As with most similar services, TheftSpy requires you to first register for an account that will be used to link the web app with the mobile app. You can get yourself a free account from the TheftSpy website, or use the in-app registration services on your Android device. In order to avail the TheftSpy service, make sure you’re logged in to the web app as well as the Android app on all the devices you wish to monitor and manage. It must be mentioned here that the app supports performing operations over Wi-Fi as well as mobile data connection.

All the functionality found in the mobile app can be remotely accessed from the TheftSpy website as well. However, you must ensure that you’re logged in to the app, and that the TheftSpy services are actively running on your device. We shall look at those feature later on, but let’s first shed some light on the various remote device tracking, management and security options that TheftSpy offers.

GPS Tracker

You can track your device’s current geographical coordinates on Google Maps, and forward fresh GPS requests.

SMS

You can view and search your WhatsApp messages as well as all the SMS/MMS messages present in your Android device’s inbox, outbox, sent items and drafts.

Cam Gallery

This feature of TheftSpy lets you remotely snap photos using your device’s front-facing camera. Once a photo has been taken, just hit the Refresh button to preview it on the webpage. The app is capable of caching all the images as long as the remote connection session remains established.

Screenshot

This feature works on rooted-devices only, and lets you remotely capture screenshots of your Android device. Like Cam Gallery, the Screenshot tab enables you to preview all the captured shots on the webpage.

Audio Recorder

You can use this feature to remotely record audio from your Android device’s microphone for a custom duration. If you opt for the Quick Record feature, TheftSpy will automatically record a 3-second audio clip for you. The website caches all the recently captured audio recordings and lets you listen to them as many times as you like.

Messages & Alerts

This tab offers three different options, using which you can remotely send a custom full-screen pop-up text message, a toast message or Text-To-Speech (TTS) message to your Android device. Oddly enough, the app currently seems to be missing the remote alarm feature, which is considered to be a basic element of most anti-theft mobile apps. However, this can be achieved using the aforementioned TTS message feature.

Data Security

Various options on this screen allow you to remotely wipe all your Android device’s data, just the photos stored on your device’s stock Camera folder, or your personal WhatsApp data. That’s not all – using the last option on this screen, you can encrypt all the content on your Android device.

Call Log & Contacts

As evident by their respective titles, the Call Log and Contacts tabs let you remotely import the list of all the calls made, attended or missed on your device, and the all the contacts stored on your Android device’s phone book, respectively.

Stealth Security

The Stealth Security tab offers different options to conceal the TheftSpy app on your Android device in order to protect the tool from prying eyes. Using various options available at hand, you can remotely hide the TheftSpy icon from your device’s app drawer, manage the device administrative privileges for the app, and launch the app’s login screen. The last option is useful if you have hidden the app’s icon from the app drawer and wish to access it again. Note that availing this option will automatically log you out of the mobile app for security purposes, and you’ll have to sign in again.

Power Control

This tab has options to remotely power off, reboot and lock your Android device.

Device Settings

Besides displaying your device’s SIM serial number, unlock code and network operator, the Device Settings tab can be used to modify various options included from the app’s main configuration screen. These include the option to grant the app administrative privileges on your device, set the emergency SMS number, automatically start TheftSpy services on system reboot, upload photos and voice recordings over Wi-Fi only, and enable silent photo capturing upon providing the wrong unlock code.

Remember that TheftSpy is still in very early alpha phases, therefore you can expect it to return a few bugs during testing. As in our case, almost every single feature was tested successfully. However, our main concern is with the app’s relatively barebones UI, which can be improved quite considerably.

TheftSpy requires Android 2.3 Gingerbread or higher to run, and can be downloaded from the Play Store for free using the link provided below.

