Some of the best apps cost a little bit of money. That’s just the way it works sometimes. However, there are also a bunch of apps that ask for too much, are very expensive, or are simply not worth it. There are millions of paid apps in the Google Play Store and many of them are excellent. However, we think a few stand above the rest. To make this list, apps have to have a single price tag with no additional in-app purchases, subscriptions, or advertising. You buy it once and you get everything. Here are the best premium apps for Android.
The best premium apps for Android
- 1Weather
- Bouncer
- Business Calendar
- GoneMAD
- KWGT, KLWP, and KLCK
- Nova Launcher Prime
- PhotoPills and SunSurveyor
- Podcast Addict
- Relay for Reddit
- Solid Explorer
- Tapet
- Textra SMS
- Tiny Scanner
- TouchRetouch
- WolframAlpha
1Weather
Price: Free / $1.99
1Weather is one of the best weather apps on mobile. We like this one in particular because it has a clean interface, all of the basic info, a weather radar, severe weather alerts, and decent widgets. Plus, the little weather fun facts are enjoyable as well. The free version has everything along with ads, while the premium version removes ads. It’s a rock-solid, single-payment weather app in a market where more and more weather apps have a subscription. Today Weather is also quite good in this space, and the better one comes down mostly to which one you like more.
Bouncer
Price: $0.99
Bouncer was our choice for the best new Android apps from 2019. It’s a security app with a focus on Android permissions. You can manage those permissions on the spot without diving into menus. It also lets you grant temporary permissions that it automatically revokes later. For instance, you can enable location to check into a place on Facebook and set Bouncer to remove that permission later. It’s an excellent bargain at $0.99. Permission management has improved dramatically in Android, starting in Android 10, but Bouncer still has a place.
Business Calendar
Price: Free / $7.99
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Business Calendar 2 doesn’t have the coolest name, but it’s one of the best calculator apps on mobile. The app has a bunch of customization, plenty of productivity features, and it even does things like recurring tasks. The developers focus on making this work as efficiently as possible, and thus, it removes a lot of fluff from other calendar apps. With all of the customizations and efficiency, it’s tough to find much wrong with this calendar. The pro version goes for $7.99, which we think is reasonable. It’s a good calendar.
GoneMAD
Price: Free trial / $4.99
GoneMAD is an unreasonably good local music player. It’s easily among the best local music players on Android. It features a simple, but functional UI, tons of features, and it supports most audio codecs. In addition, there is an EQ, crossfade support, multi-window support, and support for lyrics. It’s one of those music players that just works well without a lot of drama, and it has more than enough features. Of course, PowerAmp and MediaMonkey are also great, if GoneMAD isn’t your first choice.
Kustom Industries apps
Price: Free / $4.49 each
Kustom Industries is a developer on Google Play with a few great premium apps. The first is KWGT, a custom widget-maker where you can make widgets that do a variety of things. There is also KLWP, a custom live wallpaper maker for those who want that. Finally, you have KLCK, one of the last custom lock screen apps under active development. All three apps follow a similar premise. They let you create customized things for your phone with a no-nonsense WYSIWYG editor and simple enough instructions. Each app has a free version and a premium version for $4.49 per app. Anyone looking for deeper customization and theming should check these apps out first.
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Nova Launcher Prime
Price: Free / $4.99
Nova Launcher is the gold standard for Android launcher apps. It features a modern UI, tons of extras, some theming features, and more. You can customize everything from the size of a home screen to the number of icons on the dock and plenty of other things. Tons of people already own this app, though. Thus, if you want to try something new, some other excellent premium apps include Hyperion Launcher, Action Launcher, and the new Apex Launcher.
PhotoPills and SunSurveyor
Price: $9.99 and $7.99, respectively
PhotoPills and SunSurveyor are two photography apps with a somewhat similar purpose. These apps help you plan shoots for photography and filmmaking. It helps you keep track of things like sunrise and sunset, moon phases, and star positions so you can get the photographs you want at the right time. Both of these apps are rather expensive, but we’ve seen virtually no complaints from anybody who buys them. You can go with either one, they are both excellent.
Podcast Addict
Price: Free / $4.49
Podcast Addict is an excellent podcast player. It has all of the usual features, including excellent organization and playlist features, tons of available podcasts, and various playback controls. You can also do neat stuff like auto-download new episodes, find new podcasts, and cast it via Chromecast and SONOS. The UI isn’t the most flashy, but it’s functional and the rest of the features more than make up for it. This is easily among the best podcast apps on Android. Those who don’t like this one can try out Doggcatcher and, if you don’t mind subscription costs, Pocket Casts.
Relay for Reddit
Price: Free / $3.99
Relay for Reddit is an excellent way to browse the massive website. It features a card-style UI and it really helps separate Reddit UI elements. Some other features include inline previewing, moderator features, improved comment navigation, support for the spoiler tag, and more. It also loads comments and links simultaneously and we quite liked that. It’s an excellent all-around experience and one of the better premium apps for Android.
Solid Explorer
Price: Free / $2.99
Solid Explorer is easily one of the best file browser apps. It has a simple UI, but enough powerful features to satisfy almost anyone. It supports drag-and-drop functionality and it shows dual windows in landscape mode. Additionally, it supports most popular archive files, FTP servers, and most popular cloud storage websites. You can even stream local media files to your Chromecast. It’s powerful and it’s cheap.
Read more:
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Tapet
Price: Free / $2.99
Tapet is a wallpaper generator app. You choose the pattern and colors. The app then makes a wallpaper. All wallpapers are made for your device’s screen specifically so you don’t have to worry about mismatches or low-resolution images. Additionally, there are well over 100 patterns and tons of colors to play with. You can save the ones you like or apply them from the app itself. It also has a random generator that auto-applies if you want to go that route.
Textra SMS
Price: Free / $4.49
Textra is about as good as it gets for SMS apps. The theme is customizable in a bunch of different ways. It handles SMS and MMS very well. You can choose different emojis, there is support for video and GIF formats, and more. The app stays up to date on recent developments. For example, Android now supports message reactions and Textra already integrated it into the app. The app works smoothly and unobtrusively with very few issues.
Tiny Scanner
Price: Free / $4.99
Tiny Scanner is an excellent productivity tool. It uses your device camera to scan documents, receipts, and other items. You can then turn those items into PDFs and save them for future reference. The app supports black and white, grayscale, and color scans. Additionally, you can adjust the contrast if you need to. It’s a simple app that does a simple job. However, it does that job really well for a single price tag.
TouchRetouch
Price: $2.00
TouchRetouch is an interesting photo editing app. It doesn’t do the normal stuff like red-eye correction or anything like that. Instead, it takes out bits and pieces of photos that make it look bad. For instance, you can get rid of a sign on a beach, a power line at the top of a photo, or other small things like that. It works surprisingly well and it can touch up a photo in a lot of ways. It runs for a single $1.99 purchase. This one is also free to use if you have Google Play Pass.
WolframAlpha
Price: $2.99
WolframAlpha is an information and education app. It’s also one of the most powerful apps in this space. You can find data for dozens of topics such as statistics, math, physics, chemistry, engineering, astronomy, and more. You can ask it something basic like the tides in Honolulu, Hawaii and it’ll tell you. This is an invaluable tool for college students and likely even high school students. You won’t find a better tool for the price.
If we missed any great premium apps or paid apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments. You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists.
Thank you for reading. Try these out too:
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