Any suggestions for paid one time purchase apps on the Google play store?
Minimalist phone Launcher that helps to use addictive apps less. And overall a boring home that demotivates you to use your phone.
Plenty of those for free on F-Droid & IzzyOnDroid.
Solid Explorer
Macrodroid. It is like Tasker, but with a much much better UI.
- Password Safe Pro
- My Expenses
- FL Studio, formerly Fruity Loops (also: Desktop)
- Threema
- Through the Ages (boardgame adaption)
Otherwise, I usually prefer free open source solutions (FDroid), but I regularly donate to keep the projects alive. 1 and 2 are small dev studios that I am happy to support.
If your device has stylus support I recommend Artflow for drawing/image editing
Templar Battleforce is a great little turn based strategy game with a squad of persistent troops fighting across missions.
Fair Email. I grabbed it from F Droid and paid direct though.
Nova launcher prime
Also bought Nova Launcher Prime, but they were apparently acquired in the last year so now Nova is spyware? Anyway, I switched over to Kvaesitso and couldn’t be happier.
nova prime + netguard to keep it off the internet has kept me using it. “search focused” launchers are not how I use my phone and nothing else has all the features nova does without being able to just dump the stupid home screen search bar.
Not after they have been acquired by analytics company Branch
Nova was amazing but they’ve been bought out. I tried Niagra Launcher and after being frustrated with a new UI, I absolutely love it.
Interesting, i’ll have a look on it
Edit: gave it a try, but you have to remember the exact name of every app, and i dont care enough to remember if the name is ‘store’ or ‘market’ or ‘app store’ for example
Fair enough! Everyone has a different flavor palette. It also takes a week to get used to. After that one week, I never went back.
Yeah, I’m with you on that. I tend to install a ton of interesting apps when I see them, and categorize them into groups (many apps fit multiple groups) so when I’m looking to do something in particular the apps that might fill the need are together to try it with. If those search launchers allowed for adding multiple tags to each app for categorizing and searching, then they’d probably work well enough for me to try.
Monument Valley. Got the first one for free during a promotion but loved it enough to pay for the sequel and extra levels.
Wanted to love this but it never seemed to get hard or tricky. Whole game kinda felt like a tutorial for the hard levels they never came.
This is my partners favourite game.
Read Era is technically free, but I paid for premium years ago and have never regretted it. I can open any kind of uncorrupted book file, from the Amazon reader format to PDF to epub, and everything else I’ve ever come across. It has a great search function, and the ability to file a book into a custom ‘Collection’. You can edit the details of a book, like adding Author or pusblisher info, add your own personal notes to a page or highlighted quote, see an aggregate of all your highlights in a particular file, and adjust the font, background color, and contrast to your hearts content.
I make my whole family use it now, cause I love it so much and Premium works on Family share.
I bought moon reader 7 years ago and still use it.
Updoot for moon reader
I use Paprika 3 extensively.
I find recipes online, download them to the app stripped of all the online recipe bloat. It sorts all the information automatically, including notes and nutritional info. I can check off ingredients and highlight directions, edit tags, compile menus, add my own notes and write my own recipes, it automatically provides a grocery checklist, has a serving calculator to adjust amounts for whole recipes, built in timers, and that’s just the basics off the top of my head.
It’s free up to a certain amount of storage but I think all the features are available.
Came here for this. Best app I own.
If you’re a fan of customization and getting your home screen just how you like it, KLWP and Nova Prime.
Nova Prime is a launcher with a bunch of customization options for how your app drawer works, how apps are laid out, how big they are, how folders look, etc. I use it for the fact that i can set folders to have the icon of the first app inside, and a gesture so that tapping them opens that app, while swiping up opens the folder.
KLWP is essentially Rainmeter for Android.
Balatro
I think my cousin told me he really likes this game. Is it really worth the price?
Yes
It is one of the best games I’ve played this year. Really easy to get into for short bits, I pirated it first, played for a few hours on PC, bought it, played it for a few dozen more, and happily bought it for my phone.