Download SS-TheftSpy For Android

Visit TheftSpy Website

[via XDA-Developers]

Read TheftSpy Has Everything You Need In An Android Anti-Theft & Remote Management Tool [Review] by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Whether you wish to see the sunset view from various parts of the globe in a single shot, find out how other children look sporting a Spiderman attire in comparison to your own kid, or have someone complement a specific image with something similar but from their own perspective, Pixplit is the app for you!

To get started, you’re required to log in to the app using your Pixplit or Facebook account. Don’t have a Pixplit account? You can register a new account for free from within the app by just providing your email address.

Past the login phase, you’re greeted by a couple of tutorial slides, followed by an Instagram-like live feed that lists all the latest splits (the app’s term for its collages)) shared by other Pixplit users. There are a couple of ways to discover and interact with all the shared content. There is a Completed tab that lists all the splits that have already been finalized with the required photos, and then there’s the Playground tab that contains frames that are yet to be finished. As mentioned earlier, you can pick any incomplete split and fill it with an image of your own. Remember that irrespective of the number of empty slots available per frame, you are allowed to fill just one slot in each split.

While exploring the app’s content, you can like a split, comment on it, share it further with your buddies, download it to your local photo library, or flag it for review if you find it inappropriate. In addition, you get to see relevant tags, contributors, number of likes & comments, relevant splits, and detailed profiles of each contributor. Besides the ability to follow a user, you can also find a list of all their unfinished splits that you can help finish with your photos. Moreover, you can jump to the profile pages of other users who’ve already contributed to chosen user’s splits.

From the feeds screen, you can tap the button at the top-left to head to the app’s home screen that lets you navigate to the popular & featured splits screens, your personal Pixplit screen, and the dedicated Pixplit news screen. It is also from this screen that you can search across the Pixplit network for users. The popular and featured sections of the app have plenty of gorgeous photo collages for your visual pleasure, and if you’re lucky enough to find an unfinished split, you can become a proud contributor to the masterpiece by sharing an equally enthralling photo of your own.

Want to start your own split? Just hit the camera button at the bottom, select the preferred frame layout, fill the available slot by capturing a fresh shot or importing one from your device’s gallery, adjust the image’s layout using the available editing tools, decide your sharing and tagging preferences, and publish the split on the Pixplit network.

Like its iOS counterpart, Pixplit for Android is available in the market absolutely free of cost. You can grab the app by visiting the Play Store link provided below.

Download Pixplit For Android

Download Pixplit For iOS

Read Pixplit Is A Collaborative, Social Photo Collage App For Android & iOS by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

The services of Yandex.Store are already available in a number of countries where you can easily purchase apps and games using your credit card or via cell phone bill payments. For those worried about the security of the apps featured on the store, all apps are verified by the trusted services of Kaspersky before making it to Yandex.Store.

When launched for the first time, the app welcomes you with a couple of introductory slides. Past that, you’re prompted to log in with your Yandex ID. First time users can use the in-app registration facility to get themselves a new ID for free.

Once logged in, you’re greeted by the Play Store-style Featured Apps screen filled with a beautiful carousel and large tiles of some of the best and popular apps available in the store, followed by some other noteworthy titles. Swiping sideways takes you to the store’s dedicated games and apps sections, with the content each section organized under various popular genres. There are two broad subcategories based on pricing: Free and Paid. The top-right corner of the app’s UI carries the ubiquitous search button to help you find any particular app that you’re looking for.

On every app’s description page, you’re shown a wealth of useful information about the app such as the developer (with contact details), star ratings, installation file size, total number of downloads, screenshots, description, change logs, user reviews, and other apps by the same developer (if any). Now here’s a nice little touch of brilliance – while exploring an app under one of the supported categories, you can view other apps belonging to that particular genre in a vertically scrollable sidebar on the left. However, should you wish to see more details about the chosen app on the same screen, you can just dismiss the sidebar by sliding it to left.

