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A ton of people stick with the default carrier or Google included apps for consuming media on Android devices and, while Google does an excellent job at making those apps awesome and carriers usually don’t, sometimes they would just be better off with a third party solution. Whether you want to avoid Google having absolute access to your consumption patterns or you have a niche need that isn’t filled by the defaults, these apps will get the job done.

MX Player

If you are used to messing around in Play Movies to watch a show you’ve dropped onto your SD card and found it painful, you want this. The venerable MX Player is probably as close to Media Player Classic or VLC as you can on Android in terms of quality, speed, and format support which, combined with the no frills interface, will get you watching exactly what you want when you want. Also, if you are into watching foreign videos with subtitles embedded or included alongside, this supports basically every subtitle format that is reasonably popular.

doubleTwist Music Player

Play Music is nicely integrated with Android but is only integrated with Android; if you have a more impressive audio setup than the mono speaker on the back of your phone, you probably want something a little more tuned for your use case. With doubleTwist, life gets especially easier for those with an existing Apple infrastructure left over from when they switched to Android: you get AirPlay back along with access to your iTunes library. That means you don’t have to reacquire your entire music library or manually transfer it saving time, money, or both.

Speaker Boost

If you ever go to enjoy your music in a busy place or try show your friends a cool song, you’ve likely encountered the laughably weak output that most phones call max volume. Speaker Boost solves that in the simplest way possible which is doing exactly what its name says. Unlike other, more raw apps that promise the same idea, this app specifically regulates its output to make sure you can’t accidentally move a slider too far and blow your speakers.

RssDemon News & Podcast Reader

Some people are news junkies and want to know exactly what’s happening exactly when its happening. Or maybe they just follow a lot of blogs and have trouble keeping up. Or maybe their favorite game publishes their update notes to an RSS feed. Whatever your use case, if you want an app that delivers content more regularly than the postman, give RssDemon a try. Oh yeah, it also works with podcasts so you can listen to those as soon as they’re released inside the app.

Firefox Browser for Android

This last one is maybe a bit of a strange one but I guarantee you don’t realize what you are missing if you stick with your device’s stock browser. Tweaking your browser of choice on a desktop can significantly improve your experience bumming around the web; on Android, there is exactly one extensible browser that provides a similar tweakability experience as on desktop: Firefox. Even if you don’t like installing extensions, Firefox is produced by a non-profit which means they have no reason to abuse your privacy and collect your browsing habits.