New to Android and overwhelmed by what your new phone or tablet can do? The various categories in the Play Store are a great way to discover and install new apps on your device. However, with more than a million apps on the Play Store, finding the right ones for newcomers can turn out to be a chore instead of a breeze. To make your life easier, we list down the five must-have apps for every Android beginner.
SwiftKey Keyboard
The stock keyboard included by Google or by your OEM is more than good enough to get the job done. However, SwiftKey takes typing makes gliding fingers across the touchscreen of your device to enter words a breeze. Using its impeccable auto-correct and next-word prediction engine, users can enter whole sentences without even typing a single word! Its simultaneous multi-lingual support for more than 61 languages is like a cherry on top of the cake that further sweetens the deal.
No wonder the app has been constantly among the top 5 apps on the Play Store for over a year now. SwiftKey has to be the first app that you download from the Play Store on your brand new Android device. You can try the free version of the app for 30 days before having to purchase the full version.
Dice Player
The stock video player on most Android devices is more than capable of playing any video format that you throw at it. However, these players lack many advanced features like subtitles support, multiple audio track, playback speed control and more.
Dice Player is among the most popular video players available on the Play Store and packs in all the features mentioned above and more. It also includes a pop-up play feature as seen on Samsung devices, the ability to playback MKV videos and support for network drives.
Best of all, the app is completely free to use, though users can unlock additional functionality and support the developer via an IAP of $1.99.
DashClock
In our 4 tips that every Android beginner must know about article, we mentioned the ability to place widgets on your lock screen. If you do end up using them, DashClock is a must-have widget for you. Made by Roman Nurik, a member of the Android team over at Google, DashClock is a highly customisable widget that makes use of extensions to display relevant information from almost any app.
Best of all, DashClock is completely free to download and use. It can also be used as a standalone widget on your homescreen.
Quickoffice
Nearly a year after it acquired Quickoffice, Google released a major update to the app and made it free on the Play Store. While most Android devices do come with an office editing suite pre-installed, they are all limited in functionality or are poorly designed.
Quickoffice, on the other hand, has an excellent UI optimised for mobile devices and tablets, supports a wide array of file types and formats and best of all, is completely free to download and use.
Muzei
Unlike the other apps in this list, Muzei is not an app but a live wallpaper. Made by the developer of DashClock — Roman Nurik — the live wallpaper shows some great artistic images from around the world. Like DashClock though, Muzei is open source and supports plugins or extensions that allow users to add other sources of images.
It also recedes your current image into the background by blurring and dimming it, so as to make the icons on your home screen stand out. Muzei can be downloaded for free from the Play Store.
There are a lot of other must-have apps on the Play Store including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Keep, Translate, Timely and more. If you think we have missed a must-have app for beginners, do drop in a comment and let us know.
