Five gorgeous Android apps you can’t miss

Well designed apps on the Playstore, are not so common, compared to iOS apps on the Appstore. That is indeed changing with new design rules imposed by Google, since Android 4.0. Here are a few apps which may or may not follow those rules, but are definitely fun to use.

1. Flipboard

This is a no brainer, design is one of the reasons why Flipboard sets itself apart from other RSS/content consumption apps and though late to the Playstore, it still wears almost the same design as its iOS counterpart. For beginners, Flipboard is a visual reading app, integrating and collecting content from blogs, your Twitter feed/Facebook/Instagram/Google+etc., and of course, you navigate through the app by flipping pages.

Link: Flipboard

2. TED

TED’s official Android app is very minimal in design, and that’s exactly what I liked about it. It has a red-white color combo, following ICS’ defaults of swiping screen from edges to navigate through the app.

Link: TED

3. Solid Explorer

Solid explorer, as you’d expect, is a file explorer for Android. It’s still in beta, but has a very polished look, having this holo light/dark theme (as you see on an ICS device). The app is really smooth with neat icons, can pretty much be made the default File explorer.

Link: Solid explorer

4. Path

Path, after its redesign i.e. Path 2.0., has released their Android app. The design is very detailed with beautiful typographyand kind of similar to the Facebook timeline. With a limit of 150 friends, it’s for people who like to add only real friends to their social networks.

Link: Path

5. Chrome

Chrome for Android, which just came out of beta, is ICS-only, but just like the desktop counterpart, it is very well designed. Especially, tab management – where you swipe a tab towards an edge to close the tab, and tabs acting like a deck of cards, is really cool.

Speed dial, too, is nice to have. I found the app to be a bit buggy on my phone, but the sync feature is really solid.

Link: Chrome

Apps which are worth a mention

So those are the five, but apart from these, there are few other apps worth trying. One such app is Twitter for Android – scrolling tweets in Twitter for Android is bliss, it’s really smooth. In task management apps, I like Any.DO very much, they also have released a Chrome app recently. Google+, after recent update, has got a lot of positive response, especially because Facebook for Android is almost unusable.

If you have used any well designed Android app (which isn’t mentioned here), do drop it in the comments.