As with Google Play Store, you can hit the Menu button in the app to manage your installed apps, personal store account and Yandex.Store’s main preferences. The app’s settings screen offers several key options such enabling/disabling notifications about new app and game updates, enabling/disabling automatic updates for installed apps, setting updates to download over Wi-Fi and/or mobile data only, and clearing the app’s search history.

Want to try out this brand new Google Play Store alternative from Yandex? Just grab the APK file from the link provided below, and sideload it to your device as you would normally do with any other APK file.

Download Yandex.Store For Android (APK File)

Read Yandex.Store Promises To Be A Great Alternative To Android Play Store by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Perhaps the most impressive facet of snaplife is its focus on keeping the entire concept ridiculously simple. The app directly launches into the viewfinder mode, letting you start capturing a new video with a tap. Once a clip is recorded, the app works its trick by automatically scanning, analyzing and previewing what it deems the most important frames from the entire video. It then lets you customize and/or confirm the selection before converting them to the output format of your choice. While in editing mode, you also get the option to apply one of the following five filters to the chosen frames:

• Gray-scale
• False color
• Emboss
• Edge
• Cartoon

A great thing about snaplife is the way it lets you preview each type of output before finalizing the settings. Therefore, if you’re rather dissatisfied with one of the chosen frames or the applied effect, you can alter it to your heart’s content. That’s not all – you also get the option to choose between all three supported output formats each time you make some amendments to the pictures you want to be included in the output. The app uses a folder labelled ‘snaps’ on your device’s storage to save all the output media, and also lets you browse those files through a built-in gallery. Want to share your masterpieces with the entire world? The app offers a built-in media uploading feature that uses the upicto! service for the purpose.

The app’s default recording and output preferences can be changes by heading over to its settings screen. You can specify a custom video recording duration, the default image output size & type, the total number of photos that you want snaplife to pluck from the entire clip, and the default filter you want to be applied to selected images. Aside from these preferences, there is the option to delay capture by 5 seconds after pressing the record button, and force the app to continue recording in the background (experimental for now).

In short, not only can snaplife help you retrieve ‘that’ perfect shot from your recorded video clips, but it also allows you to save the best moments of an event in a wonderful, self-curated montage. As mentioned earlier, the best part about the entire deal is that snaplife is absolutely free in the Play Store. You can downloaded the app via the link provided below.

Download snaplife For Android

Read snaplife Saves Clips, GIFs & Collages Of Best Moments In Videos On Android by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Continuing with the app’s feature list, it can download content over mobile data as well as Wi-Fi. Also, you can limit the number of episodes per podcast that you want Podkeeper to download automatically. Episodes downloaded from the same podcasts can be displayed under the same group on the app’s home screen. Podcasts can be sorted by publication date, download date or episode title and name in ascending or descending order.

When it comes to playback, you can set the app to play content in full volume once the headphone jack is connected, and pause streaming or playback upon disconnecting it. Also, the app is capable of automatically pausing streaming in case of a phone call, and can resume playback once the call is over. That’s not all – the app also remembers the last position of each podcast that you’ve played at least once, and can resume playback from exactly the same point the next time you play it.

When launched for the first time, Podkeeper adds a few popular podcasts to your subscription list to help you get started. Afterwards, you can use the search button at the top-right to start finding and subscribing to your favorite podcasts. Alternatively, you can hit Menu > Add new podcast to subscribe to a podcast its URL.

Any episodes that you’ve download can be accessed under the Downloads tab on the app’s home screen. As mentioned earlier, the app has plenty of informative stuff to show regarding each podcast and its episodes, and you can view it by tapping the ‘i’ icon beside the item. To begin playing an episode, just tap its title once. Long pressing a title triggers batch-select mode, so that you can manage your downloads and mark the items as read or unread in bulk. The app’s podcast player UI is quite simple, with basic playback controls, a seek bar, relevant cover photo and brief information regarding the subscription.

