What applications can be downloaded on a smartphone | Articles | Phones

It is obvi­ous that today’s smart­phones, which have very high com­put­ing per­for­mance, mem­o­ry and a good dis­play, can per­form a vari­ety of tasks thanks to the appli­ca­tions installed on them. At the same time, many peo­ple still buy their first smart­phone and do not real­ly under­stand what can be installed on it. It is pos­si­ble to advise some­thing in this area only sub­jec­tive­ly, but even such an opin­ion will help you nav­i­gate the thou­sands of appli­ca­tions that exist now. We will divide appli­ca­tions by func­tion­al­i­ty and give exam­ples of them.

Navigation and references

Any smart­phone has a loca­tion func­tion that works with the help of a GPS and GLONASS chip, as well as, direct­ly, a cel­lu­lar net­work. That is, a smart­phone at almost any point (except under­ground) will “know” where it is. In addi­tion, mod­ern smart­phones have enough mem­o­ry for maps of almost any com­plex­i­ty.

Ini­tial­ly, maps for mobile oper­at­ing sys­tems were designed main­ly for car nav­i­ga­tion. In those dis­tant times, there were many soft­ware devel­op­ers who exist to this day.

Navitel Navigator

A paid pro­gram that allows you not only to dri­ve a car along a route.

Here, as in any mod­ern car nav­i­ga­tion appli­ca­tion, there is infor­ma­tion about traf­fic jams (and rout­ing tak­ing into account their detour). But this is only the basic func­tion­al­i­ty, in addi­tion to it, Navi­tel includes the fol­low­ing:

• A ser­vice that allows you to track the loca­tion of friends and get direc­tions with them.
• Infor­ma­tion about events and points of inter­est.
• Embed­ded SMS.
• Weath­er ser­vice.
• On-board com­put­er (more than 100 dif­fer­ent sen­sors are declared).
• Infor­ma­tion about cam­eras, radars and speed bumps.

Navi­tel presents not only maps of Rus­sia, there is Europe and oth­er coun­tries of the world.

2 GIS

This appli­ca­tion can also be used as a nav­i­ga­tor, but here, rather, the tar­get audi­ence is not motorists, but pedes­tri­ans. It is easy to get direc­tions on pub­lic trans­port. In addi­tion, it is of inter­est in that it is a guide to orga­ni­za­tions and var­i­ous places. You can see every­thing here, right down to the work sched­ule, the loca­tion of the entrance and the con­tacts of a par­tic­u­lar orga­ni­za­tion. In addi­tion, unlike Navi­tel, it is free.

2GIS is also good because, unlike oth­er free ana­logues, it works offline: for this, it is enough to down­load maps of the desired region. True, the reverse side of the coin here is that he lays the route with­in the giv­en region (in the ver­sion of the mobile appli­ca­tion).

In addi­tion, 2GIS works as an Inter­net ser­vice through a reg­u­lar brows­er.

Antivirus

Anti-virus pro­tec­tion for mobile phones is espe­cial­ly impor­tant, since in app stores you have to enter cred­it card details, and even reg­u­lar pur­chas­es can be made using bank­ing apps.

Most of the devel­op­ers here start­ed with desk­top antivirus.

kaspersky mobile antivirus

Inter­est­ing­ly, mod­ern mobile antivirus pro­grams include, in fact, the same func­tion­al­i­ty as their desk­top ver­sions. We list them using the exam­ple of Kasper­sky Anti-Virus:

• Scan­ning check. This is a forced check of the mobile device for mali­cious appli­ca­tions and their actions.
• Fil­ter unwant­ed calls and SMS.
• Anti-thief. Allows you to find a stolen device.

The fol­low­ing fea­tures work only in the paid ver­sion of the device:

• Antivirus pro­tec­tion. In case of sus­pi­cious actions, blocks the activ­i­ty of pro­grams.
• App lock. Allows you to set a secret code to access per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence, pho­tos and files.
• Anti-phish­ing. Pro­tects bank­ing appli­ca­tions and online pur­chas­es.
• Web fil­ter. Block­ing unwant­ed links on the Inter­net.
• Per­son­al con­tacts. Hides phone num­bers, calls and cor­re­spon­dence.

As we can see, Kasper­sky Mobile Antivirus not only fights virus­es, but also pro­tects in many unpleas­ant sit­u­a­tions spe­cif­ic to the phone.

Dr.Web Security Space

This is a mobile ver­sion of Dr.Web antivirus. It has sim­i­lar func­tion­al­i­ty to the pre­vi­ous pro­gram, plus it con­tains two more use­ful func­tions:

• Fire­wall. This is a kind of “wall” that blocks access to the Inter­net for all activ­i­ties, except for those that are includ­ed in the user’s trust list.
• Unlock­ing a device blocked by ran­somware tro­jans.

Avast antivirus

This is a com­plete­ly free antivirus, with full func­tion­al­i­ty. Here, in addi­tion to anti-virus capa­bil­i­ties, there is also pro­tec­tion against theft and block­ing calls. For the con­ve­nience and speed of the device as a whole, Avast can also:

• Clear the RAM and per­ma­nent mem­o­ry of the mobile device.
• Scan and test Wi-Fi speed.

