As some of you might know, I’m a Material 3/Material You fan; so, obviously, I’m interested in apps that use it and I might end up using them daily, so this month I’m starting an occasional format on which I will list some of my favorite Material Design 3 apps.
Before starting I want to give a big thanks to Nyas for making and updating a Material You app list, it has been a great source of discovery for me and it’s a good list too, you should give it a look imho. Let’s begin.
It’s pretty obvious, I’ve talked about it in many of my blog articles so it doesn’t need any introduction, it’s an SMS and RCS (Jibe) client installed in many Android ROMs. It might seem irrelevant in many countries where messaging apps like WhatsApp, Messenger or LINE are standard nowadays, but it’s still important to remember about standard texting when someone can’t (or doesn’t want to) use WhatsApp or any other messaging app, it has been one of my most used messaging clients for months and definitely my favorite.
It is preinstalled on many devices but if it isn’t on yours you can download it from the Play Store.
As with standard texting, I mostly use locally downloaded music now to listen to my favorite bangers and, in a time where music streaming is now the most popular way to listen to it, it is increasingly difficult to find clients to listen to music locally. Luckily, there are some devs interested in this market too, and Oto Music is definitely an example. It supports many music formats and it supports both ID3 and FLAC tags (I didn’t try any other formats except for WAV tags which don’t work sadly) and also has some Now Playing screens to choose from. Unfortunately some features are pro-exclusive and require a purchase, but I think that’s definitely worth it.
You can download this app from the Play Store.
Did you know that this blog has an RSS feed? That’s impressive, isn’t it? Do you know what’s even more impressive? Read You is an RSS Reader that allows you to, of course, read feeds and it follows the Material Design 3 design guidelines. It’s very easy to use and very customizable too, it also supports Fever (which is deprecated tho :/).
This one is not available on the Play Store but you can download it from the official GitHub repo or from F-Droid.
2FA is a very useful tool that can prevent some hacker attacks (some, because in some cases attackers can bypass it too), but many of the clients are bad tho; especially Google Authenticator which previously could lead your accounts to be permanently lost if your device broke (it happened to a few friends of mine), it now finally has cloud backups but they aren’t encrypted so f*ck Google Authenticator. Authenticator Pro on the other hand allows you to do local encrypted backups to put where you want, has built-in biometrical and password unlock and allows you to easily move your 2FA codes from a lot of services to Authenticator Pro. For example, I transferred my Authy codes to Authenticator Pro easily and didn’t have any problem (except for Twitch because it’s Authy linked so it doesn’t work). It also supports Steam Guard but I couldn’t manage to get it working unfortunately.
It’s available on the Play Store but you can also download other versions which have less features in favor of privacy.
If you like retrogaming emulation and don’t mind using touchscreen controls you should definitely try Lemuroid. It’s a free and open-source frontend for Libretro (like RetroArch), it supports various systems including more complicated ones like the PSP and the Nintendo 3DS and it has definitely the best touchscreen controls I’ve seen in any emulator. It also has some screen filters and supports savefile and status backups to Google Drive. A very interesting project and a useful companion for when you want to play and just have your phone (or something to aggravate even more your smartphone addiction I guess). You can download it from the official GitHub repository or the Google Play Store
That’s all folks, here are some of my favorite MD3 Android apps, if you want to suggest some Material You apps leave a comment and I’ll try them if I’m interested.