Really good, very addictive
Very much worthwhile. Pick up Slay the Spire while you’re at it.
I didnt enjoy it but my friends that do have lost days to it lol
I got it yesterday, it’s bloody solid. Did tend to demolish my battery a bit, but that night just have been because time was dissolving before by very eyes. If you commute or have to burn time a lot (I spent a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms recently) then it’s amazing m no microtransactions either
FL studio is pretty good. Got it ages ago and it still gets updates
Just wanted to add that it’s a music sequencing/composition/recording tool. I also bought it some 20 years ago and they really delivered the lifetime free upgrade thing - bought some upgrades and plug-in packs now and then nonetheless - - great tool. I feel that presently, I use roughly 20% of its features, but I never find the time to dig deeper.
edit: refering to the Desktop version
Tasker. Basically an interface for writing scripts for your phone. Even if you don’t have a use case in the beginning you’ll start finding things to do with it.
I completely forgot I bought that once during a discount, but didn’t even have it installed. Started using it now, thanks.
YMMV depending on your phone manufacturer (or, really, the OS). Some are too locked down to use Tasker, or need annoying workarounds to let it always run.
I used it to identify the cell towers near my home and turn wifi off when I was out of their range and back on when I was in range. It seemed to help save battery by not constantly looking for wifi networks and I didn’t have to remember to turn it off and on manually.
Cell towers are not wifi, but I think I understand what you mean.
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Never said they were lol
At home I want wifi on, and away I want it off. This saves battery so it’s not constantly looking for wifi networks.
I could achieve similar with location service turned on all the time, but that drains battery even more.
Since cellular data is always connected to some cell tower nearby, and Tasker is able to identify the cell tower names, I used the ones near my home as flags to indicate “I’m close to home, therefore turn on WiFi because I’ll be home soon”. And turn it off when I leave my neighborhood.
I migrated to Macrodroid. Much more intuitive and straightforward.
You’ve reminded me that I have premium from like a decade ago. I should have another go with it.
What are some things you use it for if you don’t mind my asking?
I used to get up at 5am and had to get ready for work in the dark so I didn’t wake my family. I’m a klutz and fumbling with my phone’s flashlight constantly just got annoying.
I ended up making a little script so that between 5am and 5:30, shaking the phone turned the flashlight on. After 5:30 the sensor turns off to save battery, since I didn’t really need it at that point.
You can do all kinds of handy little things like that
Lots of things
- Change my ringtone based on time/location
- Silence phone if my calendar has the word meet or meeting
- Parse a local news website and read the headlines to me after I dismiss my morning alarm
- Set up car mode if it is plugged in and connected to my car’s Bluetooth
- Turn on WiFi based on location
- etc
I’ve got some that pulls the picture from Bing and the picture from NASA and set them to my wall paper and lock screen back grounds.
I’ve got another one that silences my phone when I’m at work or church and not connected to my car blue tooth. I used something similar in college to silence my phone when a calendar event was happening. My phone never made a peep during a lecture! It resets volumes to normal levels after the silent period is done.
The main thing is a script to stop any media playing and turn off the screen after x minutes, so I can fall asleep watching YouTube or listening to something. There’s probably already an app for that but this is pretty customizable.
Another stupid use is putting the phone on silent while using the camera app because Samsung won’t let you turn off the camera shutter sound.
I used tasker to display an icon on my status bar to tell me whether auto rotate is enabled or not. I kept lying down on my side forgetting that I had auto rotate on and my display would rotate when I didn’t want it to.
It’s an incredibly specific and minor thing that was annoying me, but tasker let me fix it. It’s a great tool, but can be complicated if you aren’t familiar with scripting. Luckily it’s got some presets and a “basic” mode.
There’s a completely free app (no ads, either) that prevents auto-rotate from actually happening unless you want it to. It pops up an icon when your phone wants to rotate, and it you don’t tap it within the timeout (adjustable up to 3 seconds) then the icon goes away and the rotation never happens. It’s highly customizable, and I just can’t live without it since I found it.
