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

Welcome to the 140th edition of Android Apps Weekly! Here are your headlines from the last week:

• ES File Explorer released perhaps it’s more horrible update ever that claims to charge our device 20% faster.. Instead, it hijacks your lock screen, puts ads on it, and, because it’s hogwash, it doesn’t actually charge your device any faster. If you use ES, you may want to start thinking of finding alternatives because the app is more bloat than function at this point.
• Microsoft announced this week that the sun will soon be setting for Sunrise Calendar. According to an official post, the developers are busy working on Outlook and they don’t have time to update the app so they’re shutting it down which kinda sucks. For anyone interested, this probably isn’t going to happen to SwiftKey, at least not for a long time.
• This War of Mine was our pick for the best Android game released in 2015 and now it’s going to be a board game. The idea was put on Kickstarter this week and has already racked up more than three times its goal and it’s hit all of its stretch goals too. It looks quite complex and it should mirror the experience of the game rather well. You can find it on Kickstarter right now.
• The creators of Siri have been working on another AI assistant and this one is called Viv. In its short demonstration at TechCrunch Disrupt, it had a very impressive showing, allowing the presenter to do things like send money, buy flowers, and order an Uber driver in under two minutes. It’s very impressive and it should be platform agnostic.
• A developer over on Reddit created a way to play old school Virtual Boy games using your Android device, a popular emulator called Retroarch, and Google Cardboard. It’s a little complicated to get it all to work, but it does actually work and includes some extra features like changing the color from red to grayscale and others.

For even more Android apps and games news, releases, and updates, check out this week’s newsletter by clicking here. We have a bunch of stuff there that we didn’t have the space for here. If you’d like, you can sign up for the newsletter using the form below and we’ll send it to you every Sunday. You can also pick up the Android Authority app for even faster news.

[Price: Free]
Beme came out last week to generally favorable reviews but I didn’t cover it because I wanted to see what it was like first. Perhaps the best way to describe Beme is if you took the act of creating reaction videos on YouTube and created a social network out of it, that social network would be Beme. Otherwise, it’s not too much different from other multimedia sharing sites like Instagram or Vine except you can’t edit anything before you share it. It just kinda happens. It’s definitely interesting.

[Price: Free with in-app purchases]
Bejeweled Stars is the latest match-three game in the popular Bejeweled series. This one has the same basic mechanics as prior incarnations, except this time, pieces of the board move around which periodically changes which shapes are where. This adds a little extra challenge and can occasionally even save you if you’re stuck. It also comes with leaderboards, power ups, mini-missions, and more to keep things interesting. It’s a freemium game through and through, but it’s not bad.

[Price: Free / $2.99 per year]
Dark Sky is the latest hit weather app to hit the Google Play Store, although we’re not sure if it’s going to be a hit for very long. The app had great success on iOS and it works rather well on Android. However, a lot of people are upset that the app is a subscription service on Android while it’s a pay-once app on iOS. The developers claim are that the yearly subscription results in a lower up-front cost, but I think they’re missing the point on why everyone is mad. Anyway, it’s free to download if you want to try it out for yourself.

[Price: Free with in-app purchases]
After what seems like forever, there is actually a for real Pokemon game available on Android. It’s a trading card game where you collect Pokemon cards, build decks, and duel people from all over the world. It follows the same premise as most other monster or card collecting freemium games, except instead of collecting monsters that look like Pokemon, you’re actually collecting Pokemon. It’s suffering from some release day bugs, but those will likely be cleared up over time. It’s free to download right now.

[Price: Free]
Fallout 4 Live Wallpaper is, you guessed it, a live wallpaper themed like Fallout 4. It was released by Nvidia, but it should work on most devices. It features a scene with a bunch of Vault Boy bobble heads that will nod, move, and wiggle based on how you move your device or swipe your home screen. It’s nothing overly ridiculous but it’s a nice touch for fans of the series. It’s entirely free with no in-app purchases if you want to try it out and you’ll get additional features on Tegra K1 tablets.

Related best app lists:

• Miss your old handheld devices? Check out these awesome Nintendo DS emulators!
• It’s 2016, it’s okay to love both consoles now, so check out the best SNES emulators!

If we missed any big Android apps or games news, releases, or updates, tell us about them in the comments! To see our complete list of best app lists, click here.

And that about does it for this video folks, if you want to keep watching, we’ll have Jayce’s latest video linked up there on the screen and in the video description below. Don’t forget to sign up for that newsletter so you can keep up with the latest apps news and remember to keep it tuned to Android Authority because we are your source for all things Android. As always, thanks for watching everybody, and have a wonderful day.