Top 12 Best Android Productivity Apps
Your Android device can do wonders for your productivity—you just need to know the best productivity apps for Android. We’ve tested many such apps and selected twelve that we liked the most.
1. Clean Email
Price: Free for cleaning up to 1000 emails, Subscription
Email overload is a huge issue today. As an Android user, you almost certainly have a Gmail account, but the chances are that you have other email accounts as well. And if you’re like most people, you probably receive dozens and maybe even hundreds of emails every single day. If you’ve already stopped counting unread emails, don’t feel bad—you’re not alone.
But just because most people these days struggle to keep their inboxes clean doesn’t mean that we should all give up email management altogether. Instead, all email users should use Clean Email to efficiently segment their emails into relevant groups and remove, archive, move, or label them in groups instead of selecting them one by one.
Besides efficient email organization, Clean Email additionally supports seamless email management automation, allowing you to automatically apply any action to new emails coming to your inbox without any manual work. Clean Email works with all major email services, including Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, and others.
- One-click inbox management
- Automatic cleanup
- Works with all email providers
- Affordable
- The free version can clean only 1,000 emails
2. Bitwarden
Price: Free, Premium version
You’ve probably heard of LastPass, the freemium password manager that allows you to store your passwords online in an encrypted form. Well, Bitwarden is just like LastPass except that it’s open source and usable even without a subscription. Last year, Bitwarden completed an independent audit, which means that you can trust it with your passwords and other sensitive information.
Bitwarden can quickly auto-fill logins from within your web browser and other apps, making it easy to use a different password for each website you visit. It can even generate secure passwords that hackers won’t be able to crack even if they had a supercomputer to help them.
- End-to-end password encryption
- 100% open source
- Generous free plan
- No ads
- Doesn't reliably auto-fill saved passwords
3. IFTTT
Price: Free, Subscription
If This Then That, also known as IFTTT, is arguably the most interesting productivity app on this list. Essentially, it allows you to automate your life by chaining different apps and services together using simple logic and custom triggers. Don’t worry: you don’t need to know programming to use IFTTT. You can simply download ready-made IFTTT recipes and customize them to fit your needs.
For example, you can automatically set your Android phone to silent based on your Google Calendar appointments, or you can synchronize your Facebook and Twitter profiles so that you only have to upload once to reach all your social media followers.
- Automates repetitive tasks
- Plenty of automation recipes to choose from
- Can access system-level information
- Unreliable user interface
4. Pushbullet
Price: Free, In-app purchases
Is there anything more annoying than hearing the new SMS message notification and immediately finding out that you’ve left your phone in a different room? We don’t think there is. With Pushbullet, you can conveniently read SMS messages on your computer. In fact, you can even reply to them. Besides SMS messages, Pushbullet also supports popular apps including WhatsApp, Kik, and Facebook Messenger, and it can display all your phone’s notifications on your computer, including missed phone calls.
Pushbullet works on all popular operating systems thanks to its web browser plugins, and all you need to get started with it is a Google or Facebook account.
- Send and receive SMS messages from your computer
- Displays notifications on your computer
- End-to-end encryption
- Doesn't work well with all Android smartphones
5. Solid Explorer
Price: Free, In-app purchases
Even though most Android devices come with a file manager, most users quickly discover that a third-party file manager is a must to do anything beyond very basic file management. Solid Explorer is an excellent choice because it has a built-in file archiver, FTP client, cloud file hosting support, and much more.
If you’re tired of ugly file managers that were clearly designed by software developers and not designers, Solid Explorer will put a smile on your face with its material design and excellent usability. You can use it for free for 14 days, but you’ll have to purchase the premium version after that.
- Easy to use
- Two-panel browsing
- Beautiful material design
- Ability to extract file archives
- Slow SMB connections
- No native media player
6. Chrome Remote Desktop
Price: Free
With Chrome Remote Desktop, you can securely access your computer from your Android device. Why would you want to control your computer using your smartphone? Because your smartphone can’t fit everything you have on your computer and because you never know when you’ll need to access a particular document or email a certain file.
If you have an Android tablet, you can connect to your desktop computer using Chrome Remote Desktop and use the tablet as a full-fledged laptop replacement, complete with the Windows operating system and your favorite apps.
