XDA Picks: Best Apps of the Week (June 27 – July 4)

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Apps are at the front and center of any smartphone experience, and with over a million apps on the Google Play Store and new apps being submitted to our forums every day, staying up to date on the latest apps and games can be a hassle. At XDA we don’t discriminate apps – if it’s interesting, innovative, original or useful, we mention them. The XDA Portal Team loves apps too, and here are our top picks for this week.

Why is there no undo button on Android? Inputting+ brings a taste of that to the platform: it gives you a floating button that lets you access a menu from where you can undo, redo and replace text and insert content from your clipboard history. This is a very inventive solution to a common problem Android users have had for ages, and while it is not as perfect as the native implementation we always hoped for, it is enough to make typing on Android a much more pleasant experience, no matter which app you are typing in. If you value productivity, you cannot miss this app.

Solid Explorer is out of beta, bringing you one of the most consistent and beautiful file managers on Android. The amount of care put into this app’s designs is huge, with a very pleasing look and satisfying, smooth animations. It allows you to customize many aspects as well, but most importantly, it functions very well. It has a split screen view, you can drag and drop, extract all sorts of packages, it has support for cloud storage options and quick and indexed searching, great file information displays and it allows for extra plugins. Many of you are probably used to a file manager by now, but this one merits a try.

Youtube, on your wrist. This is an app that initially seems redundant, but once you try it and see its polish you can begin thinking of uses for it. The client displays video on your Wear watch, including support for Bluetooth speakers and headsets (connected to Wear, not your phone) and the ability to search for videos, read descriptions, access related content and even cast to Chromecast and control the stream through your wrist. Watching Youtube on a watch is certainly not optimal for regular media consumption, but it still feels futuristic and useful enough. I use it for cooking guides!

Many users on this site love switching phones every few months or every year, and to mitigate the blow on their wallets, many opt for selling their older devices. Swappa is a service that helps you do just that, and with their newest app you can easily pricecheck your device to know at which price range it is currently selling for. You can also look up other devices on the list to keep track of prices. If you are looking for the perfect time to sell and/or upgrade, this can prove to be a useful app.

Vainglory is a MOBA game for mobile platforms that has been around on iOS for a while, and has now hit Android. If you are a hardcore fan of MOBAs like League of Legends and DOTA 2, you’ll see that Vainglory is probably the most polished game of the genre on Android. It features amazing graphics (that even rival its PC MOBAs) with great performance, interesting mechanics that allow for plenty of depth, great controls for a touchscreen and plenty of characters and item combinations to master. This game is perhaps one of the highest-quality multiplayer games you’ll find on the platform, and it truly pushes gaming on mobile to a new level.

We usually don’t feature two games unless they are both exceptional, and Geometry Wars is a classic. This new version for mobile brings the hectic top-down shooter to your phone with spectacular and vibrant graphics full of neat effects in 3D arenas — meaning you’ll battle it out on top of cubes, spheres, and paraboloids. With many enemies, modes, scripted and timed missions and some online functionality, you are bound to get plenty of replay value out of this game. It takes little time for you to boot it up and have fun, which makes it perfect for short breaks. Its price tag is relatively high, but it’s worth it!

Notable Updates:

Pushbullet received a major update this week which brought us a new UI, a refined messaging client to keep track of your file deliveries, improved functionality and much more.

received a major update this week which brought us a new UI, a refined messaging client to keep track of your file deliveries, improved functionality and much more. Google Translate has received functionality improvements that make its translations not just more accurate, but more conversational as well.

has received functionality improvements that make its translations not just more accurate, but more conversational as well. Google added plenty of functionality and integration to its Google Fit application, including distance traveled per day, calories burned per day, nutrition data from partnered services and sleep activity as well.

application, including distance traveled per day, calories burned per day, nutrition data from partnered services and sleep activity as well. Yahoo Aviate Launcher now has a Smart Stream feature that mimics Google Now, giving you plenty of information based on your history and use-cases.

That is it for this week. We hope that you might have found some of these apps as interesting, useful or entertaining as we did. Whether you are a student, a developer, a designer or a gamer, Android has you covered. We will try to reflect that each week with a variety of picks to spark your interest, and If you see (or publish!) any new apps that you think are worthy of a feature, be sure to send us a tip and we’ll give it a look. Until next time!