Podkeeper is available on Play Store as both an ad-supported free version and a $2.99 ad-free variant. In case you start off with the free version and later upgrade to the paid one, it can automatically import your subscription data from the free version, as long as the content isn’t deleted from the app or your phone’s storage.

Podkeeper requires Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher to run, and can be downloaded from the Play Store links provided below.

Download Podkeeper Free For Android

Download Podkeeper For Android (Paid)

Read Podkeeper Is A Free Android Podcast App With Batch Downloads & Management by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Just like the previously-reviewed 2nd HOME, onDeck and my personal favorite SwitchApps, Easy Touch can be summoned from anywhere within Android – especially useful in full-screen apps – by tapping a floating on-screen trigger, which seems to have been inspired from the AssistiveTouch feature of iOS.

In this case, however, the floating trigger/button is designed to reflect the real-time memory consumption of your Android device. Tapping the trigger reveals an overlay panel, complete with your favorite system toggles, app & contact shortcuts, statistics pertaining to the current memory consumption & number of active processes, and the 1-tap memory optimizer button. As mentioned earlier, the toggles, switches and shortcuts on this panel can be set according to your preferences.

Barring the Wi-Fi, mobile data, sound profile, brightness, and GPS toggles, you can tinker with all other contents of the panel by entering the editing mode. For this, hit the edit button at the top-right of the panel. Tapping the ‘Add’ button offers you three choices, using which you can add quick toggles, contact shortcuts and apps to the panel. Apart from the aforementioned power toggles, you have the following choices at your disposal:

• Bluetooth
• Automatic sync
• Airplane mode
• Automatic screen rotation
• Home
• 1-tap screen lock

In addition, you can pick as many apps for the panel as required, and also select desired contacts you wish to call, text or mail with just a tap, all from the panel itself. There is no limit on the number of items that can be added to the panel.

By tapping the settings button at the top-right of the panel, you can turn off the floating trigger of Easy Touch, set the app to be available from your home screen only, or hide the memory consumption percentage display from the trigger itself. Tapping the Assistive Touch icon on your Android device’s app drawer lets you enable/disable the app, and adjust the opacity level as well as size of the Easy Touch trigger.

Easy Touch is available in the Play Store for free and can be downloaded via the link provided below.

Download Easy Touch For Android

Read Easy Touch Is An iOS AssistiveTouch-Inspired Multitasking Tool For Android by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

According to Koush, the idea of devising a Superuser app of his own was triggered by a number of factors, the most important one being his belief that such a tool should be fully open-source and AOSP-based, so that any developer can embed it in their own ROMs. Also, by introducing multiuser support for Android 4.2 tablets, ClockworkMod Superuser ensures that all users can enjoy true benefits of root access denied by Google in the OS by default. Interestingly, Koush was a tad disappointed with some of the already available apps that didn’t play nice with his latest Carbon app. Therefore, he decided to make one of his own, fittingly named ClockworkMod Superuser.

The app won’t be released in the Play Store while in beta. As of now, ClockworkMod Superuser is available as a flashable ZIP file. All  you need to do is grab it via the link provided at the end of this post, and flash it from a custom recovery.

ClockworkMod Superuser works more or less in the same way as Superuser and SuperSU, prompting you for root permissions upon launching an app that requires root access. In addition, Clockwork Superuser Request screen lets you grant an app root access temporarily for a user-configurable time period.

The app’s main settings screen lets you select the default response for when there’s a Superuser request made by an app. In addition, you can set a custom PIN for approval of Superuser requests, so that no one else using your device can access apps root privileges. You can also modify the default request timeout from to another value from the default 30 seconds.

Download ClockworkMod Superuser (ZIP File)

Update: The app is now available on the Play Store. We’ve added a link to its page below.

Download ClockworkMod Superuser For Android (Play Store link)

Read Koush’s ClockworkMod Superuser Offers PIN Protection, Multi-User Support & More by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

As the app’s name suggests, it adds a dedicated ‘sidebar’ along the left screen edge of your Android device, containing your chosen apps and system toggles. This vertically scrollable switch list is customizable and can be summoned from anywhere in the OS by using the swipe-in gesture from the left edge.

