Any suggestions for paid one time purchase apps on the Google play store?
Threema!
What makes it better than Signal?
Sign up without using a phone number or email. Threema isn’t trying to shoehorn a silly cryptocurrency project into the app.
There’s crypto now? Wtf
MobileCoin, it’s been around for at least 5 years. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In-app-Payments
Buzzkill is good if you have one of those
Annoying friends who
Send multiple messages instead of just one, Jonny, you annoying cunt
Fair Email. I grabbed it from F Droid and paid direct though.
Macrodroid. It is like Tasker, but with a much much better UI.
Sleep as Android
It’s just a really great alarm clock app, but with tons of other sleep tracking functionality. I’ve always had trouble sleeping through my alarms, but I never do with this.
£70 premium version is a little rich for my blood. O_O
Yikes! Is that what it is now? I got it a decade ago for $5.
Yeah same here! I had no idea it was that much now.
Same! Wow, that is a bit much :-(
If you run Home Assistant, Sleep as Android can publish events to an MQTT broker so you can create automations based on those events, like “smart_period”, “awake”, “not_awake”, “alarm_alert_smart”, etc.
I used tasker to slowly ramp up my bedroom lights before my alarm goes off. Makes it easier to get up and not as jaring.
If you have Hue bulbs (and maybe some other now, haven’t looked in a while) Sleep as Android can do that too!
I came to say Sleep as Android as well. Been using it since we were submitting bug reports on Google+ (anyone old enough to remember Google+ ? lol) … absolutely love it.
As a backup option, you can give Google Assistant or a Google Home the following commands: “at 10PM, sleep {lightname}” to dim, or “at 6AM, wake {lightname}” to brighten - both work over the space of a half-hour, and for some odd reason that’s not customizable.
I did the same thing with home assistant and just the stock clock app. Just looking at the “next alarm” sensor state.
Monument Valley. Got the first one for free during a promotion but loved it enough to pay for the sequel and extra levels.
This is my partners favourite game.
Wanted to love this but it never seemed to get hard or tricky. Whole game kinda felt like a tutorial for the hard levels they never came.
Symfonium is an awesome music player that’s a one-time $5 purchase.
Great question, btw.
symfonium is amazing and id use it if i didnt pay for musicolet
Xou dolved the sinhle issue I had with Finamp: Casting to audio devices.
THANK YOUTrying to use up some playstore credit. I don’t have time for a one month subscription, I just want to buy it now and use it later.
It was the first (only?) app where I was baffled at the features compared to the price. It’s a joy to use. If you self-host music, it beats the competition by miles
I wish sonos had better interoperability, but I did discover if you make a group of speakers and then cast to the “primary” speaker with symfonium, it broadcasts to the whole group.
Was my only issue with it, but that’s 100% a “sonos is shit” problem, not the app.
And the developer is super responsive. I pointed out a bug and once he was able to reproduce the problem, he released a fix by the next day.
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Slice and Dice is a very entertaining one time buy game. No bullshit in game purchases, no ads, I think developed by a singular guy.
Slay the spire, balatro and Peglin also fit here.
Amazing indie games, all one time buys.
Smart audiobook player, fit notes. That’s all I got and they’re kind of niche
Smart Audiobook Player +1 such a good, feature complete app.
Fit notes is free? Is it a different one?
You can donate and unlock some things
MiXplorer: Tabbed file explorer with many features. You can get it for free from their website, but it’s available paid on Google Play.
Symfonium: Music player compatible with many backends, such as local storage, WebDAV, Subsonic (which includes Ampache, Navidrome)
aCalendar+: Calendar app with many widgets. Best part is the persistent notification, which shows what’s happening today, and will happen tomorrow.
Cryptomator: Cross-platform file encryption program, also open source.
Others have recommended other file explorers, but I use FX and rather like it.
FX is one of the only 2 apps I ever paid for and it’s great. I needed something to access SMB shares and it has always worked wonderfully. It’s good for poking around in the file system on the phone too. There may be better stuff out since I bought it years ago but I’ve never had a reason to check.
Just to mention another file explorer, Solid Explorer is great especially becase it’s easy to access Google Drive without having to use the Google drive interface.
I’ve been using FX File Explorer since 2012. It’s straight up the best file manager on Android, especially when you use SMB and SFTP. Multi window makes moving things around easy as, and the built in text editor works a treat. Being able to share images from apps to FX’s “Save As” option is awesome to. It means every app can save where you want.
