Apps of The Week: Reworked Notifications, Screen Share for Devs, A New Way to Wake up and More!

Apps are at the front and center of any smartphone experience, and with over a million apps on the Google Play Store and new apps being submitted to our forums every day, staying up to date on the latest apps and games can be a hassle. At XDA we don’t discriminate apps – if it’s interesting, innovative, original or useful, we mention them. The XDA Portal Team loves apps too, and here are our top picks for this week.

Floatify v8.0 — A Better Way to Get a Heads Up [FREE]

Floatify is an app by XDA Senior Member Jawomo that has been around for over a year. Now, though, this heads up notification replacement gets a lot of goodies to make the app smarter and swifter. The notifications are now contextually aware and very customizable. You can, for example, swipe down on a notification to reveal a “Reply” function where you can write down a message on the notification. There are new gestures too, and these also show up on lockscreens. Floatify is now more compelling than ever!

Youtube Gaming — Let’s Play Some Game Videos [FREE]

Gaming is a big part of Youtube now — chances are you’ve seen kids watching Minecraft Let’s Plays at a restaurant or store. Gaming streams, however, were not… until now. Youtube’s new service allows you to watch gaming videos and livestreams from your favorite youtubers, where they play the games so that you don’t have to. While it defeats the purpose of a game, sometimes we just want to enjoy someone’s commentary or dexterity. Youtube gaming let’s you do just that. If you want to know more about the app or how it performs, check out our app review!

Vysor (Share) — Your Phone on Your PC! [BETA]

This is a great developer tool, but everyone can use it. ClockworkMod’s Koushik Dutta finally released Vysor Share this week, a neat way to control your smartphone from Chrome through an extension that recreates your screen on your computer. After that, you can use your mouse to navigate your phone’s UI. Keep in mind that your phone must be connected to the computer and the service works over ADB. After you have it set up, you can share your view to other computers. The app is seamless and it can make development or desk jobs easier by saving you precious time and streamlining your workflow.

ClockCam — Watch Yourself Wake Up!  [FREE]

Did your alarm even go off? Now you can figure out why you are 2 hours late for work or school. ClockCam starts a video recording the moment your alarm starts buzzing up until the moment you dismiss it. This way you can keep track of what happened that morning as well as get hilarious videos of your clueless morning self. You won’t wake up nor look like people in movies do in the morning, but that’s half the fun of this app. Either way, the concept is nice and the application is well designed in and out.

FRAMED — Fix a Story Frame by Frame [PAID]

FRAMED is a brilliantly designed game where you simply must organize a story to see it unfold. The game displays a comic book strip with various frames, and it’s up to you to find the correct order of events. Each frame then animates and you will see whether you were right or wrong the moment the story works or breaks. FRAMED is easy to play and relaxing, with a good background soundtrack and a sleek visual style loyal to the comic books it emulates. Need a time killer? If so, this is a one-of-a-kind experience.

Notable updates:

• A new Play Services version has rolled out which will act as a foundation for Android Pay, which is coming “soon”.
• Samsung Pay is now in beta in the United States. You can sign up and once you are accepted, your placeholder Samsung Pay app will update to the actual application. Keep in mind that it only works with select cards at the moment.
• Amazon has done away with their free app of the day model and is now featuring Amazon Underground, which rounds up thousands of free applications for you to check out.
• Popular multitasking web browser Link Bubble is now free.

That is it for this week. We hope that you might have found some of these apps as interesting, useful or entertaining as we did. Whether you are a student, a developer, a designer or a gamer, Android has you covered. We will try to reflect that each week with a variety of picks to spark your interest, and if you see (or publish!) any new apps that you think are worthy of a feature, be sure to send us a tip and we’ll give it a look. Until next time!

 

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