You can easily navigate to any of the pinned apps or trigger a system feature by just tapping its icon. Long-pressing an item lets you remove it from the list or replace it with another item. When adding new items, you’re provided with a comprehensive list of all your apps and various system toggles. A rather simple way to remove an unwanted item from this list is to swipe its icon towards the right from the switch list itself.

To configure the app’s layout and behavior, you’ll have to tap the Sidebar icon from the notification dropdown. On the screen that follows, you can activate/deactivate the app’s services, set the app to automatically start on system boot, enable/disable animations, and adjust the sidebar’s width, opacity, color, sensitivity, height & position.

Sidebar is available in the Play Store as both a feature-limited free version and a $1.99 fully functional variant. The free version restricts the terms of the number of apps and system toggles that can be added to the switch list, and also limits access to certain in-app customizations. On the other hand, the full version is free of any such restrictions. Download links to both the variants are provided below.

Download Sidebar Lite For Android

Download Sidebar Pro For Android

Read Sidebar Is Another Ubuntu-Style Android App Launcher With System Toggles by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Looking at the app’s interface, you immediately get an impression that it’s been built keeping simplicity and intuitiveness on the forefront. There are no needless features or excessive configuration options to play around with, and you can switch between your Facebook news feeds and chats with a mere tap. The app’s persistent notification drawer icon lets you instantly launch Atrium from anywhere in Android.

You’re required to grant Atrium access to your Facebook account to get started. The app’s home screen is split into three main tabs namely News, Friends and Chat. The News tab displays your latest Facebook news feeds, the Friends tab lets you take a peek at the currently online friends, and the Chat tab lets you initiate a new chat session or continue an ongoing one with one of your friends. You can also see a detailed logs of your chat history with all friends, and send them messages even when they’re offline.

Using the various options listed on the app’s left sidebar, you can start posting new status updates, add new photos & videos to your Facebook account, check in to locations, view your Facebook profile, log out of Atrium, and tinker with the app’s settings. While exploring user profiles, you can view their timelines, about pages, and shared photos & videos.

Likewise, for each post, the app lets you like, share and comment on it. In addition, you can view all the likes and comments the post has raked from other users. The same applies to the shared photos, with the additional option to download them directly to your Android device.

While the app impresses with its speedy performance and clean UI, it still has plenty of room for improvement on a number of fronts. In the upcoming updates, we’d love to see the app get a home screen widget and the options to edit profile, access Facebook groups and manage events.

Atrium is available for free in the Play Store and requires Android 2.3 Gingerbread or higher to run. Download link to the app is provided below.

Download Atrium For Android

[via XDA-Developers]

Read Atrium Is A Faster, Lightweight Facebook App For Android by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

PAUL claims to learn about your choice from your online and social media viewing habits, and curates your audio and video feeds accordingly. You can affiliate your social network accounts with the app and also specify the volume of content you want PAUL to include in your feeds from each supported service. In addition, you can let PAUL know at what time(s) of the day are you mostly connected to the internet. Once configured, the app automatically starts preloading vides from the chosen services according to your configuration.

To keep you updated about the total bandwidth PAUL saves for you through its smart data compression technology while downloading content from each supported service, the app offers a detailed data analytics feature. Using the app’s My Savings screen, you can sift through all the relevant statistics for daily, monthly and yearly usage. You can also allocate the maximum storage capacity on your SD card that PAUL can use to cache content. You also have the option to retain all the saved content for a short, medium or long period.

The app’s home screen features tiles for each of your configured services, along with a notification counter for each tab that keeps you informed about the total number of downloaded videos available from that particular service. Apart from checking out these videos, you can also share them with your friends. Tapping a video title begins playing it in the app’s native player that offers basic playback controls and a seek bar.

