Any suggestions for paid one time purchase apps on the Google play store?
Buzzkill is good if you have one of those
Annoying friends who
Send multiple messages instead of just one, Jonny, you annoying cunt
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 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.
That’s smart!
I have a few triggers that turn on Do Not Disturb mode:
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When I open an app that I doom scroll before I fall asleep and when I wake up.
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When I connect to my doctor’s or dentist’s office wifi.
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Cell towers are not wifi, but I think I understand what you mean.
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.
Ok. I did not see what you meant.
I have a home zone that triggers things. I don’t think location services uses enough battery for me to worry about
How does the home zone work?
For me location service eats my battery up - can’t last a full day with it on.
I do mine from home assistant. I can leave location services, Bluetooth, and wifi, all on without worrying about battery life for the whole day.
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.
I also find that super annoying!
I created a trigger to disable auto-rotate when I’m using the apps I’m usually browsing while in bed (i.e. doom scrolling social media) but I like your idea.
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.
What are some things you use it for if you don’t mind my asking?
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 have a script which saves my fine location to a Google sheet when I disconnect from my car’s Bluetooth. If, like me, you are the sort of klutz who can lose their car in a two-car garage…
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
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’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.
Power amp music player
Balatro
I think my cousin told me he really likes this game. Is it really worth the price?
Yes
I didnt enjoy it but my friends that do have lost days to it lol
Fair Email. I grabbed it from F Droid and paid direct though.
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.
Novalauncher Tasker Automate Fairmail
Nova launcher is a data harvester. You should be aware.
Oh i wasn’t… But it’s firewalled anyway 😁
Slay the Spire
Fx file manager. if you do file management locally or want to access SMB share content , cloud, bluetooth etc, this app ia awesome.
I love it but I can feel it getting neglected with each Android update.
The worst for me was transferring a video to a computer using the FX Web feature and discovering it silently truncated the video… when it was already too late…I bought solid explorer at the dawn of android and still use it to this day
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.
Solid Explorer
MiXplorer - https://mixplorer.com/
A file explorer allowing for me to transfer files over the network. When Solid Explorer suddenly didn’t seem to want to do network transfers anymore (likely because Windows updated something), I waited for that app to update to fix the issue. It never did. I found that MiXplorer was a good alternative that transfers files over the network just fine and works nice and fast as well. The interface takes a bit to get used to (meaning it isn’t the same as Solid Explorer) but the app is certainly worth using. Importantly, I can transfer files over the network without issue again.
Notably, this app is free to download (from XDA) however the Google Play version is not free. The Google Play version (which supports development) is a one time paid fee.
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.
Square Home.
I know the Windows Phone experiment failed but it was my first smartphone that I bought and not just inherited my dad’s work-iPhone when it became deprecated. I really love the “live tile” type home screen and Square Home improves on it as well, instead of just carbon copying it.
Other than that, the FUTO keyboard / voice input and Grayjay, although these three technically offer a lifelong free testing period, similar to WinRAR, but even less obnoxious because they don’t even remind you that they want you to pay for them.
MiXplorer: Tabbed file explorer with many features. You can get it for free from their website, but it’s available paid on Google Play.
Symfonium: Music player compatible with many backends, such as local storage, WebDAV, Subsonic (which includes Ampache, Navidrome)
aCalendar+: Calendar app with many widgets. Best part is the persistent notification, which shows what’s happening today, and will happen tomorrow.
Cryptomator: Cross-platform file encryption program, also open source.
