A. Rehman Maqbool

Mobile Content Writer
Technology enthusiast. I love exploring, reviewing and sharing anything related to Google's mobile OS, Android. Follow me on Google+

Lifelike Apps Bring Their Newspaper-Style Craigslist Client To Android

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Despite being one of the most popular online classified ad services, it comes as a surprise that Craigslist does not have official apps for popular mobile platforms. Even worse, there aren’t too many quality third-party offerings available in this regard either, especially for Android,while iOS users have had a great option in the unofficial Craigslist app by Lifelike Apps for quite some time now. Right from its real newspaper-like UI to the option to browse ads by user-selected locations, the app seems to have everything that you’d like to see in a quality Craigslist mobile app. If you’re an Android user, you’ll be glad to learn that the developer has just launched the Android variant of their Craigslist app. Supporting more or less the same feature-set as its iOS version, the app aims to become your one-stop solution for posting, discovering, bookmarking, searching and replying to Craigslist classified ads on the move. Read More

Send Content From Web To Android As Notifications Using PushBullet

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Android users who want to be reminded about their most important tasks, notes and to-do lists via custom notifications have several apps available for the purpose, such as Lotify, Notif and ReNotify. All three of these take full advantage of the rich notifications announced in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. While it’s pretty useful to be able to compose personalized notifications from your Android device itself, what's even more convenient is being able to do so straight from your desktop browser. This is precisely the idea behind PushBullet – a free web app that allows you to remotely push custom notifications from a desktop browser straight to your Android device over the internet. Of course, you’ll need the PushBullet mobile app running on your Android device in order to receive all the remotely pushed content. Read More

Add Amazing Action & Sci-Fi Special Effects To Videos With FxGuru For Android

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Remember Ultimate Special FX, a video editing Android app that let you apply stunning high quality visual effects to your recorded clips to make them look like a piece of some sci-fi action flick? The app received a lot of love from Android fans for its rather unique feature and the ease with which it let you add a lot of fun into your otherwise monotonous video recordings. However, with the app no longer available in the Play Store, you might be on the lookout for a similar – if not better – alternative. Search no more – we have found one for you! FxGuru is a free app that offers a huge variety of special movie effects that can be applied to your video recordings. Ranging from scintillating cruise missile attacks to the uninvited UFO Arrival effect, FxGuru has a massive compilation of goodies to offer. Better yet, the app is supplemented with a couple of powerful tools in MotionMatch technology and Virtual Decals to help you capture the perfect video of you destroying your enemy’s playground with a TNT barrel explosion, filming a UFO successfully land on your rooftop, or aiming a rocket launcher at your moving school bus. Read More

picq For Android: Photo Collage Creator With Stylish Layouts & Effects

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Photo collage creator and editor apps are available by the hundreds in both Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. As per your requirement, you can find the ideal app that merges your specific photo collections into a wonderful collage, complete with visually appealing layouts, effects, filters, frames et al. However, as is often the case with most such apps, you only get to select from a handful of collage layout templates, without enjoying much control over tweaking those images on an individual basis. This is where picq shines. This free Android app allows you to individually resize, reposition, enhance, decorate and apply effects to every single photo and then merges them into a collage layout of your choice. Using picq, you may create a highly customizable collage containing as many as nine different freshly captured or locally imported images. There are plenty of static and dynamic collage layouts to choose from, where the formation of each different template keeps changing based on the number of photos you wish to include in it. Read More

Sygic Releases Location Tracking Android & iOS App For Family Members

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Sygic, one of the most trusted names in the world of GPS navigation software, has launched a brand new Android and iOS app called Family By Sygic, with the aim to help parents keep a close tab on their kids’ security, whereabouts and activities. Available for free in both Google Play Store and iTunes App Store, Family is equipped with several protection, messaging, alerting and real-time location tracking tools that can keep you informed about your loved ones’ well-being and safety. The best part about the app is that it requires minimal setup, and allows you to manage multiple child accounts from under a single administrative ID. Once configured, the app can be used to instantly track current locations of your family members, see their real-time locations via augmented reality views, send instant & private messages to all or a select few family members, request navigation routes for required member’s location, specify safe and unsafe zones on map via geo-fencing, send SOS to your family regarding your location, notify them about your check-ins to a specific place, and receive instant notifications regarding a number of activities relevant to all your family members’ movements. Read More

