Protect your iOS and Android phones with this week’s top 5 apps

Please note that this article is separate from our bi-weekly “Free Apps of the Week” edition. We go beyond just reading about these apps and thoroughly test them by downloading and installing them individually. We also thoroughly inspect each app to make sure you don’t have any unwanted in-app purchases or sneaky data collection practices that compromise your privacy.

We publish this article weekly, so you can always check out our previous “Top 5 Apps” story for the traditional list of suggestions. This week, it’s all about protecting your device and digital identity.

BitWarden (Android and iOS [and more])

The password management category has never been more important and threatened. With increasing ease of use and integration from native apps from Apple and Google, news of attacks and vulnerabilities in popular services such as LastPass may drive users away from using a third-party service.

But listen, there are still arguments for using an independent tool like BitWarden, the app is not only free to use, but also open source and cross-platform. Heck, if you’re more paranoid than usual…only the paranoid survive*– you can even operate your own server.

There are other similar tools out there, notably KeePass (which I used for a couple of years with cloud sync plugins), but BitWarden surpasses them by offering a native web client, apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and extensions for all major browsers.

• Price: Free / Advertiser: None of them / In-app purchases: No / Drawer: Required

DuckDuckGo Browser (Android and iOS)

At long intervals DuckDuckGo (DDG) user, the release of his browser a few years ago was an unavoidable excuse to install another browser on my phone. But DDB Browser has shown real staying power with its features, especially the privacy-only ones.

By default, DDG blocks the most popular online tracking servers and offers a handy “fire button” that clears browsing data with a single touch. Of course, you can configure websites to bypass these protections, so you can easily choose DDG as your default browser and keep your most used logins activated.

Additionally, DuckDuckGo is working to offer email protection (using the duck.com domain) and a third-party app privacy feature that blocks app usage trackers with a VPN-like service.

• Price: Free / Advertiser: None of them / In-app purchases: No / Drawer: Not necessary

Authy (Android and iOS)

Two-factor authentication is one of the best available layers of protection for your accounts, especially pseudo-random tokens or one-time passwords (OTPs). But aside from being inconvenient for the average user, what happens if a phone authenticated by Google or Microsoft is lost?

Rather than managing dozens of disaster recovery codes, one practical alternative is to switch to a cross-platform, cross-device application such as Authy. The service synchronizes token generation with multiple phones, tablets, and even PCs, protected by your phone number and PIN code.

OTP applications are clearly not the most exciting category, but if you don’t like Authy and are looking for alternatives, check out the open source alternatives Aegis (Android) and Raivo (iOS, macOS), the latter even syncs OTPs with iCloud.

• Price: Free / Advertiser: None of them / In-app purchases: No / Drawer: Required

Simple Keyboard (Android)

What? Why should I care about my phone’s keyboard? Well, if you don’t trust the big tech companies like Google and Microsoft, your keyboard app might be profiling you with all kinds of data: what apps or websites you use, what searches you do, your most used words, and more.

The companies say they use this type of data to give us a better experience, including spell checking, word prediction and swipe typing, none of which Simple keyboardno thrills, no tracking, a bare keyboard with just the basics.

If you use the BitWarden password manager recommended above, you won’t miss the passwords you saved to your Google account and uploaded with GBoard, and you’ll rest at night knowing you didn’t feed the big tech monster as much as you did the day before. .

• Price: Free / Advertiser: None of them / In-app purchases: No / Drawer: Not necessary

Interland (Android and iOS)

Interland is a relatively old Internet game created by Google to teach kids about basic online safety concepts, including phishing, harassment, fake information, online trust, and privacy.

The game is divided into five different worlds (if the game were new, they would have been called “biomes”), each teaching one of the aforementioned themes, with simple trivia, platforming, and other gameplay.

Interland can be played in a browser tab and features charming, minimalist, flat-shaded polygonal graphics. The controls are touch based and change based on what is selected bio world.

• Price: Free / Advertiser: None of them / In-app purchases: No / Drawer: Not necessary

That’s it for this week’s top 5 apps. We encourage you to share your own suggestions and tips for improving the online security of your connected devices. We’ll be back next week with must-have apps, so stay tuned!