Anyone Recommend Apps For Galaxy?

[Falcon Man™]

Just curious. I have had iPhones for as long as I can remember, but I just switched to a new job and the company phones are all Samsungs. They sent me a new S4 until the S6 comes out and I was wondering if anyone has recommended apps for the phone. I know it kinda depends on what you're into, but whatever you find useful would be a help.

On a side note, it took me the last 4 weeks to get used to this phone. I miss my iPhone, but as long as it is a company paid phone that I can use as my personal phone as well as company phone (unlimited data), I will take what they give me.

[ATL Fan in the DMV]

Ok, I'll bite. I have a brand new S4 (S5 was a bit too expensive for me), so I settled on the S4 which I like.I'll break these down into categories...

Battery Saver: Green Power Free Battery Saver Premium. Has a lot of great options. You can try the free version, but the paid version is where it's at. IMO, better than the highly-touted Juice Defenders.

Sports Alerts: The Score. It blows ESPN's app out the water. It also keeps me from downloading each of my fave teams' apps due to its comprehensive nature.

Alarm Clock: Alarm Clock Plus. Great options and customizable. Has options to do math to turn off alarm.

Music Player: Rocket Player. Free and full of options.

Cleaner: Clean Master. The best, no one comes close.

Security: CM Security Antivirus. The best in class.

Dialer: ExDialer. Fast

Launcher: Nova Launcher

Keyboard: Swiftkey. Amazing and accurate. The Ice theme has snowflakes that fall down as you swipe.

Live Wallpaper: Snow Stars Full and Falling Leaves Live Wallpaper

Navigation: Waze of course!

Weather: For live wallpaper that beautifully renders the weather outside accurately, Weather Now by Hamster Beat is great. I formally used GoWeather, but although it is free unlike WeatherNow, it isn't as accurate, and it has limited its options over updates. I use Weatherbug Elite for the weather widgets and info until WeatherUnderground figures out how to incorporate severe weather push alerts into their app.

Others:

Brightest Flashlight Free

Heads Up Notifications (for Lolipop-style notifications)

MX Player

Shazam

Wakelock Detector-Save Battery

Whitepages Caller ID & Block

Volume Control +

Daily Bible by JoanSoft (if you are into that)

Hope this helps! What do you think?

[WOR]

The score is a must. Amazing app. ESPN mobile is garbage.

I just learned about google goggles today. Google image search using your camera.

I will second swiftkey.

I use smart launcher. It's very clean and completely different than the stock look

[WOR]

I also use gosms for texting. I don't like the look of stock messaging.

Evernote is a good app if you need to store information and keep it all organized. It's good for business. Let's you take pictures of business cards,receipts, etc etc which is a nice feature. It has a search button so you can go back through and find everything which is really nice.

[WOR]

Ginger keyboard is cool but isn't as good of a basic keyboard as swiftkey. It has a bar at the top with app shortcuts. like say someone emailed you or texted you info and you wanted to save it. Just hit the evernote button and you're there. Saves a step. Also has google search which is good if you're typing something and need to look up a word you don't have to close what you're doing and open search separately.

Best thing is it haa gifs built in with emojis lol. Which is cool for Facebook and texting.

[Vicious]

I have owned a couple of Samsung devices, and have found little to no use from the Galaxy apps. I would recommend using the play store apps. Personally, I use Apex Launcher to change the homescreen layout. I like to change the layout to 5 rows by 5 columns. It also allows you to resize homescreen widgets. I also like that it has a setting for the app drawer to where you can change the scrolling to vertical continuous. This allows you to swipe up and down to browse your apps vs having to swipe left and right through pages. If you are wondering what a launcher is, it is the gui for the homescreen and app drawer. Others like nova launcher. I haven't tried the new one out, as they hadn't updated their style to lollipop (android 5) until recently, so I can't comment on that one in particular.

My personal favorite apps include soundhound, one more clock (has the weather, time, and battery percentage all on one widget with different styles to choose from), tapatalk for forums that I frequent, ES File Explorer (mostly for the root browser functionality because I root my device), terminal emulator for command line access to the file system, and titanium backup for backing up my apps and their data regularly (requires root access). If you play games, then Adobe Air would be a good choice.

My wife uses the alarm clock app mentioned above. It works better to wake you up because you have to solve a math problem to turn it off. Works very well when you have a newborn that you don't want waking because of the alarm! Adaway is amazing at removing ads from apps and browser pages, but requires root access. There used to be some very good ad blockers in the play store, but since google makes most of their money from advertisements they removed them from the store.

[Vicious]

I never got into the swype function for keyboards, so I use the google keyboard. It's simple, and works like I need one to. It also has the swype function if you are into that.

[Vicious]

Also, I'm not sure if the S4 came with this feature, but on some of the galaxy devices dropbox has a promo that gives you 50GB of free online storage if you signup or sign into your account using the built in app. If your device doesn't have that app available in accounts, or in the app drawer, then I do not think it qualifies.