- Straightforward
- Completely free
- Quick to set up
- Chrome browser is required
7. Grammarly Keyboard
Price: Free, Premium version
Our list of the best productivity Android apps wouldn’t be complete without Grammarly Keyboard. This alternative virtual keyboard is basically your own personal editor, keeping your writing mistake-free and allowing you to type with confidence. Grammarly Keyboard goes well beyond spell checking, offering advanced punctuation correction, vocabulary enhancements, a contextual spelling checker, and a sophisticated grammar checker.
Even if English is your native language, you should still use Grammarly Keyboard to improve your writing and ensure that you won’t embarrass yourself by sending an email or message with a basic mistake. Grammarly Keyboard plays well with all apps, and it gets smarter the more you use it.
- Reliably corrects grammar, spelling, and punctuation
- Works with any app
- Clear explanations for every correction
- Slow typing and correction speed
- Limited customization options
8. Google Drive
Price: Free, In-app purchases
Having to connect your Android smartphone to your computer every time you need to transfer a file to or from it is no fun, and it's certainly not the most productive way of sharing data between your devices. Google Drive is a free cloud storage solution that integrates well with other Google products, including the Android operating system itself.
With a free Google account, you get 15 GB of Google Drive storage space, and you can purchase additional storage space straight from the app. Google Drive lets you store all types of files and easily share them with others. Documents can be viewed directly in the app or edited in Google Docs with a simple tap. Besides Android, Google Drive also works on Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Linux, so you can keep your files synchronized across all of your devices.
- Works on all major platforms
- Google Docs integration
- 15 GB of free storage
- Many third-party integrations
- Privacy concerns
9. Microsoft Office Lens
Price: Free
Microsoft Office Lens is one of the best Android productivity apps from Microsoft. With this app, you can essentially turn your Android smartphone into an intelligent document scanner capable of automatically trimming, enhancing, and organizing everything from school notes to business contracts to pictures of whiteboards.
Office Lens can convert captured images to a number of different file formats and store them both locally and to OneDrive. The app is completely free, and it doesn't contain any in-app purchases.
- Completely free
- Can save scanned documents to Word
- Automatic picture correction
- Complicated business documents can confuse it
10. Trello
Price: Free, Premium version
Staying organized is the foundation of productivity, but there's only so much you can do with the calendar app on your Android device. Trello is a Kanban-style productivity app that lets you easily organize your life and projects using customizable-yet-simple boards, lists, and cards. Trello is loved by organizations of all sizes, but it can also be used as a more flexible alternative to conventional to-do apps by anyone else.
With the free Trello plan, you can create an unlimited number of personal boards, unlimited cards, and unlimited lists. You can, however, create only 10 team boards and include attachments that are up to 10 MB large.
- Easy to use Kanban app
- Effortless team collaboration
- Integrations with third-party services
- No reporting features
11. Evernote
Price: Free, In-app purchases
Evernote is an easy to use note taking app with a ton of useful features for organizing, task management, and archiving. For starters, it allows you to collect your ideas in a variety of formats, including text, sketches, photos, audio, video, PDFs, web clippings, and more. You can organize the collected notes in notebooks and share them with other people.
Because Evernote supports a variety of different platforms, you can keep your notes synchronized across any computer, smartphone, or tablet. The free plan includes all basic note-taking features, but it lacks team collaboration features, integrations with other apps and services, and other functionality that's included in the Premium and Business plans.
- Powerful search
- Flexible
- Clean user interface
- Restrictive free plan
12. Headspace
Price: Free, In-app purchases
You can’t really be productive if you’re stressed, anxious, or tired, which is why Headspace deserves a place on this list of the best productivity apps for Android. Describing itself as a personal guide to health and happiness, Headspace is a meditation app that teaches how to breathe, meditate, and live mindfully. It features thematic mediation courses, each of which is designed to help you master various forms of healthy living, from managing anxiety to finding focus to coping with cravings.
You can get a taste of what the Headspace library has to offer for free, but a subscription to Headspace Plus is required to unlock all meditation courses.
- Free introductory program
- User-friendly interface
- Sessions can be downloaded for offline listening
- Costs a lot of money
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve featured 12 best Android apps for productivity, including our favorite Android productivity app: Clean Email, a powerful bulk email organizer with filters and rules that organize your inbox into easy-to-review bundles.
Instead of trying all top productivity apps for Android at once, we recommend you start with just one or two so that you don’t overwhelm yourself with new organization apps, which could, paradoxically, make you less productive. Since email is already part of your daily life, it makes sense to start with Clean Email.