Last Message For Android Alerts Select Contacts When Battery Is Low

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Despite constant measures taken by mobile device manufacturers regarding battery performance issues, you’ll still find a lot of dissatisfied users out there complaining about irregularities in their devices’ battery behavior. The worst situation arises when you need to stay in touch with your contacts on the move and your device suddenly powers off due to low battery. How often have you been confronted by such a helpless situation where you were unaware of your device’s battery status and consequentially failed to inform your contacts that you might not be able to reply to them for a while just because of your dead mobile battery? How about an app that could automatically determine your device’s alarmingly low battery level in such dire circumstances and send that one final message to your contacts before you can catch up with them again after a fresh recharge. Enter Last Message – a free and customizable Android app that is capable of automatically sending a personalized message to your SMS, mail and social contacts once your device’s battery reaches a user-specified critital minimum. Read More

Facebook Pages Manager For Android Now Available In Google Play Store

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It was back in May last year that the official Facebook Pages Manager iOS app was rolled out in iTunes App Store to allow iDevice owners to manage, moderate and check detailed statistics for their Facebook Pages on the go. Now after a long delay of almost 8 months, the official Android variant of the app has been released to Google Play Store with more or less the same feature set. Replicating the looks of the official Facebook Android app, Facebook Pages Manager puts you in control of all the Facebook Pages you manage. Using this free app, you can post new status updates & photos on your Pages, reply to comments, receive notifications regarding new activities, check out detailed Page Insights & statistics, view & reply to private messages, manage your Timeline content, keep a close tab on the activity log, and interact with your audience right from your Android device. Read More

Delete All Emails In Your Gmail Trash Folder From Android

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The official Gmail mobile app is highly regarded by Android and iOS users alike. However, one aspect where the Android variant of the app disappoints compared to its iOS counterpart is the lack of an option to empty the Trash folder. As you keep deleting mails from your various Gmail folders, they’re temporarily stored under the Trash label, but there is no easy means to permanently delete such mails from within the app itself. As a result, Android users mostly have to rely on their desktop or mobile browser to accomplish this task, if they don't want to delete mails from trash one by one. On the other hand, iOS users have the luxury of availing this service right from the official Gmail app. If you’re an Android user looking for a quick solution in this regard, you can avail the services of Empty Gmail Trash. This small yet useful Android app can help you get rid of all your Gmail Trash contents with just a tap. Read More

The Fast, Powerful Baidu Browser For Android Comes To The Play Store

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Back in September, Baidu – the leading Chinese web services provider – announced its own Android web browser called Baidu Explorer that claimed to be faster than most of its competitors, courtesy its new and powerful T5 engine. When pitted against the likes of Chrome, Firefox and Opera in terms of better HTML5 and Javascript support, the browser did impress with relatively high scores. Apart from faring considerably well in various benchmark tests, the app boasts quite a few nifty features that are considered to be a hallmark of a quality mobile web browser. Until now, only the APK of Baidu Explorer was available to users from the official Baidu forums, but the company has finally released the browser to Google Play Store by the name of Baidu Browser. Past the break, we shall take a look at the various goodies offered by this brainchild of the renowned Chinese search engine. Read More

Ctrl+C Lets You Copy Shareable Text Or Links From Anywhere In Android

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As much as Android impresses with some of its innovative and powerful features that set it apart from other contemporary mobile operating systems, it can also annoy with certain shortcomings in a few areas. For instance, the native clipboard manager of Android comes in handy in situations only where you want it to hold a specific URL or a piece of text that you've copied from an app. By default, the stock clipboard is capable of storing just one such text entry at any given instance, meaning copying anything new overwrites the clipboard data. To address this issue, there are several clipboard management Android apps available in the Play Store, but not all are capable of automatically fetching and recording URLs, titles and descriptions from within a shareable, text-based item such as a webpage or an article from an RSS feed. This is where Ctrl+C aims to offer some help. It is a free clipboard management app for Android that allows you to record as many as ten different text entries of this sort, complete with their respective descriptions and embedded URLs, which can then be pasted into any app through Android's default sharing menu. Read More

