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10 best Christmas apps for Android
It’s officially the holiday season. That means people are decorating, celebrating, and giving to others. It’s a wonderful time of year and, by far, one of the most colorful and engaging. There are no other holiday seasons where people do things like this. There is a lot to the holiday season. You get music, movies, and TV shows along with family time, gift buying, and snow, hopefully. There are a lot of parts of Christmas you can manage right on your smartphone! Here are the best Christmas apps for Android.
The best Christmas apps for Android
1Weather
Price: Free / $1.99
Christmas means a lot of traveling, going out shopping, and other outside activities. Knowing the weather is essentially important around this time of year. 1Weather is about as good as it gets. It shows the current conditions, a ten-day forecast, and a 12-week forecast. The app also includes a radar, sunrise and sunset times, and more. It also includes multiple locations. That should cover just about every use case that we can think of. It’s also relatively inexpensive. The free version comes with all of the features along with ads. It’s not a bad way to go as long as you don’t mind ads on the free version.
Christmas Countdown
Price: Free / $1.99
Christmas Countdown is an app with a Christmas countdown timer. It’s configurable with a bunch of little options along with several home screen backgrounds. You can make it look basically how you want. It counts down the time until Christmas and that’s its main function. Its secondary function is as an advent calendar as a second way to countdown to the big day. However, it also plays Christmas music, provides ideas for Christmas gifts, and it even gifts you a holiday wallpaper that you get to keep. The premium version includes two countdown widgets for your home screen, more customization options, and more Christmas music. There are no ads in any version of this app and the developers usually do good to update it every year.
Google Santa Tracker
Price: Free
Google’s Santa Tracker app is easily one of the best Christmas apps. It’s at least better than the other Santa Tracker apps in the Play Store. NORAD’s Santa Tracker app (Google Play link) is getting better every year, though. The app includes several fun little games and activities for kids. That includes Google Cardboard VR support, Android Wear support, and a countdown timer. It then follows Santa’s path around the world on December 24th. The app is completely free with no advertisements or anything like that. It’s one of the best Christmas apps for kids too. The 2020 version isn’t out yet, but we’ll update the article once it becomes available. Until then, we’ve linked to the official website instead. The website is fully operational for 2020 already.
See also: The best spy apps for Android
iHeartRadio
Price: Free / $9.99 per month
iHeartRadio is definitely among the best Christmas apps for music. It features a variety of holiday-themed radio stations that include new hits, old classics, and mixtures of the two. The app is also entirely free as long as you don’t mind commercials. Other music streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify, Google Play Music, Pandora, etc all have Christmas playlists as well. However, iHeartRadio is the easiest to fire and forget. It’s also the easiest for people who don’t generally use music streaming services already. Just open the app, search for Christmas, and find the station you like. Done.
See also: The best radio apps for Android
Mint
Price: Free
Christmas can be a hard time on your finances. Thus, something like Mint can help. It’s a budget app to help keep track of your money. You input your income and then add in all of your monthly payments and other expenses. The app tells you how much you have leftover for things like Christmas shopping or even extras like Christmas dinner. It’s probably a good habit to have something like this all year long, but it’s especially helpful during financially difficult times like Christmas. Mint is completely free as far as we can tell.
Movies Anywhere
Price: Free / Movie prices vary
Movies Anywhere is a good spot for movie fans. It gives you access to movies from a variety of services, including Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, Apple’s movie store, and others. You can buy movies from any of those services, log into this app, and get all of them in one place. You can usually find a ton of Christmas movies on sale around this time of year, but rarely all in one spot. This lets you start your Christmas movie collection without too much of a hassle. Of course, you can always go with Netflix, Hulu, and other per-month streaming services because most of them have Christmas content as well.
See also: The best movie apps for Android
Safe Notes
Price: Free
Safe Notes is an excellent app for Christmas gift shopping. It’s a notepad app similar to popular names like Google Keep Notes. However, this one lets you hide your notes behind a lock and key, so to speak. You can set a PIN or password lock so nobody can get in and see what you’re buying them. The app UI is a little old looking, but the premise is solid. You can keep different colors per note and each note can be up to 250,000 characters in length. It’s a super simple notepad app and we’re only really recommending it for its lock features so snoopy kids and significant others can’t find your shopping list. Otherwise, something like Google Drive or Google Keep is totally the way to go.
See also: The best note taking apps for Android
TickTick
Price: Free / $27.99 per year
TickTick is a to-do list app. Christmas is a busy time of year. Apps like TickTick can make it easier to keep track of things. The app lets you add tasks, organize tasks into various lists, and even share tasks with other people with TickTick. It’s great for Christmas gift lists, remembering to buy the right food, and remembering to pack for that trip to the in-laws. The free version includes all of the relevant features. The pro version is optional and really only necessary for business class use. We doubt you’ll need the pro version.
Zedge
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Zedge is probably the best notification and ringtone app on Google Play. It has a ton of tones, sounds, ringtones, and other stuff. Of course, that includes stuff for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other holidays. The ringtones and notification tones are usually fairly high quality. You can find all kinds of stuff here. The app also features wallpapers if you want those. Most of the app is free with advertising. There is some premium content that may require in-app purchases in order to get. Of course, if you don’t like the wallpaper selection, we have a list for those as well!
Whatever live TV app you like
Price: Free / Varies
Live TV apps are quite popular these days and you have a few options. PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling TV, and DirecTV Now are the biggest options. These services give you access to cable television in an app instead of a cable box. Thus, you can catch all of the yearly specials from shows you watch, and all of the Christmas-themed content that comes in every year around this time. The prices vary, but most of them are good enough to replace your actual cable TV if you don’t mind picking up something like a Chromecast.
Your favorite shopping apps
Price: Free
Some of the busiest Christmas apps are shopping apps. Literally, all of them are going to have a variety of sales, special events, special offers, and other various deals. Those shopping for others or themselves can find all kinds of good offers on stuff they’ve probably been looking at all year. Many brick-and-mortar stores offer same-day pickup on online purchases in case you still want that traditional Christmas shopping experience. Online shopping is as stable as it’s ever been. Now is a great time to start your Christmas shopping.
See also: The best shopping apps for Android
Bonus: Google Duo (or Zoom)
Price: Free
The 2020 Christmas season is unlike any in recent memory. The COVID-19 pandemic has a lot of places shut down and governments are strongly warning against large gatherings for the holidays. Thus, some families may need to visit their loved ones virtually instead of in reality. Something like Google Duo should work out fine. Google Duo supports video chats of up to 32 people across both Android and iOS. There is a family mode with some fun filters and all of that. It’s a decent way to see everybody on Christmas without getting anyone sick. A lot of people already have Zoom as well so Zoom is a viable alternative if you don’t want to use Duo. Skype is a final good option in this space that everyone is familiar with.
If we missed any great Christmas apps, tell us about them in the comments. You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists.
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