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mardi 27 décembre 2016

15 best Android apps released in 2016

It has been a good year for apps. We didn't see as many game changing releases as we have in prior years. However, we have seen plenty of app genres expand and grow to give people more options than ever before. We also saw a lot of apps that takes new concepts and makes them easier for other people. It's been a lot of fun for app devs this year so let's take a look at the best Android apps released in 2016.

Adobe Photoshop Fix, Photoshop Sketch, and Comp CC

[Price: Free (may require Adobe CC subscription)]
Adobe released a handful of Android apps this year. Instead of putting them individually on the list, we're going to group them all together. The biggest releases included Adobe Photoshop Fix, Photoshop Sketch, and Adobe Comp CC. The first is a photo editing app that gives you some pretty decent tools and controls to fix your photos. Photoshop Sketch is a drawing app with a few pro-level features. Finally, Comp CC allows you to create designs that can then be ported to other Adobe apps. They all work pretty well, although you may need a Creative Cloud subscription to utilize their full features.
Download Adobe Comp CC here!
And download Adobe Photoshop Sketch here!

Download now Photoshop Fix on Google Play!

Brave Browser

[Price: Free]
Brave Browser has an interesting history. Late last year, the popular Link Bubble browser was rebranded as Brave Browser. In late 2016, the app was re-rebranded as Link Bubble and Brave Browser saw a fresh release. This browser is based off of Chromium so the interface should be familiar for most people. It also comes with built-in ad block along with additional security and privacy features. It's a solid browser overall and probably the best one that comes with built-in ad block.

Download now on Google Play!
brave browser best new android apps

Chromer

[Price: Free / $4.54]
One of the big announcements at Google I/O was Chrome Custom Tabs. It's essentially an instance of Google Chrome that opens as an in-app browser. Chromer is an app that essentially gives every app a Chrome Custom Tab. It works by intercepting links and then opening it up in its own Chrome Custom Tab instance. It's a relatively simple app. Once you fire it up, you can forget it and it'll just open web pages for you as you go. It also has a "webheads" feature that allows you to load websites in the background and open them later.

Download now on Google Play!

Evie Launcher

[Price: Free]
Evie Launcher flew under the radar for much of 2016. For those who don't know, it's a minimal launcher that uses a no-app-drawer premise. You are instead given a slide-out, alphabetical list of your apps or you can search for them. It also comes with customization features to help make you feel right at home. It's not as feature heavy as something like Nova Launcher, but it does have more options available than something like the Google Now Launcher. It's pretty good and it's also free.

Download now on Google Play!
evie launcher best android apps

Flamingo for Twitter

[Price: $2.49]
We don't usually do social media apps for best of the year candidates. However, Flamingo for Twitter is just that good. It features comprehensive multi-account support that includes per-account theming options and settings. On top of that, the interface and layouts are customizable. There is also a good set of Twitter-specific features and the app just works really well. It's a pay-once app like most Twitter apps, but it's definitely worth it. Even in beta, it was one of the best Twitter apps out there.

Download now on Google Play!
flamingo beta best new android apps

See also:

The best FREE Android apps!

4 weeks ago

Giphy

[Price: Free]
After a long time of being simply integrated into a ton of other products, Giphy went ahead and released their official app. With it, you'll have one of the most solid and reliable sources of GIFs on the entire Internet. The app is simply designed and takes a lot of design cues from the actual website. Thus, using both interchangeably provides a level of familiarity. You'll be able to search for keywords or browse GIFs based on the pre-made categories by the site. If you use or enjoy GIFs whatsoever, you'll want to give this one a chance.

Download now on Google Play!
giphy best new android apps

Google Allo/Duo

[Price: Free]
Google Allo and Duo caused quite a stir when they were released. After all, we had been waiting for them for months and what we got wasn't quite what we expected. Even so, over the course of the last few months, both have become pretty decent chat platforms. Duo's primary strength is its ease of use and cross-platform support. Allo boasts the only non-Pixel way to access Google Assistant. We expect them to get a lot better as time goes on so even if you're not interested now, keep them on your radar.

