What non-game paid apps do you use that are worthwhile and still relevant in 2023?
For context, I have a decent amount of Google Play credit thanks to Opinion Rewards and a gift card. I'm not looking to start a book or movie collection there, nor sign up for subscription services. But I'm happy to buy the paid/pro version of useful apps.
I'm excluding games just because that's a whole topic on its own.
Here are some one-time paid apps I've been happy with:
I have to admit I haven't been buying a lot of new apps the last few years. I don't play games on my phone and most of the apps I use daily are basically the same ones for a few years already.
FX file explorer
An excellent file manager that I have been using since forever. There are other good ones, such as Solid Explorer, but FX is my favorite.
Tasker
I used to play around with this so much, the things you can do with this app are endless. But I have been using it less lately, switched to Google home since it has better/easier integration with other devices in the house.
Nova Launcher
I think most of you will be familiar with this launcher. I have probably been using this one since it came out. It's perfect!
JuiceSSH Pro
To be honest I don't even know what features are unlocked by purchasing the pro edition without looking because it has been so long since I bought it. It's an SSH cliënt and one of my most-used apps.
Sync for Lemmy
There are plenty of Lemmy apps that are good but I was using Sync for Reddit since forever so I jumped on the hype-train when it came out. I paid for Ultra monthly because 2€ per month for something I use daily is a no-brainer.
Besides these there are some Google Wear watch faces I purchased. There had been other apps that I bought years ago like sdmaid or some other tools from when I used to install custom roms but I don't really use those anymore - too much hassle for marginal improvements. And the question was about apps that are still relevant.
Looks at the paid apps on my phone..... The fuck. Right down to the SDmaid and using roms years ago. Like identical... seriously it's a small community of popular apps that run in these communities sometimes.
Balance - for Meditation. They have been offering a one year free trial for some time now. It has been really helpful for me. Their programs are highly customised to achieve your goals. Give it a try.
KWGT & KWLP - if you're into home screen customisation, then these are must haves.
Niagara Launcher - Lightweight, minimalist, with solid, fluid animations. One-hand friendly. Free version has ZERO ADS. I've been using the free version for a couple of years now. I'm hooked to it. I don't think I can go back to a normal App Drawer drawer style launcher now. They offer one time purchase as well for the pro version. I felt no need for the pro features, though i'd definitely buy the pro to support the dev.
Some of these have decent free alternatives. Mixplorer is free to use officially through XDA. KWGT & KWLP have free ad supported versions available through their official website. Regardless, these have been installed on all my phones for years now.
I have multiple Google calendars to keep track of pretty much everything; birthdays, anniversaries, bills, when school is in session (I have kids), scheduled days off, various appointments, etc. I've been using this since 2011/2012 with their first version, and moved over to the 2nd version after that came out. It gives me more control over how my calendar looks on my phone, I can easily toggle calendars and tasks on or off...
Honestly, I can't use another calendar app now. I love my color coded (you can change calendar colors in the app to any color you want) month at a glance calendar.
And I also can't recommend KWGT enough for widget making. I originally got Zooper to try to emulate Conky (from Linux), but Zooper stopped being developed. I have a lot of fun trying to get my widgets just the way I like them - even if my code is a mess.
It's georgous and I've grown to love the list view for apps. As phones are really tall, it makes more sense to lay out apps vertically instead of horizontally. It's search function is great too.
My work uses google workspaces, the agenda widget is so useful for quickly seeing a list of calendar events and weather.
I don't have many paid apps, but one I do like is Peakfinder. It's not something I use all the time but it does become rather handy when you've climbed up a hill to a viewpoint and now want to figure out which other hills you're looking at.
For mobile- Poweramp - let's me view and play music by Folder. Google and Samsungs built in player suuuucks.
You can't build a Playlist with Poweramp, but if you have lots of your "own music" .mp3s, I highly recommend it.
And SimpleGallery. Infinitely better than whatever the fuck "Google photos" puts together. It lets you sort and view by, you guessed it, FOLDER NAME rather than "most recent" always at the top. It also let's you Hide folders too for all those cute cat photos. Also allows Excluding folders, so that game thumbnail folder doesn't show up too.
Check the price for Sync for Lemmy again, maybe you get lucky - they are tweaking it regionally now - the price for me changed to 1/10th of the original ask.
I paid for Tilla, it's a great app to manage subscriptions. I get notifications when the next payment is due. Pretty simple UI but that's what I like about it. You can check how much you spend per week/month/year.
Titanium Backup became worthless when split APKs became a thing after it stopped updating. Looks like oandbackup claims to support them, but I see an open issue about some split APK apps not working after a restore (which is what TiBu did)
Edit: So in the spirit of OPs question, an app I gladly paid for was Swift Backup
KLWP and KWGT are amazing for customization. KLWP is for making live wallpapers, KWGT is for making your own widgets. They're both extremely powerful apps that allow you to completely customize phone home screen to your exact liking. There's a slight learning curve to them, but once you have the basics down you can do some pretty amazing things with them.
I've thought about those but I'm just not sure I'd really use them. I'm generally happy keeping my screen pretty simple with static wallpaper and very few widgets.
I am interpreting "worth paying" as "immensely useful" because I don't recall paying for an app, ever.
Aurora Store: Basically Play Store but you don't need to sell your soul to Google. You can log in to Google account while staying signed out on Android or use "anonymous account" function.
KDE Connect: File transfer, phone notifications on PC, stops video/audio on PC when you answer a call and many other features. Right clicking a file on my Linux PC and then clicking "Send to Phone via KDE Connect" is so satisfying.
Samsung Notes: No non-sense PDF reader and annotator. It did not appear when I searched for Android PDF readers on the Internet and its name doesn't imply that function making it sort-of a hidden gem. Maybe there are better apps I couldn't find, though.
What a disappointment is the BigBag app. Bought it yesterday but I expected a better app (also UI wise).
Especially the recipe book part. Maybe the will improve in the future, but I am not going to use it for now.
Really? I only used the recipe book once but it seemed easy to hit the checkboxes and move ingredients over to my grocery list.
Mostly I just use it to sync shopping lists between myself and my partner. For that it has been quite reliable. Yeah I can imagine some UI improvements, but overall I think it's pretty good.
Can you find a better grocery app? I've tried a ton of them and most were horrible. Either they had a hard-to-navigate UI with no dark mode, or they didn't allow syncing with another person, or some major functional problem.
There used to be a grocery app I loved called Cinnamon but the dev stopped maintaining it :(
Niche but very valuable for me is: symfonium which is a very complete subsonic client.
Prana Breath is a lean but featureful breathing app with a ton of different exercises from beginners to advanced yoga practitioners
Both apps are android only and are miles ahead of anything iphone can offer which is worth being mentioned imo.
Material Files https://github.com/zhanghai/MaterialFiles is a free and open source file manager that allows decompression, archive viewing and compression of files and folders using 7zip, tar or zip. If you prefer the command line, p7zip CLI can also be installed on Termux, https://github.com/termux/termux-app both free and open source.