No idea why it isn’t more popular compared to the alternatives.
HiPER Calc Pro. A great scientific calculator I use constantly. (There is also a unpaid, ad-supported version, and the ads weren’t too intrusive the last time I tried it)
Qalculate is now on Android.
Tasker. Basically an interface for writing scripts for your phone. Even if you don’t have a use case in the beginning you’ll start finding things to do with it.
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There’s a completely free app (no ads, either) that prevents auto-rotate from actually happening unless you want it to. It pops up an icon when your phone wants to rotate, and it you don’t tap it within the timeout (adjustable up to 3 seconds) then the icon goes away and the rotation never happens. It’s highly customizable, and I just can’t live without it since I found it.
I used it to identify the cell towers near my home and turn wifi off when I was out of their range and back on when I was in range. It seemed to help save battery by not constantly looking for wifi networks and I didn’t have to remember to turn it off and on manually.
That’s smart!
I have a few triggers that turn on Do Not Disturb mode:
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When I open an app that I doom scroll before I fall asleep and when I wake up.
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When I connect to my doctor’s or dentist’s office wifi.
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Cell towers are not wifi, but I think I understand what you mean.
Never said they were lol
At home I want wifi on, and away I want it off. This saves battery so it’s not constantly looking for wifi networks.
I could achieve similar with location service turned on all the time, but that drains battery even more.
Since cellular data is always connected to some cell tower nearby, and Tasker is able to identify the cell tower names, I used the ones near my home as flags to indicate “I’m close to home, therefore turn on WiFi because I’ll be home soon”. And turn it off when I leave my neighborhood.
Ok. I did not see what you meant.
I have a home zone that triggers things. I don’t think location services uses enough battery for me to worry about
How does the home zone work?
For me location service eats my battery up - can’t last a full day with it on.
I do mine from home assistant. I can leave location services, Bluetooth, and wifi, all on without worrying about battery life for the whole day.
What are some things you use it for if you don’t mind my asking?
I’ve got some that pulls the picture from Bing and the picture from NASA and set them to my wall paper and lock screen back grounds.
I’ve got another one that silences my phone when I’m at work or church and not connected to my car blue tooth. I used something similar in college to silence my phone when a calendar event was happening. My phone never made a peep during a lecture! It resets volumes to normal levels after the silent period is done.
I used to get up at 5am and had to get ready for work in the dark so I didn’t wake my family. I’m a klutz and fumbling with my phone’s flashlight constantly just got annoying.
I ended up making a little script so that between 5am and 5:30, shaking the phone turned the flashlight on. After 5:30 the sensor turns off to save battery, since I didn’t really need it at that point.
You can do all kinds of handy little things like that
Lots of things
- Change my ringtone based on time/location
- Silence phone if my calendar has the word meet or meeting
- Parse a local news website and read the headlines to me after I dismiss my morning alarm
- Set up car mode if it is plugged in and connected to my car’s Bluetooth
- Turn on WiFi based on location
- etc
I have a script which saves my fine location to a Google sheet when I disconnect from my car’s Bluetooth. If, like me, you are the sort of klutz who can lose their car in a two-car garage…
The main thing is a script to stop any media playing and turn off the screen after x minutes, so I can fall asleep watching YouTube or listening to something. There’s probably already an app for that but this is pretty customizable.
Another stupid use is putting the phone on silent while using the camera app because Samsung won’t let you turn off the camera shutter sound.
I migrated to Macrodroid. Much more intuitive and straightforward.
You’ve reminded me that I have premium from like a decade ago. I should have another go with it.
YMMV depending on your phone manufacturer (or, really, the OS). Some are too locked down to use Tasker, or need annoying workarounds to let it always run.
Read Era is technically free, but I paid for premium years ago and have never regretted it. I can open any kind of uncorrupted book file, from the Amazon reader format to PDF to epub, and everything else I’ve ever come across. It has a great search function, and the ability to file a book into a custom ‘Collection’. You can edit the details of a book, like adding Author or pusblisher info, add your own personal notes to a page or highlighted quote, see an aggregate of all your highlights in a particular file, and adjust the font, background color, and contrast to your hearts content.
I make my whole family use it now, cause I love it so much and Premium works on Family share.
I bought moon reader 7 years ago and still use it.
Updoot for moon reader
