15 best free Android apps of all time (Updated December 2021)
Android’s biggest strength is its app ecosystem. There are a digital ton of Android apps. People downloaded them billions of times. Some of them cost money and some of them don’t. Usually, the best apps will cost you a few bucks. However, there are plenty of amazing options that don’t cost you anything. These services are usually supported by advertising, sponsorship of some sort, or something else.
However, there are still some truly excellent apps out there that you can use for free. After all, good functionality shouldn’t always involve throwing copious amounts of money at a thing to solve it. These are the best free Android apps for Android! This is a best all-time list, kind of like a hall of fame, so the contents of this list won’t change very often until something truly great comes along. You can see our picks for the best apps and games of 2020 with the video above if you want to see more recent stuff.
The best free Android apps, ever:
1Weather
Price: Free / $1.99
1Weather is about as complete of a weather app as you can find. It comes with all kinds of stuff including current conditions, forecasts, radar, predictions, fun facts about meteorology, graphs, and even a sun and moon tracker. The design is gorgeous as well and the app includes fairly decent and somewhat configurable widgets. It’s free to use and the $1.99 charge is simply to remove advertising. As long as you don’t mind the occasional banner add, you get all of the features in the free version. You can also check out our list of the best weather apps if you want an alternative. We also quite like AccuWeather, especially since AccuWeather’s redesign in mid-2020.
Bitwarden Password Manager
Price: Free
Bitwarden Password Manager is one of a few decent free password manager apps. It works like most password managers. You get a vault with all of your usernames and passwords. You can store as many as you want without worry and retrieve them as needed. In addition, the app has 256-bit AES encryption and it is entirely open source. It hits all of the checkboxes for a good, free password manager. The app saw a spike in popularity after LastPass reduced the features on its free tier. KeePassDroid is another excellent option in this space, but we like Bitwarden’s UI just a little bit more. You can also check out our best password manager apps list for more options.
Cookmate
Price: Free / $20 per year
Cookmate is arguably the best individual cookbook app on mobile. A lot of people have a lot of dietary wants and needs so the use of a personal cookbook app benefits a lot of people. This one is particularly nice to use. You can create custom recipes from scratch, complete with instructions and an ingredients list. Additionally, you can import recipes from virtually any website. The UI is clean and easy to use plus there is cloud backup, even in the free version. The premium version is a yearly subscription, but all it really does is increase the number of recipes you can sync or you can just use the Dropbox option. Of course, there are many other excellent recipe and cooking apps here if you want to see more.
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Want to see more apps? Try these:
Gboard
Price: Free
Google Drive
Price: Free / $1.99-$299.99 per month
Google Opinion Rewards
Price: Free
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Imgur and Giphy
Price: Free
Imgur and Giphy are two image databases. They’re great places to find things like funny GIFs, fun images, little facts, and all kinds of other entertainment purposes. Most of those awesome pictures you see on Facebook, Twitter, etc come from here. Imgur also happens to be the image upload service that most people use on Reddit. Both Giphy and Imgur are completely free to download and use. They have your back whether you want to kill a few minutes slacking off or looking for the perfect reaction GIF for that Twitter or Google+ post. They’re two free Android apps worth having. Plus, you can upload your images to Imgur without limits for sharing to various places. There are other funny apps on Android, but we like these two the best.
Check out more apps here:
Musicolet
Price: Free
Musicolet is an intriguing option for local music playback. It does all of the basics, including playlists, tag editing, organizational features, file browsing, and embedded lryics (LRC) support. You also get an equalizer, a sleep timer, widgets, lock screen controls, Android Auto support, and more. It covers basically all standard use cases and it still piles more on top. In addition, it’s entirely free with no in-app purchases and no advertising. We also quite like the simple, effective UI. You can check out other music app options here as well if you need to or here for music streaming apps if you want that instead.
Resilio Sync
Price: Free / Varies
TickTick
Price: Free / $27.99 per year
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Zedge
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Zedge is pretty much a one-stop shop for things like wallpapers, ringtones, notification tones, and alarms. There is a very large selection of all of those things available in a variety of genres including fantasy, mainstream, funny, and pretty much whatever else you can think of. Zedge’s users add most of the content themselves. Thanks to this, there is quite a bit of variety. There is also a premium option for wallpapers and those are pretty decent. Abstruct, Walli, and Tapet are better options for wallpapers, but the premium content in Zedge isn’t half bad and Zedge is basically the only truly great app left for ringtones. There are other great wallpaper apps and ringtone apps, but Zedge is the only one that can reliably do both.
Zoom
Price: Free / Varies
Zoom was one of the definitive apps of 2020. When the pandemic hit and everybody started working from home, Zoom became the app to beat for video conferencing. It has a fairly robust free version. You can do unlimited one-on-one video chats and 40-minute meetings with up to 100 people. That’s good enough for most use cases. You can pay to remove many of those restrictions. The app lets you screen share, use a whiteboard to write stuff down, and it even includes things like end-to-end encryption. The app could be better and Zoom took its sweet time adapting to its new popularity. However, it managed to persevere.