Download now on Google Play!

Isotope

[Price: Free / $0.99]
Isotope is an education app. Its purpose is to show you facts and data about the periodic table of elements. It does so quite well. It features information on 118 elements, theming, high quality images, no advertising, a search feature, and a temperature unit chooser. The free version comes with some basic info while the pro version offers an additional theme and more detailed info on every element. It's a bit niche, but the design of this app is impeccable and it's definitely the best at what it does.

Download now on Google Play!

Quik

[Price: Free]
Quik is a simple video editing application that was was released by GoPro. It takes a simpler approach to video editing. You'll take a bunch of clips and the app will try to thread them together into a fun little highlight reel of sorts. This can, of course, be shared on social media when you're done. It comes with some editing options and you can do some of the cutting yourself. It's not a full featured video editing tool, but it's definitely good enough for mobile use most of the time.

Download now on Google Play!

ParcelTrack

[Price: Free / $2.99]
ParcelTrack is a fun little app that helps you track your packages. It works by taking tracking numbers and then keeping a detailed list for you to check back on when you want to. It supports most carriers around the world and it's a good place to put all of your shipments into a single spot. You get a decent amount of features in the free version while premium users also get push notifications, a barcode scanner, syncing between Android devices, and more. It's a must have if you ship or receive shipments regularly.

Download now on Google Play!
parceltrack best android apps

SKR

Don't miss:

The best PDF Readers for Android!

May 25, 2016

Prisma

[Price: Free]
Prisma was one of this year's most viral apps. It hit the scene and was so popular that the app's servers crashed. For those who don't know, Prisma is a photo filter app that uses neural networks and artificial intelligence to rebuild your photos from the ground up with these new filters. Admittedly, the results aren't as awesome as the tech behind it sounds, but you do get a selection of some pretty unique filters that people seem to really enjoy.

Download now on Google Play!

SKRWT

[Price: Free / $0.99]
SKRWT bills itself as an advanced photo editing and camera app. It's big draw is its in-app extensions that allow for even more advanced editing tools. They are called MRRW and 4PNTS which allow for things like perspective correction, mirror effects, image manipulation, and more. It's not as loaded with tools as some photo editing apps, but it does have some fairly unique tools that nobody else really has. You can get the app for free and the various plugins will require in-app purchases in order to get.

Download now on Google Play!
skwrt best new android apps january 2016

Swipe for Facebook

[Price: Free / $2.99]
Swipe for Facebook is probably the best Facebook alternative out there. Its claim to fame is its customization. On top of having theming support, you can also change the layout of the app to make it work how you want. You can make it it look more Google+, for instance. As a whole, it works pretty well or at least as well as can be expected as a third party app to a site that hates third party apps. You can pick it up for free and check out and there is a separate app for those who want widgets.

Download now on Google Play!
Swipe for Facebook best new android apps

Trusted Contacts

[Price: Free]
Trusted Contacts is a pretty awesome little app from Google. The basic premise is that you use it to assign yourself trusted contacts. Those contacts can then ping the app as to your whereabouts if they think you're in trouble. You can block the request simply by responding to the app in a reasonable amount of time. It likely isn't great for everybody, but there are some situations where it can be great. For instance, having an older relatively who is ill or having a kid who is out trick-or-treating on Halloween. In any case, it's completely free.

Download now on Google Play!
trusted contacts Android Apps Weekly

Editor's Pick: Chrooma Keyboard

[Price: Free / $2.49]
Chrooma Keyboard is the biggest keyboard release in 2016. Its original claim to fame is its adaptive theming that changes the keyboard theme based on what app you're using. Updates over the course of the year have added additional features to round out an already pleasant experience. The keyboard also does the basics, like gesture controls, auto-correct, and more. There is even a Night Mode along with a neural network-powered prediction engine. Its original release wasn't all that impressive, but a steady stream of big updates over the course of the year kept making it better and better. Overall, we're choosing it as the best Android app released in all of 2016.

Download now on Google Play!

Related best app lists:

If we missed any great new Android apps, tell us about them in the comments! To see our complete list of best app lists, click here.

