While Android and any other mobile platform out there have been slowly shifting into providing more entertainment than productivity, anyone who wants to keep their workflow unabridged even when they are out and about, doing completely unrelated tasks, can check out these 9 best productivity apps for Android. The selection was done by me, being an avid user of a lot of them (just like in our list of the best budget headphones that’ll save you a ton of money) and the ranking references their status by number of downloads on Google Play.
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There is much to be expected from a platform as versatile and open as Android in terms of enhancing one’s productivity. Smartphones are a particularly good target for such use due to the fact that they seldom leave people’s pockets or hands. While in the past you needed a set of tools which could, with a bit of ingenuity, fit in a backpack, you can now practically run a business from your mobile phone without any hurdles to overcome. There have been many attempts at recreating an office setting on a smartphone but in the past, weak hardware and small screens limited what people could accomplish greatly. Nowadays, however, most of the tools you would use on your home computer to do typical office work have been ported to Android or have similar alternatives available for free or for a very small price. But it doesn’t have to be all about work and all about getting something serious done while you are walking your dog. People of all sorts can benefit from an intelligent todo list or something that allows them to capture their ideas or important aspects of their daily lives. Walking around in circles with a handheld recorder and speaking out your ideas into a lifeless device can stay back in B-grade criminal dramas from the 80s. Nowadays you can take your phone out, unlock it and lay down all your ideas with an ease-of-use factor that your older friends could not have dreamt of in the earlier days of portable electronics. What is more, developers are constantly banging their heads against all sorts of walls in order to come up with an even lazier alternative to what is already out there.
With all this power, however, comes a great responsibility, as the cliche line from Spiderman goes. You have to want to be productive, you have to be driven in order for these things to work for you. If you are stranded on an all-night flight, you shouldn’t use it as an excuse to wait it out and get something done later, you can just whip out that sleek smartphone of yours and bang out whatever spreadsheet, presentation or document you need ready. With a bit of creativity and readiness to experiment, you could use your tablet as your office computer and it’s easier than it sounds. Now that there is USB On The Go (OTG) technology, you could easily plug in a cheap USB hub and have a working mouse and keyboard (which are surprisingly easy to use on Android). With more screen estate and less bulkiness, you could as well work from a bench in the park with only battery life limiting you. If you don’t wish to use your smartphone/tablet in such a radical way, though, there are still some priceless apps that you can easily enhance your daily life with. Let’s take a look at them.
9. CloudMagic
CloudMagic is an email client with a slight twist for the excellent – it support quite a bunch of protocols, including the most widespread email services out there and lets you view activity on all your accounts in the same window or it lets you sort them via several sophisticated schemes.
8. Any.Do
We can all agree that Any.Do is the ultimate to-do list app out there that comes with an adorable user interface and a unique way of reminding you to get stuff done. Aside from that, it lets you sort and categorize your tasks in a completely open and customizable way that allows you to sort your tasks by priority in the case a conflict occurs.
7. AirDroid
AirDroid is the missing link in the chain of your work devices. It can become tedious and difficult to constantly fumble around for your phone at every notification buzz. In that case, you can use AirDroid to channel all your calls, messages and notification to your computer, as well as transfer files wirelessly. The best thing about it is that you don’t even need to have your devices on the same WiFi network since they don’t communicate directly.
6. Asana
Asana is like a team version of Any.Do. It allows you to easily manage team projects of all sorts, quite like that old and chipped cork board people used to pin their messages and task distribution for the day, only on steroids. Lots of steroids.
5. IF/IFTTT
The ultimate automation toy, previously known as If This, Then That (IFTTT) and now renamed to IF, allows you to take any event on your phone, be it GPS position, connecting to a network, receiving certain notification and anything else you can imagine and map it to another function (i.e. muting your sound, sending a message, playing a song, launching Maps).
4. CamScanner
Have you seen The Bicentennial Man where a cyborg Robin Williams learns new things by snapping pictures of a book with his eyes? You can do that with your phone now, given you’ve gone to the extent of downloading CamScanner and learning how to use it, all in the time you would take to read this paragraph.
3. Microsoft Office Mobile
Microsoft’s irreplaceable Office suite with all it’s thunder and lightning, only now it fits in your pocket and integrates with some of the other apps on this list. What many people were begging for a year ago is now a reality and it’s every bit as good as you can imagine.
2. Pushbullet
Pushbullet allows you to exchange all sorts of goodies between your phone and laptop/desktop computer with the push of a button. Quite like AirDroid, Pushbullet also allows you to share files and notifications but it’s more deeply integrated with other platforms and also offers the ability to notify you about things outside of your workflow such as news.
1. Evernote
Evernote wins in the list of the 9 best productivity apps for Android without a doubt, being the ultimate incarnation of the notepad of your dreams. It allows you to capture anything from the ideas in your head to the ones in your surroundings via pictures and categorize and sort them in notebooks. What is more, you can share all that information instantaneously because Evernote is also available on every other device.