Nat­u­ral­ly, the devel­op­er wants to make mon­ey, and there­fore the pro­gram also has pre­mi­um func­tion­al­i­ty: anti-theft and appli­ca­tion block­ing. Every­thing else works in the free ver­sion.

Cleaning programs

These pro­grams, like antivirus­es, are rel­e­vant for Android, as it is an oper­at­ing sys­tem with a rather con­fus­ing file struc­ture. Dur­ing oper­a­tion, many ser­vice and tem­po­rary files are cre­at­ed, which are quite dif­fi­cult to find even for an advanced user who does not have pro­gram­ming skills. To solve this prob­lem, spe­cial clean­ing pro­grams have been devel­oped that “know” what and where to look for. They are able:

• Delete unnec­es­sary cache items, mes­sages, logs, calls and so on.
• Man­age appli­ca­tions, mon­i­tor which ones clog your phone, delete them.
• Per­form auto­mat­ic sched­uled clean­ing.

Here are some exam­ples of pro­grams in this cat­e­go­ry:

• CClean­er



• Clean Mas­ter — also per­forms the func­tions of an antivirus.
• AVG Junk Clean­er — can also remove low-qual­i­ty pho­tos, keep track of rarely used appli­ca­tions.

Health & Fitness

Any smart­phone has a built-in accelerom­e­ter, that is, an accel­er­a­tion sen­sor. There­fore, being a wear­able device, it is con­ve­nient for record­ing phys­i­cal activ­i­ty, count­ing calo­ries and work­ing on a dai­ly rou­tine. There are var­i­ous pro­grams, paid and free, that allow you to do this. You can divide them into sev­er­al cat­e­gories:

• Sports pro­grams. “Vir­tu­al train­ers”, accord­ing to which you can do cer­tain exer­cis­es, with the num­ber of approach­es and rep­e­ti­tions. This can also include bike com­put­ers and sim­i­lar pro­grams.
• Calo­rie coun­ters. Designed to mon­i­tor weight, improve diet.
• Pedome­ters. For those who are just walk­ing.
• Well­ness pro­grams for work­ing with sleep pat­terns, water intake and the like.

One appli­ca­tion may com­bine two or more of these func­tions.

There are also appli­ca­tions that serve to work with var­i­ous fit­ness bracelets and sports watch­es.

Tutorials

Among oth­er things, a smart­phone can be used as an inter­ac­tive text­book or ref­er­ence book, of course, it will not replace full-fledged cours­es or an edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion, but it can reduce the time to search for infor­ma­tion, or help to work on cer­tain skills. Of course, there are many things you can learn, we will give exam­ples of only a few pro­grams from this cat­e­go­ry.

Duolingo

A pro­gram that can improve Eng­lish lan­guage skills in a play­ful way: read­ing, writ­ing, speak­ing and lis­ten­ing. It’s the most pop­u­lar learn­ing app on Android and it’s com­plete­ly free.

Star Walk 2

Paid pro­gram, which is a map of the star­ry sky with a built-in guide to celes­tial objects.

Dis­plays a map of the star­ry sky and shows the area where you point your smart­phone. All this in real time, as well as the “trans­fer to the future” func­tion, which is called the “time machine” here.

Allows you to eas­i­ly find any object in the star­ry sky.

It uses aug­ment­ed real­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy, 3D graph­ics to cre­ate con­stel­la­tion mod­els, and can even show objects that are vis­i­ble only in gam­ma, infrared and x‑ray spec­tra.

Ecoguide

This is a whole series of appli­ca­tions that are ref­er­ence guides for var­i­ous types of plants and ani­mals. For exam­ple, the EcoGu­ide: Birds of Rus­sia pro­gram includes 206 species of birds, with their pho­tographs, images of nests and voice record­ings, a sys­tem­at­ic tree and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion by 13 fea­tures.

Entertainment and players

Car­ried in a pock­et or bag, a smart­phone replaces many devices that were pop­u­lar in the past — an MP3 play­er, a portable media play­er, a game con­sole, as it per­forms their func­tions. To watch videos and lis­ten, you can use the pro­grams installed on your smart­phone ini­tial­ly, but they may not rec­og­nize cer­tain files. There­fore, the eas­i­est way is to install two or three play­ers on your phone and use those who “know” the for­mat of the desired file.

As for games, here the choice is sub­jec­tive, there are var­i­ous puz­zles or, on the con­trary, action games, paid and free. A char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­ture of all mobile games is that they are designed to be played for a short time, they are not suit­able for hard­core gamers.

conclusions

Many peo­ple now do not part with a smart­phone, they even talk about a new kind of addic­tion. How­ev­er, this device, being a full-fledged com­put­er, is just a tool that any­one can use as they want. We think that in our arti­cle we man­aged to show the whole vari­ety of pro­grams, each of which is easy to find and down­load, since they all have free and demo ver­sions.