5 Android Apps You Shouldn’t Miss This Week

Welcome to the 470th edition of Android Apps Weekly. Here’s last week’s big news.

• YouTube Music has an annoying censorship bug on Nest Hubs. It won’t let you play music with sensitive album covers. The phone app will also give you the same warning, but you can usually work around it. Unfortunately, there are only limited ways to get around it on the Nest Hub. Click the link for more information.
• According to a former Facebook employee, Facebook can kill the battery on purpose. It does this through a process called negative testing, where the app steps up, drains the battery, and Facebook collects data with it. It doesn’t happen to many people, but it can happen to anyone.
• Samsung updated Good Lock this week, just in time for the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S23. The update gave me the option to update all installed plugins at once. Previously, each had to be updated separately. It’s a minor improvement in quality of life, but a welcome one.
• ChatGPT is getting serious. You can now spend $20 a month on the more powerful version of the OpenAI bot. It’s currently only available to US customers, but may expand later. The bot is also making waves at Google, which is why the company is ramping up its own artificial intelligence work.
• Apex Legends Mobile is shutting down after less than a year. EA made the announcement just a month after half the internet, including us, named it the best new game of 2022. EA cites content pipeline challenges. This is logical, since the newer updates contain many bugs that the developers simply cannot eliminate. Oh, it was a good run.

Pompom: The Great Space Rescue

Price: Free / $5.49

Pompom: The Great Space Rescue is a platformer. You play as Pompom and progress through the game by jumping over obstacles and around enemies and solving puzzles to progress. It pays homage to the 16-bit gaming era, so you’ll see a lot of elements, including graphics, from that era. There are also a bunch of weapons and tools to help you on your way. The actual gameplay has some running elements where it auto-forwards and it’s not 16-bit era style, but the game is still fun.

Memory Note

Price: Free / $2.49

Memori Note is a note-taking app that focuses on things you remember. You describe what you want the app to do, ask it to randomly remind you, and it does. The app is also color-coded, tags, and a filter system, and we think it looks great with the muted colors. There are also some backup options if you want to transfer notes to a new device. We don’t know how effective it will be in the long run, but it definitely has the potential.

Devil Hunter Idle

Price: It’s free to play

Devil Hunter Idle is an idle action game. Your character hacks and slashes your way to leveling up, loot, and resources. You use these resources to power up your character so they can go back and knock down and cut down more bad guys. This is the primary gameplay and plays similarly to classic games like Buff Knight. The game’s extraordinary art style makes it feel like there’s a lot more going on, and the player can control certain aspects of the combat. Ads are annoying, but you can pay to remove them all. Other than that and a few early bugs, the game is decent for its genre.

Rewind: Music Time Travel

Price: Free

Rewind: Music Time Travel is an app to rediscover music. It’s basically a big timeline that you scroll through to see what the music world looked like in that year. It’s a neat way to rediscover old hits and remind yourself of things you used to listen to. When I tested this, it helped fill out my YouTube Music library a bit, as I had forgotten some songs I had listened to before. You won’t be using this long term, but it’s a neat little app anyway.

Checkers clash

Price: It’s free to play

Checkers Clash is an online competitive game where you play checkers. It’s not a complicated experience. You enter a game with your opponent. The two of you take turns until one of you runs out or sells the match. You can also invite your friends and play against them. Some of the other game features include 8×8 and 10×10 board options, playable bots to improve your skill, and a reward system where you can collect various things. The matchmaking system is imperfect, as in almost all online games, but it is one of the few mobile checkers apps out there.

If we missed any great Android apps or games, let us know in the comments.
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