Any suggestions for paid one time purchase apps on the Google play store?
Slay the Spire
Solid Explorer
Smart audiobook player, fit notes. That’s all I got and they’re kind of niche
Fit notes is free? Is it a different one?
You can donate and unlock some things
Smart Audiobook Player +1 such a good, feature complete app.
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.
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.
I migrated to Macrodroid. Much more intuitive and straightforward.
You’ve reminded me that I have premium from like a decade ago. I should have another go with it.
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 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.
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.
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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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’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.
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.
just scrolling trough my phone, here’s some I like
app opps - lets you change permissions for apps, handy if you want to have multiple things playing audio or use google photos without it scanning your phone.
calcu - it’s a calculator!
simple draw - exactly what it says on the tin
es file explorer pro - versatile, but not bloated
moon+ reader pro - a handy reader for all sorts of docs, including search etc
polarr - a photo editing app with features not a lot of apps have. The devs are pushing some dumb filters tho
handy photo - same as polarr
mx player pro - got videos to play?
poweramp - a music player
poweramp equalizer - is what it says on the tin
sd maid pro - for clearing out old files and such
poweraudio plus - used to be the only app with a parametric equalizer. Now poweramp does too
ultrachron - just a nice timer/stopwatch
unified remote - a remote control app, be careful tho, I doubt this thing is secure
web video caster - also downloads videos from plenty of places
and a couple more apps, where the developer has decided to pull the lifetime license and move to a subscription, even after I had bought it
officesuite pro - it’s handy, but f them
I will second Moon Reader and Web Video Caster.
So I’ve used Moon reader pro for several years and love it, but I cannot get reading states to sync between my Samsung phone and Samsung tablet. The book files are named exactly the same on both. I’ve tried syncing using Google Drive and Dropbox. It treats the books as two separate reading states, though I see the metadata/reading states file edited in Google Drive upon reading for a bit. Any suggestions?
I don’t have it installed right now, as I’ve been trying out a FOSS reader for a while now on my new phone, but there is a troubleshooting section about syncing on their site, and also they recommend this guide made by a user discussing sync troubleshooting.
It’s not a feature I’ve used, so maybe those guides have something you haven’t tried. Since you replied to me though, I feel partially responsible for making sure you get helped now. 😅
Heads up, SD Maid is being rebuilt as SD Maid SE now with more/better features.
Thanks for reminding me! I have the free version of unified remote and have been meaning to upgrade.
Nova launcher prime
Nova was amazing but they’ve been bought out. I tried Niagra Launcher and after being frustrated with a new UI, I absolutely love it.
Interesting, i’ll have a look on it
Edit: gave it a try, but you have to remember the exact name of every app, and i dont care enough to remember if the name is ‘store’ or ‘market’ or ‘app store’ for example
Yeah, I’m with you on that. I tend to install a ton of interesting apps when I see them, and categorize them into groups (many apps fit multiple groups) so when I’m looking to do something in particular the apps that might fill the need are together to try it with. If those search launchers allowed for adding multiple tags to each app for categorizing and searching, then they’d probably work well enough for me to try.
Fair enough! Everyone has a different flavor palette. It also takes a week to get used to. After that one week, I never went back.
Also bought Nova Launcher Prime, but they were apparently acquired in the last year so now Nova is spyware? Anyway, I switched over to Kvaesitso and couldn’t be happier.
nova prime + netguard to keep it off the internet has kept me using it. “search focused” launchers are not how I use my phone and nothing else has all the features nova does without being able to just dump the stupid home screen search bar.
Not after they have been acquired by analytics company Branch
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.
Updoot for moon reader
Symfonium is an awesome music player that’s a one-time $5 purchase.
Great question, btw.
symfonium is amazing and id use it if i didnt pay for musicolet
Trying to use up some playstore credit. I don’t have time for a one month subscription, I just want to buy it now and use it later.
It was the first (only?) app where I was baffled at the features compared to the price. It’s a joy to use. If you self-host music, it beats the competition by miles
I wish sonos had better interoperability, but I did discover if you make a group of speakers and then cast to the “primary” speaker with symfonium, it broadcasts to the whole group.
Was my only issue with it, but that’s 100% a “sonos is shit” problem, not the app.
And the developer is super responsive. I pointed out a bug and once he was able to reproduce the problem, he released a fix by the next day.
You solved the single issue I had with Finamp: Casting to audio devices.
THANK YOU
Others have recommended other file explorers, but I use FX and rather like it.
I’ve been using FX File Explorer since 2012. It’s straight up the best file manager on Android, especially when you use SMB and SFTP. Multi window makes moving things around easy as, and the built in text editor works a treat. Being able to share images from apps to FX’s “Save As” option is awesome to. It means every app can save where you want.
No idea why it isn’t more popular compared to the alternatives.
FX is one of the only 2 apps I ever paid for and it’s great. I needed something to access SMB shares and it has always worked wonderfully. It’s good for poking around in the file system on the phone too. There may be better stuff out since I bought it years ago but I’ve never had a reason to check.
Just to mention another file explorer, Solid Explorer is great especially becase it’s easy to access Google Drive without having to use the Google drive interface.
If you’re a fan of customization and getting your home screen just how you like it, KLWP and Nova Prime.
Nova Prime is a launcher with a bunch of customization options for how your app drawer works, how apps are laid out, how big they are, how folders look, etc. I use it for the fact that i can set folders to have the icon of the first app inside, and a gesture so that tapping them opens that app, while swiping up opens the folder.
KLWP is essentially Rainmeter for Android.
Sleep as Android
It’s just a really great alarm clock app, but with tons of other sleep tracking functionality. I’ve always had trouble sleeping through my alarms, but I never do with this.
£70 premium version is a little rich for my blood. O_O
Yikes! Is that what it is now? I got it a decade ago for $5.
Yeah same here! I had no idea it was that much now.
Same! Wow, that is a bit much :-(
If you run Home Assistant, Sleep as Android can publish events to an MQTT broker so you can create automations based on those events, like “smart_period”, “awake”, “not_awake”, “alarm_alert_smart”, etc.
I used tasker to slowly ramp up my bedroom lights before my alarm goes off. Makes it easier to get up and not as jaring.
As a backup option, you can give Google Assistant or a Google Home the following commands: “at 10PM, sleep {lightname}” to dim, or “at 6AM, wake {lightname}” to brighten - both work over the space of a half-hour, and for some odd reason that’s not customizable.
I did the same thing with home assistant and just the stock clock app. Just looking at the “next alarm” sensor state.
If you have Hue bulbs (and maybe some other now, haven’t looked in a while) Sleep as Android can do that too!
I came to say Sleep as Android as well. Been using it since we were submitting bug reports on Google+ (anyone old enough to remember Google+ ? lol) … absolutely love it.
Slice and Dice is a very entertaining one time buy game. No bullshit in game purchases, no ads, I think developed by a singular guy.
Slay the spire, balatro and Peglin also fit here.
Amazing indie games, all one time buys.
Buzzkill is good if you have one of those
Annoying friends who
Send multiple messages instead of just one, Jonny, you annoying cunt
Minimalist phone Launcher that helps to use addictive apps less. And overall a boring home that demotivates you to use your phone.
Plenty of those for free on F-Droid & IzzyOnDroid.
Stardew Valley
