navigate on the Microsoft Launcher surface. This app uses Accessibility Service Permission for optional gesture of screen lock and recent apps view.
Improved performance: · Microsoft Launcher now loads faster, uses less memory, is more battery efficient, and offers fluent animations.
Notifications
Join is a mobile and desktop application that lets you remotely control many aspects of your Android phone through Tasker integration, as well as send and receive files, SMS, screenshots. It also has universal copy/paste and screenshot mirroring.
To sum it up, you can:
- Sync your notifications across devices
- Send SMS messages from any web browser
- Copy your clipboard from one device to another
- Push web pages
- Take screenshots
- Set wallpapers
- Encrypt your pushes
- Use all of this in Tasker and much more!
You have 30 days to try out the app for free and can then unlock it with a one-time payment (no subscriptions in sight).
Chat
An alternative Telegram client based on TDLib, with higher speed, slicker animations and experimental features. The goal of Telegram X is to reinvent Telegram and explore new frontiers in speed, ease of use, quality of animations and all other aspects.
Telegram is a messaging app created by former VK creators with a focus on speed and security. It’s superfast, simple and free. It is like SMS, but more powerful.
You can send messages, photos and videos to people who are in your phone contacts (and have Telegram). You can also create groups for up to 200000 people or channels for unlimited subscribers.
Your chats are not encrypted by default, which enables other people to see what you are writing. You can enable a "Secret Chat" to enable end-to-end encryption.
Telegram offers a Premium plan too: by subscribing to Telegram Premium, users unlock doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management – and a whole lot more. At the same time, all existing features that users have come to expect and rely on for nearly a decade remain free. Moreover, non-premium users will be able to enjoy some of Premium's benefits: for example, download the extra-large documents and view stickers sent by premium users, as well as tap to increase counters on premium reactions that were already added to a message. There are different prices for the Premium subscription based on your country, also if you buy it via the @premiumbot you don't have to pay the app store fees.
Telegram's security model has received notable criticism by cryptography experts. They criticized the general security model of permanently storing all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers by default and by not enabling end-to-end encryption for messages by default.
Telegram's client-side code is open-source software, whereas its server-side code is closed-source and proprietary. The service also provides public APIs with which developers can access the same functionality as Telegram's official apps to build their own messaging applications.
Telegram also provides a bot API for programmers to create different kinds of Telegram bots. Bots are simply Telegram accounts operated by software – not people – and they'll often have AI features. They can do anything – teach, play, search, broadcast, remind, connect, integrate with other services, or even pass commands to the Internet of Things.
Using Signal, you can communicate instantly with your relatives without making a compromise on privacy or security. Make video calls, send messages, pictures, videos, documents, voice recordings, GIFs, contacts & location, create groups so that you can chat in real time with all your friends at once and react to their messages with emojis -all with complete privacy-. Signal servers never have access to any of your communications and never store any of your data.
- Say Anything - Share text, voice messages, photos, videos, GIFs and files for free. Signal uses your phone's data connection so you can avoid SMS (No longer supports SMS or MMS) and MMS fees.
- Speak Freely - Make crystal-clear voice and video calls to people who live across town, or across the ocean, with no long-distance charges.
- Make Privacy Stick - Add a new layer of expression to your conversations with encrypted stickers. You can also create and share your own sticker packs.
- Get Together with Groups - Group chats make it easy to stay connected to your family, friends, and coworkers.
- No ads. No trackers. No kidding. - There are no ads, no affiliate marketers, and no creepy tracking in Signal. So focus on sharing the moments that matter with the people who matter to you.
- Remain Connected - Push notifications let you know when new messages have arrived, and they'll be waiting for you even if your battery dies or you temporarily lose service.
- View Source - All of our code is free, open, and available on GitHub (https://github.com/signalapp).
- Join Movements - Technology developed by Open Whisper Systems is trusted and used by millions of people around the world every day.
