Google is one of the biggest tech players in the industry. From search to cloud services, ads, smartphones, and many other fields, Google owns a brand in just about every sector of the internet world (and beyond) today. While you’re probably familiar with Google’s most famous offerings, like Gmail, YouTube, and Gemini, there are other popular apps you’ve probably been using for ages but might have never realized are also owned by the company.

These apps offer great tools to help you with various aspects of daily life, whether you’re commuting, tweaking some details of a photo, or even pairing your wearable with an Android or iOS device to track your health. Google plays such an important role in our digital lives that sometimes we forget the company is also constantly adding new properties to power its tech empire and entrench itself even further in our routines.

For example, YouTube wasn’t a Google app back in the day. After the company acquired it in 2006, though, it started to deeply integrate the platform across its ecosystem in search results, Android (with an app), ads, and more. Even what we now know as Google Maps, which recently got an overhaul in the U.S., was built on several acquisitions and constant upgrades to make it what it is today. In that spirit, here are some other popular apps you might not have known were part of Google’s ecosystem … until now.

Snapseed is an interesting app owned by Google. First released exclusively for the iPad in June 2011, it was also named iPad App of the Year that same year. The developers behind it later released an iPhone version, and even a Microsoft Windows version. In 2012, Google took over the app and released an Android version. However, instead of just implementing this app under Google’s OS or apps, the company continued to offer Snapseed for both iOS and Android platforms, with ongoing updates.

Today, Snapseed is promoted as a complete photo editor with no ads, just editing. Google says it offers over 25 tools and filters to help users improve their photos. Snapseed has been the go-to editing tool for many smartphone users over the years because it offers a simple way to clean small details from photos. It was slow to integrate AI, though, and still lags behind others in that area. Photomator, for example, which was acquired by Apple recently, is a favorite among Apple users, partly for its AI features.

Still, for anyone wanting to improve their pics, Snapseed is a great tool, as you can continue to open and tweak native camera files and then export as a new one. You can also automatically tune the image, crop, rotate, blur, or add filters with just a few taps. Google’s Snapseed is available on the App Store and the Google Play Store for free.

When you’re tired of Google Maps and Apple Maps, you might think you’re giving yourself a third option by choosing Waze. However, you’re actually just choosing Google again. Waze launched late in 2008 after a couple years of planning and fundraising, then spent the next five years building out the foundation for how we know it today, with live updates regarding accidents, protests, and the smartest route to take based on users’ input. Following its initial success, Google bought the platform in 2013, and to this day, it continues to be offered as a standalone app.

Waze also still provides real-time updates with an accurate estimated time of arrival. With millions of users daily, the app lets you report a broken traffic light, an accident, whether the route has traffic, or even if it’s raining. After that, other users can just confirm or deny the claims to help improve the platform for their fellow drivers.

Waze also offers upcoming speed limit changes, alerts about police presence, and guidance about lane restrictions or bottlenecks. The platform has evolved to show toll pricing, where to find gas stations, and even EV stations along your route. Users can also compare parking lot prices using the app, and Waze often collaborates with celebrities to offer customized voice navigation. It also offers local accents for a personalized navigation experience that can help avoid confusion caused by unusual pronunciations. Waze is available for free on iOS and the Google Play Store.

Google completed the acquisition of wearables giant Fitbit in 2021. Before that, Fitbit was already a well-established brand, with several wearables and a platform to help people monitor their health. Since then, Google has taken two different lanes with the line. One is through continuing to develop Fitbit, like Charge and Inspire products, which help users track their fitness with generous battery life and simple interfaces. The second one is by integrating the Fitbit platform into Pixel Watch models, giving Pixel users more functionality than ever.

It probably comes as no surprise that the Fitbit app is still a central part of the experience, as it tracks activity, sleep stages, heart rate, and stress metrics. What happened over the past few years is that the app now relies on a Google account, and it connects with services like Google Health Connect, which already had tie-ins with the Pixel hardware. The addition of Fitbit to the mix offers premium features like deeper analytics, guided workouts, and other health insights.

Overall, Fitbit is a great example of not only a hardware company that is owned by Google, but also an entire health platform that can be used by both iOS and Android users. The Fitbit app is available on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

Founded in 2014, Photomath is a mobile app that helps solve math problems using your smartphone’s camera. However, more than just giving you the answer to the problem you scan in, it offers the full reasoning behind the operation — it was doing that well before AI took over the role, too. In 2022, Google announced that it was acquiring the app, and after regulatory approval, it completed the transaction in 2023. While Photomath has been integrated into Google’s broader AI and education efforts, it continues to be its own thing, as well.

Today, you can still open Photomath and point your camera at a math problem on a piece of paper or a screen to get a step-by-step breakdown of the solution. The app shows each transformation, different possible solution methods, and even animated explanations (with a paid upgrade) that walk through the logic visually, making it more of a learning tool than just a place to get a quick answer.

Photomath supports both handwritten and printed problems, and it even includes a smart calculator.  Users can go one step further with the paid version, Photomath Plus, for more detailed steps and access to advanced features, like interactive graphs, animated tutorials powered by AI, and contextual tips that explain rules or how the formulas are being applied. Photomath is available for iPhone users in the Apple App Store and for Android users on the Google Play Store.

Last but not least, Google has a very interesting accessibility app called Lookout, with hundreds of thousands of users. Designed primarily for people who are blind or have low vision, it uses the phone’s camera together with on-device AI to interpret the surrounding environments in real time. The app has a few different modes, which are built to handle specific tasks. For example, the Text mode reads printed or handwritten text out loud, while the Explore mode continuously describes objects and scenes around you, which can be helpful to identify furniture, people, or general surroundings. Users can also take advantage of Food Labels mode to help with grocery shopping or Currency mode to identify banknotes.

First released by Google in 2019 as part of an accessibility project for Pixel users, the app recently got better AI-powered features to generate more descriptive scene explanations, rather than just giving simple text. Besides that, the app can now answer follow-up questions about what it sees, making the experience more of a conversation rather than a one-sided information dump.

While most Google apps take advantage of ads and cloud resources for processing, Lookout handles everything on-device, which makes the experience faster but also more private. The app is Android-only, and it’s available on the Google Play Store. Besides Apple’s own accessibility solution, a similar app for iPhone users could be Microsoft’s Seeing AI.