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Become a photography pro by mastering your camera’s manual mode

Smartphone cameras are shipping with better and better cameras each year, and there are a plethora of apps available to help you capture the best looking snaps too: from filters right through to camera apps with built-in manual controls. Even if your phone doesn't ship with a built-in manual mode, there are plenty of apps on the market that can even bring better looking pictures to older handsets.

For the uninitiated, the sheer number of settings can be overwhelming at first, so this guide will help explain the most common settings and how you should use them.

ISO

We'll start with one of, if not the most, important settings that you'll find in any advanced camera app – ISO. Essentially this adjusts the image sensor's sensitivity to light, making it an extremely powerful tool. The lower the number, the less sensitive the sensor is to light. Likewise, increasing the ISO, and therefore the sensitivity, can help capture brighter pictures in dark environments, but this comes at the expense of extra noise.

Keeping the sensor sensitivity low is the key to capturing clean looking images, but this is isn't always practical or possible.

It's also important to know that your camera's ISO is also tied to how quickly it takes to capture light or an image. Additional light takes more time to capture, so a low ISO also means a longer time needed between opening and closing the shutter to capture the required amount of light. However, leaving the shutter open for longer periods of time increases the risk of blur. If you're trying to capture a fast moving scene, a higher ISO can help to avoid motion blur at the expense of some quality. While shooting stationary images, using the lowest possible ISO will produce higher quality looking pictures. Only begin increasing the ISO if you can't capture enough light or are taking an action shot, and even then use it sparingly to keep the noise low.

The example below shows a rather extreme case of the same picture taken with an ISO of 100 and the other at 12800 in good lighting conditions. Notice the large amount of noise, loss of detail, and off color tone in the latter compared with the former. Keeping the sensor sensitivity as low as possible is the key to capturing clean looking images, but this is very tough to achieve with limited smartphone sensors.

: ISO 100

: ISO 12800

Shutter Speed

While we're talking about time taken for shots, shutter speed is an equally important control you'll find in many apps these days. It's tied in very closely with shutter speed and aperture, which we'll discuss in a minute. This settings defines the length of time that your image sensor is exposed to light, hence why shutter speed is sometimes also referred to as exposure time. The longer the shutter is open, the more light reaches the image sensor and the brighter your picture will be. A lower ISO requires a longer shutter time to capture the same light as a high ISO, but balancing between the two is essential for managing image quality, exposure, and the speed requirements of the shot.

Long shutter speeds can also be used to introduce artistic motion blur, and is often used to capture the illusion of moving water or take those pictures you see of streaked traffic. Shorter shutter speeds are again useful for capturing an image that's in fast motion, but too short of a shutter speed can result in very dark pictures.

See also:

15 best camera apps for Android

September 1, 2016

Aperture / Exposure

Aperture tells us the size of the lens opening with which light passes through on its way to the sensor, much like the way pupils pass light in our eyes. The larger the opening the more light, but it's actually a smaller aperture figure, known as "f-stops" that represents a larger aperture. So F/1.4 is a larger aperture than f/4. As well as again controlling the amount of light making its way to the sensor, aperture also controls the focal point of the lens. A large aperture creates a larger focal separation between the foreground and background than a small aperture.

Aperture is usually the third pillar of the all important "exposure triangle", allowing the photographer to optimize the balance of ISO, shutter time, and aperture to capture the desired amount of light, focal softness, and motion. However, smartphone lenses don't feature any moving parts, so we can't actually adjust the aperture of the lens and so we can't change focal points. That said, emerging dual camera technologies are using clever software tricks to emulate this experience.

Unfortunately with fixed lenses, smartphone cameras can't vary their aperture like the DSLR above. Although dual camera technologies offer software based alternatives.

Instead, you might find that your smartphone camera or app offers up a general "exposure" or compensation setting. This automatically adjusts your ISO and/or shutter speed settings to brighten up or darken your pictures while using your phone's fixed lens aperture. You won't be able to achieve the full range of shots that you would with a DSLR, but tweaking a general exposure setting will do most of the above and should be used to quickly fine tune the amount of light your shot. If you can't quite get the exposure right, it's always best to err on the side of underexposure to preserve detail, which you can then attempt to fix with some brightness and contrast tweaks afterwards.

