As you might expect, I’m a huge Android fan. I think that what you can do with an Android phone is spectacular, especially a rooted one. There are still some big apps that make it to iOS first, but there are also a huge number of apps that only make it to Android because iOS is too locked down for them.
After finding a really cool app unexpectedly, I thought it might be cool to share some of my favorite Android apps that you probably don’t already have.
It was midnight, I was visiting family in Boston, and I decided to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu. My laptop has a few strange quirks with linux, and one of them is that when you install a new version of linux, you must boot with a bootable USB disk to do something.
Of course, I didn’t have a USB disk with me, and my computer was completely useless until I could find one. Finally, as a fourth resort, I thought that maybe there was some way to boot from the SD card in my phone. I was that desperate.
I stumbled across DriveDroid. It will download a boot image for any of a couple dozen popular linux distributions and then become a bootable device for that image. Within minutes I was running Ubuntu off my phone and used it to fix my computer. Amazing.
CF Lumen is like f.lux, but better. It changes the color tone of your screen to avoid blasting you with blue light when it might disrupt your circadian rhythms, but it also goes into a cool red-only mode at night. Unlike every other similar app for Android, it actually changes the color tones properly and keeps the necessary contrast and details.
It’s hard to convey just how awesome this program is. If you like f.lux, you will love CF Lumen.
If your phone has NFC, as most modern Android phones do, you can use FareBot to read a huge amount of information from your transit card (like the SF clipper card or Tokyo Suica). Just tap your card on your phone and you can see the remaining balance.
LoungeBuddy (also iOS)
If you have a bunch of credit cards, you probably have access to airport lounges. Amex gives you access to their own lounges, a few airline ones, and a Priority Pass card that gives access to some amazing lounges around the world. Many co-branded airline cards give access to their lounges.
LoungeBuddy lets you input all of the cards you have and will let you search by airport to see which lounges you can access. This is a huge improvement over the old method of doing a bunch of google searches and sifting through tables.
Android has a decent video player built in, and VLC is quite good as well, but MX Player is by far the best. It’s the only player that’s been able to play every single video file I’ve ever thrown at it, including a really strangely encoded Japanese movie with subtitles.
A big trend in sneaky surveillance is to record the MAC address (a unique identifier) of your phone any time you’re near a WiFi hotspot. Retailers do it to see who visits, governments do it to locate you. Pry-Fi is a great utility that will randomize your MAC address until you actually connect to a WiFi access point. I believe that the newest version of iOS does this as well.
AirDroid isn’t as unknown as some of these other apps, but it’s so useful that I’m mentioning it anyway. If your computer is on the same wifi network as your phone, you can access many of the functions of your phone through a web browser. I mainly use it to text with a real keyboard, but it does a lot more than that.
I always think that I know about every great Android app out there, and then I find a new one (like CF Lumen last night). Do you have any great ones that I haven’t heard of?
###
Photo is a chunk of my app drawer.
Leave a Reply