PAUL also comes with a wide range of home screen widgets, each offering information and quick access to your favorite audio & video content from the supported services, as well as bandwidth-relevant statistics. There is also a generic widget sporting all of the above information, including the latest audio & video feeds as well as all the informative content.

PAUL is currently compatible with devices running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and later, and can be downloaded for free via the Play Store link provided below.

Download PAUL For Android

Read PAUL For Android Is A Smart Online Media Aggregator With Automatic Downloading by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

As indicated by its name, Sulia Quick Launcher fetches its news stories from the trusted service of Sulia, and also shows the latest social activities from your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account in the same carousel-oriented layout on the lockscreen.

While configuring the app for the first time, you’re presented with the option to select your favorite news categories and social network accounts that you want Sulia Quick Launch to retrieve content from. Ranging from politics to entertainment, there are plenty of topics to choose from. These categories and social network settings can be modified later on. On a slightly disappointing note, the app allows selecting a maximum of just four items to be shown on your lockscreen. For instance, you can fill all the available slots with different news categories, activate feeds from all three supported social networks and have space left for just one news category of your choice.

Once configured, you’re taken to the lockscreen interface split into two halves. The lower half displays the current time, date, the unlock ring and the volume toggle slider, and holding down on the padlock button reveals quick unlock options for the camera, messaging and dialer apps as well as the home screen. To directly unlock to one of these apps, just drag the padlock all the way to its icon and lift your finger. Gliding the padlock trigger over the generic unlock option reveals icons of your recently opened apps. You can further drag the trigger all the way to one of those icons to directly launch the respective app.

The upper half of this screen displays a search bar to help you quickly search online for your queries directly from the lockscreen. Below the search bar, you get the latest news feed for your selected topics displayed on a colorful card. Tapping the card lets you explore the story in detail in your browser of choice, while swiping sideways lets you sift through other stories relevant to the selected one. To switch between news categories, you can simply start scrolling vertically.

Just like the news categories, the app has a separate card reserved for each of your social networks, which can be accessed by scrolling all the way to the bottom. Besides checking out the latest feeds from these networks, you can interact with them accordingly as well.

As with Quick Launch, Sulia Quick Launch is available in the Play Store absolutely free of cost. Grab the app via the link provided below.

Download Sulia Quick Launch For Android

Read Get News, Social Feeds & Recent Apps On Android Lock Screen With Sulia Quick Launch by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

MovieBase lets you download high quality movie posters and backdrop photos for your favorite movies & artists, and also offers high definition movie trailer streaming. Can’t find your favorite movie title or artist listed in the app? You can use the app’s native search tool to instantly look for them. As of now, MovieBase is available in English and German languages.

By default, the app’s home screen lists the titles currently most popular among fans. However, using the dedicated left sidebar, you can switch to the top rated, now playing or upcoming movies list. You can also check out and search for the list of popular celebrities, and head over to the app’s genres section to discover movies by type/category. MovieBase also supports integration with Google Play Movies to help you easily purchase your favorite movie titles online.

Alongside each movie title, you get to see its ranking, vote count, release date and backdrop photo. Tapping a title takes you to another screen that lists more detailed information pertaining to the movie. Swiping sideways, you can check out the entire cast, crew members list and other movies similar to the one currently selected. For each artist, director and crew member, you can check their detailed biographies as well as other movies they’ve starred in or worked on.

MovieBase is available in the Play Store a feature-limited free app. However, upgrading to the Pro version of the app for $0.99 will grant you access to all the locked features including the option to rate movies, add movies to your favorites list & watchlist, and browse all your personalized movie content.

The app requires Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher to run, and can be downloaded via the Play Store link provided below.

Download MovieBase For Android

Get MovieBase – Unlocker For Android

Read MovieBase Is A Holo-Themed Movie Discovery Android App With Play Movies Support by A. Rehman on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter