With the release of new operating system KitKat and the announcement that it hit both one billion activations and 50 billion app downloads, it's clear that 2013 has been a year of great news for Android.
See also: 5 Top Great Android Apps to Find your Lost Android Device
In the past 12 months, we've seen the release of some truly remarkable new apps on Google Play, while some old standards got a much-needed revisiting. Here, we list our picks for the top Android apps of the calendar year.Our top choices for 2013 include a leviathan of productivity, a new breed of news reader and a sleep tracker. Check out these apps in the gallery above, and see if they're fit for a download.
Duolingo
Duolingo works to add interactivity and customized lesson planning to
the language learning experience by rewarding users when they achieve
goals, giving incentive to return for more lessons -- something your
high school's Intermediate Spanish course never did.
Duolingo gives users the opportunity to learn English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. You don't have to worry about being charged for the service any time soon, either. Co-creator Luis von Ahn told USA Today, "We're fundamentalists on the belief that we should not charge for language education."
Duolingo gives users the opportunity to learn English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. You don't have to worry about being charged for the service any time soon, either. Co-creator Luis von Ahn told USA Today, "We're fundamentalists on the belief that we should not charge for language education."
Pocket Casts
A one-stop shop for organizing your podcasts, Pocket Casts allows you
to listen to, download and sync your podcasts all from one device.
Audio playback is customizable, allowing you to adjust playback speed to
whatever you're comfortable with. The "featured" and "popular" menus
also help with podcast discovery.
Evernote
Evernote, which has become more of a
leviathan of productivity than just an app, received several updates in
2013, including a customizable home screen and image and PDF markup.
With Evernote, you can take notes or photos, keep reminders, record
audio and tag all of it to make it easily searchable. It's so vast,
getting started may seem too daunting to some. We recommend our beginner's guide.
Pixlr Express
A powerful, customizable photo editor that's more than just filters,
Pixlr Express comes packed with the ability to color-correct, blur or
layer images and stickers on top of one another. Just taking up 7.2 M of
memory, Pixlr Express is more than worth the small amount of space
it'll take up on your SD card.
Nova Launcher
With the release of iOS 7, Apple raised the bar for home screen
design in 2013. For Android, Nova Launcher reaches the same bar. Fully
customizable, performance-oriented and with a prime version at just $4,
Nova Launcher is a great download for any android user.
doubleTwist
Aside from being a great tool to sync your music between your Mac or
PC and your Android device, doubleTwist is a powerful media player,
enabling you to play multiple audio files, watch videos, stream radio
and listen to podcasts. It certainly doesn't hurt that doubleTwist's
album cover-centric design is beautiful to look at as well.
Reddit is fun
Reddit is fun is our preferred way of browsing and using Reddit on
our Android devices. Easy to navigate, the app more closely resembles
the web experience of Reddit than other popular apps -- which seem to be
more focused on browsing rather than posting or commenting. Frequently
updated with bug fixes and small updates, you can count on Reddit is fun
to continue improving with time.
Feedly
Now that our dear Google Reader has moved on from this world, we
require a new RSS curation tool to fill our article-consuming needs --
and Feedly fits the bill. The app's design is heavily image focused,
giving a reading experience closer to how we use the web than most news
aggregation tools. Offering easy sharing tools and integration with
Evernote, Instapaper and Pocket, Feedly is a fluid, fast moving hulk of a
news app.
Sleepbot
Whether you choose to use Sleepbot as a simple time log or a
dedicated and powerful sleep tracker is up to you, but both options
offer a rewarding experience for anyone looking to improve his or her
sleeping habits. Sleepbot tracks your movement and noise levels,
greeting you with a quiet alarm in the morning at your lightest level of
sleep.
Aereo
Straight out of The Jetsons, the Aereo app -- currently in
public beta -- allows you to access your cloud DVR on your Android
device, meaning you can watch your favorite television shows on your
morning commute (assuming you use public transportation, of course-- Crcles tech does not condone driving under the influence of Breaking Bad). You can tune into your local channels and save up to 20 hours of television in the cloud.
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