Your Android phone could be a lot more useful to you with the right apps. Although modern Androids have important apps pre-installed, such as Gmail and Google Maps, preloaded apps won’t let you fully unlock what your phone can do. To do that, you’ll need to head to the Google Play Store, but be wary, because there are tons of buggy, poorly designed apps on the store that might do more harm than good. Although Google has said it will purge the worst Android apps in the Play Store, proceed with caution when downloading new apps. The other thing you’ll want to consider is price. Many apps are free, which makes paying for an app seem like a waste of money. While true for some, a few apps are essential and totally worth the price of admission.

Apps like Balatro and Shonen Jump will save you from boring flights and doctors’ visits, while apps like Sun Seeker will provide you with accurate information you won’t find elsewhere. To find a complete list of essential Android apps worth the price, keep on reading below. 

If you listen to podcasts daily, you need Pocket Casts Plus. The Pocket Casts app is free to download. You can use the app without paying a single cent, and it’s fine if you only listen to a few podcasts per week. If you’re one of those podcast listeners who like to listen at a higher speed, you can do that, and also put as many podcasts in the “up next” queue, which makes listening very convenient. You can also add RSS feeds for unlisted podcasts, or to access ad-free versions available through a podcast’s Patreon page. All that is free, but if you’re a power user, the paid tier offers a lot more.

However, the Pocket Casts Plus subscription adds a ton of functionality that makes listening to your podcasts more enjoyable. The Plus plan costs $40 a year and includes features such as folders, shuffling, bookmarks, a smartwatch app, and 20GB of cloud storage for all your audio files. The Patron tier is more expensive at $100 a year, and it comes with everything in the Plus tier plus 100GB of cloud storage, a special supporter badge for your profile, unique app icons, and, as Pocket Casts puts it, “the undying gratitude of everyone at Pocket Casts.” This tier is great if you want to support the app even more, but it’s not necessary. For most people, the Pocket Casts Plus tier is more than okay.

If you’ve never considered the usefulness of an app that tracks the sun, it’s probably because you’ve never used one. While it sounds like the kind of gimmicky app you get tired of after using it once, the Sun Seeker app, which costs $6.49, actually has a ton of real-life uses. When buying a home or picking a new apartment, you can use the Sun Seeker app to track the position of the sun throughout the year, letting you know how and when natural light comes in through the windows. It can also be great for gardening. However, photographers and videographers will probably get the most use out of the Sun Seeker app. When shooting outdoors on location, you can map out the position of the sun months in advance, helping you plan your shots way ahead of time. 

Sun Seeker works in a few different ways, all of which inform you of the sun’s position in relation to you. The home tab is a compass that shows you where the sun is relative to your position, where it was, and where it’s going next. The compass, as well as the sun’s position, rotates and adapts as you move. While the default setting shows the sun in its current position based on your location, you can also adjust the time and location to plan future shots. The map tab shows you a top-down view of a location. You can pick any location and date, which is useful if you can’t travel to a spot before filming. Finally, the 3D View tab displays a path of the sun based on your current position. You can also adjust the date to see where the sun will be in the middle of June, for example. 

It’s hard enough to cook after a long day at work, and even more stressful when you have to come up with an idea on the fly that’s tasty, affordable, and at your skill level. You could search the internet for recipes from creators you’ve never heard of, so long as you don’t mind scrolling through a few thousand words before getting to the meat of it. Or, you could download the NYT Cooking app, which has thousands of recipes from reputable chefs and online food creators like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, Sohla El-Waylly, and Eric Kim. There are recipes from every cuisine you can imagine, from your standard American fare to authentic Mexican, Japanese, and Indian dishes. 

The NYT cooking app is free to download, but you’ll need to subscribe to the service to use it. There are two options. You can either sign up for the New York Times’ All-Access plan, which gives you access to the New York Times news app, NYT Cooking, NYT Games, The Athletic, and Wirecutter. That plan comes out to $25 per month once the promotional period ends. The other option is to just sign up for the NYT Cooking service, which is $6 a month or $50 a year. While you can access the service via the web, it’s best used on your phone or tablet, where you can easily swipe through recipes while you cook. You can also sort recipes into folders, such as easy weeknight recipes or family favorites, and peruse the carefully curated recipe playlists on the home page. 

Balatro, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a roguelike poker game with seemingly simple gameplay, but it’s far from it. Every run varies wildly, and it’s entirely dependent on the Jokers you collect along the way, in addition to enhanced playing cards and planet cards, which increase the base score of a specific hand. Winning your first run won’t take long, and you won’t want to stop. Every run rewards you based on your achievements with new Joker cards and vouchers that can be used in the store. Also, as you win, you’ll unlock new decks that unlock specific perks, such as the ability to start with more money than usual, giving you an advantage early on. Completing runs also unlocks new difficulty options for the chosen deck. You can unlock further difficulty options by beating a run with the previously unlocked difficulty. 

Balatro emerged as last year’s breakout indie game, stealing countless hours from anyone who touched it. At the Game Awards 2024, the game was nominated for five Game Awards, winning three. One of the awards the game won was for Best Independent Game, beating out indie gems like Animal Well and UFO 50. The Android version of the app launched several months after the game’s initial release, and it’s every bit as good as the version on PC or Nintendo Switch, while being $5 cheaper. Balatro on Android costs $10, and it’s worth the price. If you need a game to decompress on your commute or before you fall asleep, this portable version of Balatro is unbeatable for the money.

Getting to manga is easier than ever, but trying to catch up on several series at once is a quick way to end up with a depleted bank account. Rather than spend $220 on a boxed set of Demon Slayer, which contains 23 volumes of the manga, you can download the Shonen Jump app and subscribe to their monthly service to read up on your favorite series. The subscription is just $3.99 a month, which is roughly a third of the cost of the average manga volume. While the subscription recently jumped in price from $2.99, the daily reading limit of 100 chapters was removed for paid subscribers, making it possible to read an entire series in one day. Another benefit of the app is that you can download chapters for offline reading, which is a great way to pass the time when traveling — you don’t have to rely on slow airplane Wi-Fi or a public internet connection. Just remember to download chapters before heading out. 
In addition to “Demon Slayer,” the app gives you access to other popular manga series, such as Kaiju No. 8, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Spy x Family. Chapters are added weekly, with the newest chapters available for free. With manga now more popular than comics in the US, this is an excellent way to get into manga without exceeding your budget. If you’re not sure what to read next, Sakamoto Days, which is Netflix’s newest anime based on a popular manga, is available on Shonen Jump.