I’m always looking for solutions to problems people are having with their smartphones. This means I spend a lot of time browsing forums and release sites looking for new apps. In doing so, I find a lot of apps that don’t quite solve a major problem, but are nonetheless pretty cool. I came across four of those this week.
They’re all new apps, and they’re mostly from independent developers — just one or two people working out of their home, trying to make it big in the tech world. You can find the latest releases from Google, Facebook, and Apple elsewhere — we’re trying to shine a light on the little guy here.
App 1. WeWatch
First up is an app called WeWatch from developer Jersey Fonseca out of Chicago. This one has a great sales pitch: It’s like Tinder for movie night.
- Play Store Link: WeWatch (free)
You sign up for an account, then choose the streaming services you use. Then the app will show you full screen movie posters on the main menu. These are the movies available on your services.
You just swipe right to give one a thumbs up, or swipe left to dislike the movie.
Do that for a while, then get your friends or your S/O to swipe on movies too. Then We Watch will tell you which movies you guys have in common, and hopefully that will make movie night go a lot more smoothly.
App 2. URL Transfer
Next is an app called URL Transfer by Mahmut Salih Cicek from Turkey. It’s a live clipboard of sorts. You sign into the app, then open the website on your computer and sign in with the same account over there.
Then, anything you paste on the Notes page in the app will instantly show up in the browser tab, and vice versa. So it’s a simple, yet effective way of linking your phone and computer when it comes to text input.
- Play Store Link: URL Transfer (free)
App 3. Hypatia
After that, we have Hypatia, an open-source real-time malware scanner. It was created by a group of developers — in fact, the same team behind Divest OS, the privacy-focused custom ROM for Android.
This one isn’t on Google Play, so you’ll need to have the “Install Other Apps” permission enabled for your browser. Once you do, go to F-Droid.org to sideload the official F-Droid client. Open F-Droid and head to the Settings tab, then choose “Repositories” and tap the + button at the top of the screen. Here, enter the following URL to add the repo that contains Hypatia:
http://divestos.org/fdroid/official
Now, close and reopen F-Droid or tap the menu button and sync repositories, then use the search feature on the home tab to find “Hypatia.” Now, just tap “Install” and grant F-Droid the “Install Other Apps” permission if asked.
Once it’s installed, you’ve got the world’s only open-source, real-time malware scanner for Android. You can select which malware databases you want to scan against, and the whole thing has almost zero battery impact.
App 4. Randomizer
Finally, there’s Randomizer by Pavel Zhdunov out of Russia. It’s really just an easy way to settle an argument. You can use it to generate a random number between two user-defined values, and that’s where it gets its name.
But you can even just have it give you a yes or no if you find yourself in a tossup type situation, or it can offer random topics of conversation and even generate passwords for you. Definitely random!
- Play Store Link: Randomizer (free)
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