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

Welcome back to Android Apps Weekly!

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This week’s Android Apps Weekly is sponsored by Degoo Cloud Backup. This well-designed application gives you 100GB of free space to backup your device with whatever files you feel like storing there. It employs military grade encryption to keep your files safe and you can restore any time you need to.

The app uses Material Design and it definitely looks good. You can also choose which folders to backup, when to upload backups, and several other settings to make sure your backups are always up to date. You can pick up an additional 250GB of storage for $2.99 per month if needed but the first 100GB and the app itself is totally free. Give it a shot and show your support for the Android Apps Weekly show.

Let’s get into the big headlines from the last week!

• A new report out of AVG shows apps that take up the most battery, storage, and data usage. Unsurprisingly, most of them are audio and video streaming apps with a smattering of social media and messaging apps like Tumblr and Snapchat.
• Google is now giving people the opportunity to become beta testers for the official Google App. For the time being, there’s nothing new quite yet but it’s only a matter of time before the beta testers start seeing new features ahead of everyone else.
• The latest Humble Bundle is now live and includes games from Kemco. For those who don’t know, Kemco makes jRPG style games so pretty much all of these have a ton of content. You’ll get three games for whatever price and four more if you beat the average. You’ll also be helping charity!
• Samsung Pay is reportedly making its way out to Verizon Samsung devices as the company’s slow roll-out continues. Of course, finding the app in the Play Store is like playing a game of hide and seek, but we’re sure these kinks will be worked out eventually.
• The Google Play Store is on the verge of a total redesign that separates entertainment stuff from applications. The new design is set to go live sooner or later so keep an eye out for that. It looks nice and it’ll be a mostly welcome change.

For even more Android apps and games news, don’t forget to check out this week’s newsletter! There you’ll find all the stuff we didn’t have time or space for here today. If you’re so inclined, you can sign up with your email address and we’ll send this to you once a week!

While you’re at it, don’t forget to subscribe to our Twitch channel! We have a lot of fun playing games on there and while we are swamped with stuff right now, we have every intention of getting back there to play again sometime soon. Follow us now and don’t miss out!

[Price: Free with in-app purchases]
RAD Boarding is a new game out of Noodlecake Studios. It’s an endless runner style game where you must board down a mountain while being pursued by tons upon tons of lava. You can collect various items to purchase upgrades and power-ups all while performing all kinds of stunts and tricks for a grizzly bear that keeps asking you to do it. The graphics look pretty good and the game is easy enough to play. There are some early release issues so do beware of that.

[Price: Free with in-app purchases]
SEGA has released the sequel to Sonic Dash, simply called Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom. This one revolves around the new Sonic cartoon show that’s been out so you can expect to see references and characters from that. The game itself is not all that different from the first as it is an infinite runner where you try to collect coins. It also features Team Mode where you can play with up to three players total, new powers, new obstacles, and some more newer content. It is free to download but there are in-app purchases.

[Price: $7.99 with in-app purchases]
NBA 2k16 is an interesting release because it’s actually a basketball game in contrast to last year’s offering which was just a card collector game. In this title, you can actually play basketball which is also its biggest feature. It comes with a revamped soundtrack, all of the teams and players, and the on-screen controls actually aren’t too bad. There is also a MyCAREER Mode, Season Mode, and Blacktop modes to play through with some other content to enjoy. There are in-app purchases, which kind of sucks given the price, but otherwise it doesn’t seem that bad.

[Price: Free]
HTC Restore was released during the last week during the announcement and discussions about the One A9. This is a simple app that doesn’t do all that much. It simply allows you to restore apps, data, and more that you may have backed up using HTC’s Backup function built into their OEM skin. It’s totally free and only for HTCdevices running Marshmallow which means literally no one can download this quite yet, but it is there if you ever need it.

[Price: $4.99 with in-app purchases]
After months of waiting, the day finally arrived when Minecraft: Story Mode was released. The highly anticipated title by Telltale Games gives us Minecraft but with a story with an all-star voice cast that includes Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Martha Plimpton, Corey Feldman, and others. So far, it’s received plenty of positive reviews and we anticipate that this will be one of the best paid games of the year. The game is classic Telltale Games which means your decisions will have implications on the story and there will be a total of five episodes released.

Wrap up

If we missed any awesome Android apps and games news that you think we should know about, tell us more about it in the comments!