Blekko’s Izik Is An Intuitive, Tablet-Ready Search Engine For Android & iOS

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With the growing user base and popularity of smartphones, tablets and other web-enabled gadgets of the present age, the most renowned search engines are trying to carve out an ideal solution to help mobile users conduct online searches on their devices in the most convenient manner possible. The introduction of Google Now in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and the release of a Smart Cards-powered Google Search app for iOS is a definite testament to the above statement. That being said, most existing mobile search solutions are still deemed by many as a bit unintuitive and hard to get a hang of. New to the scene, Blekko's izik is a search engine with companion mobile apps that builds upon the concept of rich search results, answering your online queries with an even greater wealth of information on a single, interactive and visually rich search page. Read More

Blip TV App Brings Web Series Discovery To Android, iOS, Kindle & Xbox

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If you’re fond of watching web series, but often have trouble finding new ones to follow, then must be familiar with Blip (a.k.a. Blip.tv), and you’ll be delighted to know that web series exploration service has recently expanded its reach beyond the web to mobile platforms and Microsoft's flagship gaming console. The Blip TV mobile app, which is now available for Android, iOS, Amazon Kindle Fire and Microsoft Xbox, allows you to access your favorite personalized Blip content as well as all the videos featured on the original website. You can instantly access all the featured, popular and newest videos, explore content by a number of genres, receive push notifications for the shows you follow, and search for your favorite videos across the network. The app’s integration with Facebook lets you keep track of your Blip activities, utilize the various socializing tools offered by Blip, and share your favorite Blip events with your friends. Read More

Facebook Messenger For iOS & Android Gets Voice Messaging & VoIP Calls

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In the past few months, Mark Zuckerberg and his team have been working quite hard to beef up the Facebook Messenger app for Android and iOS with some handy features. What started as a rather simple, standalone mobile messaging app for avid Facebookers now qualifies as a handy SMS replacement that doesn’t even require a Facebook account to get configured. So far, the app’s content sharing capabilities revolved around text messages, images, emojis and locations. The latest update brings the added functionality of voice messaging to both Android and iOS variants; instant 1-minute audio messages that can be shared as part of a conversation. A Viber and Vonage-like VoIP calling service is also reported to be under experimentation for iOS users in Canada. The free internet calling facility is expected to be announced for other parts of the world soon. Read More

Get Jelly Bean-Style Notification Quick Settings On Any Android Device

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One of the biggest advantages of being an Android user is that you can enjoy enormous control over tweaking and modding your mobile OS to whatever extent you prefer. The same applies to Android’s notification panel. As we’ve already seen with apps like 1Tap Quick Bar by Root Uninstaller and Notification Weather, as well as various custom Android ROMs, you can add a whole lot of goodies to your Android device’s notification shade as per your requirement. In fact, the popularity and usability of such tools prompted Google to incorporate shortcuts to system settings and power controls within the notification drop-down of Android's latest iteration, 4.2 Jelly Bean. Fresh to the Play Store, QuickSettings (Beta) is a free and customizable Android app that brings similar functionality to any device running Android 2.3 or higher. Read More

150 Best Android Apps Of Year 2012

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Building on its hard-earned success from the previous years, Google's mobile operating system, Android, continued to maintain its position as a leading name in the business all throughout 2012. Apart from the release of the powerful Samsung Galaxy S III and numerous other top-of-the-line Android devices, the recently-concluded year saw Google introduce the quad core-powered Nexus 4, and the first tablet in the Nexus series, the Nexus 7, followed by its 10-inch variant, the Nexus 10. Obviously enough, 2012 wouldn't have been complete without adequate advancements on the software front as well. Thanks to the release of the Project Butter-powered Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and its enhanced iteration (4.2), Android became a much steadier, smarter, faster and secure platform. As a result, the inflow of apps in the Google Play Store (formerly Android Market) has continued to increase and so has the number of big names making their debut on it. This post, like the one at the end of last year, focuses on the best free Android apps of 2012 that were featured on Addictive Tips. Read More

