With the release of new operating system KitKat and the announcement that it hit both one billion activations and 50 billion app downloads, it’s clear that 2013 has been a year of great news forAndroid.
In the past 12 months, we’ve seen the release of some truly remarkable new apps on Google Play, while some old standards got a much-needed revisiting. Here, we list our picks for the top Android apps of the calendar year.
Our top choices for 2013 include a leviathan of productivity, a new breed of news reader and a sleep tracker. Check out our list, and see if they’re fit for a download.
1. Duolingo
Duolingo works to add interactivity and customized lesson planning to the language learning experience by rewarding users when they achieve goals, giving incentive to return for more lessons — something your high school’s Intermediate Spanish course never did.
Duolingo gives users the opportunity to learn English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. You don’t have to worry about being charged for the service any time soon, either. Co-creator Luis von Ahn told USA Today, “We’re fundamentalists on the belief that we should not charge for language education.”
Price: Free
2. Pocket Casts
A one-stop shop for organizing your podcasts, Pocket Casts allows you to listen to, download and sync your podcasts all from one device. Audio playback is customizable, allowing you to adjust playback speed to whatever you’re comfortable with. The “featured” and “popular” menus also help with podcast discovery.
Price: $3.99
3. Evernote
Evernote, which has become more of a leviathan of productivity than just an app, received several updates in 2013, including a customizable home screen and image and PDF markup. With Evernote, you can take notes or photos, keep reminders, record audio and tag all of it to make it easily searchable. It’s so vast, getting started may seem too daunting to some.
4. Pixlr Express
A powerful, customizable photo editor that’s more than just filters, Pixlr Express comes packed with the ability to color-correct, blur or layer images and stickers on top of one another. Just taking up 7.2 M of memory, Pixlr Express is more than worth the small amount of space it’ll take up on your SD card.
Price: Free
5. Nova Launcher
With the release of iOS 7, Apple raised the bar for home screen design in 2013. For Android, Nova Launcher reaches the same bar. Fully customizable, performance-oriented and with a prime version at just $4, Nova Launcher is a great download for any android user.
Price: $4
6. doubleTwist
Aside from being a great tool to sync your music between your Mac or PC and your Android device, doubleTwist is a powerful media player, enabling you to play multiple audio files, watch videos, stream radio and listen to podcasts. It certainly doesn’t hurt that doubleTwist’s album cover-centric design is beautiful to look at as well.
7. Reddit is fun
Reddit is fun is our preferred way of browsing and using Reddit on our Android devices. Easy to navigate, the app more closely resembles the web experience of Reddit than other popular apps — which seem to be more focused on browsing rather than posting or commenting. Frequently updated with bug fixes and small updates, you can count on Reddit is fun to continue improving with time.
Price: Free
8. Feedly
Now that our dear Google Reader has moved on from this world, we require a new RSS curation tool to fill our article-consuming needs — and Feedly fits the bill. The app’s design is heavily image focused, giving a reading experience closer to how we use the web than most news aggregation tools. Offering easy sharing tools and integration with Evernote, Instapaper and Pocket, Feedly is a fluid, fast moving hulk of a news app.
9. Sleepbot
Whether you choose to use Sleepbot as a simple time log or a dedicated and powerful sleep tracker is up to you, but both options offer a rewarding experience for anyone looking to improve his or her sleeping habits. Sleepbot tracks your movement and noise levels, greeting you with a quiet alarm in the morning at your lightest level of sleep.
Price: Free
Source: Mashable
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