The low light example below demonstrates how a combination of a custom ISO and Exposure controls performs much better than the app's automatic setting, even on a relatively poor smartphone camera. I wouldn't call the result great, but it demonstrates the power of manual controls quite well. While an ISO of 400 and +2.0 exposure compensation didn't quite capture enough light with the phone's limited shutter time, 800 proved to be the sweet spot and resulted in much less noise than the camera's auto selection of 2650.

: ISO 400, Exposure +2.0

: ISO 800, Exposure +2.0

: ISO Auto (2650), Exposure +0.0

White Balance

White balance is a very common setting that you'll probably find included even with basic camera apps. This setting adjusts the "color" that represent white light in your picture between red and blue, thereby shifting all of the other colors too. This allows for the creative use of warmer and cooler shots, and is also helpful when compensating for any discoloration that your light sources may introduce. If you've ever noticed that your indoor shots always look orange, this is the setting you'll want to tweak.

At the most basic level, you will probably have seen white balance settings that allow you to compensate for cloudy or sunny outdoor shots and incandescent or fluorescent lights. Above these basic settings, some apps offer up color correction using a full kelvin (K) color temperature scale. This allows for a finer turing of the white point, between overly red at 2000K and ridiculously blue at 9000K. Typically speaking, adjusting the value to between 5000K and 6000K will be enough for palatable tweaks, while larger values should be reserved for major corrections.

Camera White Balance settings from top to bottom: Shade, Sunlight, Fluorescent, Auto, Incandescent.

An alternative to having to make this decision at capture time is to defer to taking a RAW image. This will keep all of the sensor's color data, allowing you to make accurate color adjustments in editing at a later time.

JPEG vs RAW

Many phones these days have introduced RAW capture out of the box, with the promise of better looking pictures. That's not strictly true though, as picking RAW over JPEG isn't something that will automatically make your pictures look better. RAW data by itself isn't much to look at. Instead it's there to preserve all of the image sensor's information for those looking to make more serious edits.

Shooting in RAW won't automatically make your pictures look better, but will allow for superior editing.

While saving a picture to JPEG chucks away image data and compresses the picture, this is perfectly fine if you're planning to upload a picture to Facebook or take a quick snap for your gallery. Just keep the compression value around 90 or above and your pictures will look great.

RAW should only be used if you're planning on going back in to edit your pictures at a later date. The file sizes are much larger, but this does allow you to tweak the full exposure and color settings of your pictures with the benefits of viewing them on a larger screen, by bypassing the camera's default image processing. Coming from RAW also produces a better quality output and no artifacts compared with trying to make the same tweaks on a JPEG file. But remember, at the end of the day you'll end up exporting your RAW file to JPEG or similar to view it anyway.

See also:

What is RAW and should you shoot in it?

June 28, 2016

HDR

High Dynamic Range is also a setting that is increasingly common even in basic smartphone apps, and is a quick and easy way to boost the look of your pictures. You should easily be able to spot extra contrast and more vibrant looking colors in many shots just by flicking HDR on and this makes it tempting just to leave this setting on for every shot.

However, smartphones create HDR by combining data from multiple pictures captured at slightly different exposure levels. This is great at making blacks dark and highlights brighter, but it's important to appreciate the speed limitations of this software implementation. If we're already taking a picture with a longer shutter speed or low ISO, taking multiple pictures in the form of HDR means an even longer time between pressing the shutter and processing the picture. This is obviously no good if we're trying to capture some fast action , as it will introduce extra blur to objects in motion. HDR can also blur pictures simply from the minor tremors in our hands, such as when using long exposure for low light shots. That being said, HDR averaging algorithms can help reduce noise in low light situations providing that the camera can be kept perfectly still, say by using a tripod.

: Samsung Galaxy S7 – HDR

: Samsung Galaxy S7 – no HDR

As a general rule of thumb you can leave HDR on for most shots, but might want to turn it off when capturing fast action or when struggling with blur in low light situations.

Hopefully that's enough information to get you started taking some great pictures with your smartphone camera's manual mode. If you have any of your own photography setup and shooting tips, please feel free to share in the comments below.

Up next:

How to take better pictures with your Android smartphone

February 3, 2016

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HMD Global rumored to launch as many as four Nokia-branded phones in mid-2017

One of the most anticipated smartphone launches of 2017 centers on HMD Global's promise to release devices with the Nokia branding. Today, a new yet unconfirmed report claims that the company will in fact launch as many as four Android phones with the Nokia name sometime in the second and third quarters of 2017.

See also:

5 things Nokia, and HMD Global, need to do for a successful 2017 Android phone launch

November 23, 2016

This latest report comes from DigiTimes, using unnamed sources. It says the four new phones will have display sizes that will range from between 5 to 5.7-inches, with resolutions in WQHD or Full HD. The story added that the displays will come from a number of different sources, such as LG Century Technology (CTC) and Innolux.

The story also claims that HMD will reveal its first Nokia-branded phone in late February at the Mobile World Congress trade show. It cites another Chinese-based news source which claims the first phone will be called the Nokia DIC, and will come in two models; one with a 5.0-inch display and 2GB of RAM, and the other with a 5.5-inch screen and 3GB of RAM.

As always, be sure to take these unconfirmed reports with a grain of salt. We'll be sure to let you know if HMD Global makes any official announcements regarding these rumors.

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BlackBerry’s upcoming ‘Mercury’ phone might be sold by Verizon

BlackBerry's final smartphone that the company designed in-house may be sold by one of the top wireless carriers in the US. A new rumor claims that the phone, known as BlackBerry Mercury, will be made available when it is released by Verizon.

See also:

BlackBerry DTEK50 review

August 11, 2016

The info comes from noted gadget news leaker Roland Quandt, via his Twitter account. He offers no other info on the phone, such as a release date. Previously, BlackBerry's CEO John Chen teased that the company would indeed release one last phone created in-house, with its trademark QWERTY hardware keyboard.

Previous rumors about the BlackBerry Mercury claim it will have a 4.5-inch screen, an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of on-board storage, a 3,400mAh battery and a fingerprint scanner. Some reports claim it will have Android 7.0 Nougat installed and ready to go out of the box. None of these reports have been confirmed by BlackBerry.

BlackBerry recently announced that TCL Communication has been awarded the rights to make any future smartphones with the BlackBerry branding, beyond the Mercury QWERTY phone. TCL has already promised it will be making some BlackBerry-related announcements next week at CES 2017 in Las Vegas. It's possible one of those phones could also have a QWERTY hardware keyboard.

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Confirmed: Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy A lineup will be water resistant

Samsung is expected to take the wraps off its new 2017 lineup of Galaxy A smartphones soon, most likely at CES 2017.

We have previously reported that the smartphones might come with an IP68 rating, which means that they will be both dust and water resistant and will, therefore, be able to survive under water (up to 5 feet/1.5 meters) for 30 minutes. We are now happy to report that the rumor has been confirmed.

See also:

Samsung Galaxy A7 (2017) gets Bluetooth certified, launch imminent

November 19, 2016

Samsung Malaysia has uploaded an image on Facebook teasing the launch of the devices and letting us know that they will be water resistant. The Galaxy A lineup will probably consist of the Galaxy A3, A5, A7, and A9, but we still don't know if the South Korean giant will announce all the devices at once.

Yesterday, press renders of one of the devices, the Galaxy A5, along with the specs have leaked. We already know how the device looks and what it will offer specs-wise. Other Galaxy A smartphones will probably look more or less identical to the A5 but will offer different hardware.

Are you happy to hear that upcoming Samsung's Galaxy A lineup will be water-resistant? Let us know down below.

As a reminder, CES 2017 kicks off January 5 in Las Vegas. Android Authority will be on the floor bringing you all the details, so stay tuned for more information about the Galaxy A line.

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