Reddit Now Is A Great Android Reddit App With Gesture-Based Holo UI

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The insanely popular social news and Q&A website, Reddit, boasts a huge number of users from virtually all corners of the world. With most Redditors now preferring to access their favorite site from their mobile devices, it is only fitting to see a huge variety of quality Reddit clients popping up like mushrooms across all major mobile platforms, and Android is no exception. Going by the feature list of some of the best Reddit Android apps available in the Play Store, you can see how each alternative brings something uniquely to the table in addition to core Reddit features, to cater to the needs of a specific niches. Today, we have the latest entrant in that list in the form of Reddit Now that introduces a fresh blend of gesture-based navigation to enhance your Reddit experience on Android. Currently in beta and a tad limited in features, Reddit Now might not be yet ready to be cited as a full-fledged Reddit client, but it certainly impresses with whatever basic and new features it does support, the best of which remains its multi-pane UI. Details to follow. Read More

GYF Is An Omnipresent, Gesture-Controlled App Launcher For Android

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The number of gesture-based multitasking and app switching solutions for Android is becoming difficult to keep track of. From our personal favorite SwitchApps to the highly-customizable Flip Launcher, there are plenty of options available to Android users that allow instant switching between recent or user-select apps from virtually anywhere within the entire OS. When it comes to user-friendliness however, most of the existing solutions can be a tad difficult for many to get used to. GYF Side Launcher aims to change that by presenting Android fans with what is arguably the simplest solution for quickly switching to any system or third-party app. Once activated, the app installs an ribbon-like app drawer that can be dragged out of the screen's left edge. The ribbon also features a column of alphabets to allow quick browsing of apps by name. Read More

Zime Is An Android To-Do List Manager With A Gesture-Controlled 3D Timeline

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It’s the beginning of a brand new year, and to help you with your new year resolutions, we have a brand new to-do list and event management Android app for that aims to take care of your task scheduling needs more efficiently compared to most alternatives. Currently in beta, Zime is a well-crafted personal time-organizing app boasting plenty of interesting features including an interactive gesture-controlled 3D timeline view, Google Calendar integration, custom workdays, work hours & lunch break specification, advanced task prioritization, statistical analysis of self-evaluated tasks, multiple skins, and all the basic notes and event management tools that you’re required to work with. There's a lot more to the app than that, so let's take a look at its features in detail after the jump. Read More

Upload Android Gallery Photos To Cloud While Compressing Them On Your Device

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The Gallery app on Android, as we all know, is a centralized location to access the photo and video albums stored in various directories of your device’s internal and external memory. In this age of high-resolution mobile cameras, images captured from our devices can consume a significant chunk of our local storage space. Confronted by this issue, most users are left with no option but to back up these albums to their computers or their preferred storage of choice in order to create more room for new files on their devices. This makes accessing those good old memories of yours relatively hard to access on the go, especially if the backed up data is sitting on your computer’s hard drive. New to the Play Store, Gallery Drive Sync is a rather unique online photo backup app that aims to solve the ever-threatening ‘out of sight, out of mind’ issue in this regard. The app lets you move select or complete full-resolution Gallery photos and albums to your Google Drive, while still retaining the content on your device in compressed format under their respective albums. Read More

talkbits Is A Location-Based Social Walkie-Talkie For Android & iOS

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The resounding success of the likes of Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SoundCloud et al has inspired many new startups to launch a themed social network of their own that's specific to a certain niche. There are quite a few such services out there based on the concept of voice messaging and audio clip sharing such as Airetalk, VoiceBo and Hallo, and the latest addition to the list is talkbits. Fresh to the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store, it’s a free, location-based social walkie-talkie app for iOS and Android. Unlike most similar services, talkbits offers location-based channels to let you indulge in conversations with nearby users by sharing audio streams and short voice messages. This way, you can discover like-minded people or stay informed about a live event taking place in or around a location of your interest. Be it a sports event, a public gathering, a musical concert or a traffic jam , talkbits lets you listen in on any activity of concern through other users’ voices. Read More