5 Android apps you shouldn't miss this week - Android Apps Weekly

Welcome to the 406th edition of Android Apps Weekly. Here are the big headlines from the last week:

• Google Chrome had quite the rise to power as the world’s most popular web browser. We took a look at the history and the moves Google made in order to make that happen. The history includes Chromium and other products that helped Google seal its top spot. Hit the link if you’d like to read it.
• We asked our readers if they upgraded to Windows 11 last week. Roughly one-third of our readers say they have upgraded to Windows 11. Of those who didn’t, only about 15% said they didn’t want to at all while everyone else is basically still waiting for the update. There are some people who don’t intend to update because they finally got their Windows 10 installation how they want and don’t want to mess up their apps. Hit the link to see the data yourself.
• Our latest Wallpaper Wednesday brings six new wallpaper ideas for your phone or desktop. We have three from the team and three from our readers. I personally like the rocky harbor and the raindrops ones. Give them a look and check back next week for more.
• YouTube removed the dislike counter from YouTube videos this week. The update is currently rolling out so you should see it soon. There isn’t much to talk about, really. YouTube cites instances like “dislike attacks” as its reason for doing it. Basically, YouTube wants to cut back on harassment. Your downvote does still count, you just won’t get to see how many there are on any specific video.
• Google is on the lookout for people with speech impairments to help with research for a new app. The new project, called Project Relate, aims to make it easier for folks with speech impairments to communicate with other people and also digital assistants like Google Assistant. Project Relate will apparently listen to what you say and transcribe it so you can copy and paste it on your phone, repeat what you say to others, and support Google Assistant. Hit the link if you’re interested.

Ragnarok Origin

Price: Free to play / $7.99+ per month

Ragnarok Origin is a mobile remake of Ragnarok Online, one of the most popular early MMORPGs. In terms of general gameplay, it’s a fairly typical MMORPG. You run around an open world doing campaign missions along with side quests. There are a bunch of various items to upgrade your character, anime-style cut scenes, and your typical tank, DPS, and support roles. It’s actually a fairly well-crafted experience with a decent amount of freedom. The game doesn’t lean on modern stuff like auto-battle or auto-travel like many others. You actually have to play this one for the most part. There are free-to-play elements along with a subscription service. You can choose whichever experience you prefer.

Roll20 Companion

Price: Free / $59.99-$109.99 per year

Roll20 Companion is basically what the name says. It’s a companion app for the Roll20 website, an online service where you can play tabletop games with friends. The app is okay, but leaves us a bit wanting. You can view existing character sheets, all of your stats, roll dice, and send the rolls to the chat. That’s about all it does right now although we do hope the developers extend functionality soon. We’d like to see the app mirror the full website, but we understand that it’ll take time. For now, it’s definitely a good tool, and we hope one day that it’ll be better.

Revived Witch

Price: Free to play

Revived Witch the latest release from Yostar, developers of the popular gachas Arknight and Azur Lane. This one is also a gacha. The game is a 2D adventure RPG and it boasts 3D lighting effects. The result is a JRPG-style playstyle. You walk through dungeons, fight bad guys, progress through the story, and find various loot. You also summon characters and use them to build your team. It’s all pretty standard stuff. Where Yostar wins here is with hits execution. The sound, the mechanics, the graphics are all very well done and work together for a single cohesive experience. The gacha part is okay with reasonable drop rates as well. This is one of the best gachas released in 2021 so far.

Geo Music Player

Price: $0.99

Geo Music Player is a decent little music player. It boasts support for a bunch of different audio codecs, no extraneous permissions, and it doesn’t even connect to the Internet. The UI is clean with easy-to-read graphics and simple controls. You can also do stuff like add songs to the queue, use the sleep timer, and it offers offline lyrics support. It’s a brand new app so there are likely bugs we didn’t find. That said, music players aren’t exactly new technology so we don’t expect there to be too many. We don’t think it usurps long-standing leaders in mobile music players, but it’s a decent and cheap alternative.

PUBG: New State

Price: Free to play

PUBG: New State is one of the biggest mobile game releases of the year so far. At its core, it’s the same basic battle royale setup. You and 99 other players drop into a map and duke it out to see who becomes the last one standing. What this one boasts is better graphics than the original PUBG: Mobile along with tweaked mechanics and a different environment. In short, if you liked the last one you should like this one as well. The game had 55 million pre-registrations. That’s a lot of players downloading and playing the game all at once so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to hear that the game had server issues for its first week. It came out mere days ago and has already leaped over the ten million downloads mark.

If we missed any big Android apps or games news or releases, tell us about it in the comments.
Thank you for reading! Try these out too:

• The best MMORPGs for Android
• The best Magic: the Gathering apps for Android
• The best gacha games for Android
• The best music player apps for Android
• The best battle royale games for Android