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10 best Thanksgiving apps for Android
Thanksgiving is a trying, but ultimately happy time of year for many people. You get a chance to see your family, eat a ton of food, and you finally get to whip out all those excuses you’ve been saving up on why you haven’t come to visit more often. The dominant opinion is that it’s a day to put your phone or tablet away and interact with your family, but we have a list of awesome Thanksgiving apps that can help make the day go by smoother.
The best Thanksgiving apps for Android
Allrecipes Dinner Spinner
Price: Free
Allrecipes Dinner Spinner is a great app for recipes. Cooking a Thanksgiving dinner is quite stressful. You may not have all of your grandma’s perfect recipes on hand. This app can help. It boasts a metric ton of recipes that range from breakfast to dinner and even a lot of seasonal stuff. It also includes tons of instructional videos, a method to save favorite recipes, and more. The app is also entirely free to download and use. It can be very helpful during one of the biggest cooking days of the year. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be on a Thanksgiving apps list.
Google Duo
Price: Free
COVID-19 is, no doubt, affecting a lot of people’s Thanksgiving plans this year. Thus, we imagine a lot of folks will have Thanksgiving virtually rather than literally. Google Duo can help with that. It’s an excellent video chat app from Google that includes good video quality, simple functions, and support for video chats with up to 32 people. That should be more than enough to get everybody around the table if you decide not to do a family get-together this year. A lot of Android devices have this pre-installed and it’s also available for iOS devices as well. It’s the best option for a bad situation and hopefully it helps bring the family together.
See also: The best video chat apps for Android
Price: Free
Pinterest is one of the interesting Thanksgiving apps. It doesn’t provide any specifically helpful information. However, you can find ideas for all kinds of fun stuff. That includes recipes, decorations, DIY projects, fun crafting activities for the kids, and other fun ideas. Everything is posted by community members and it’s all free. That gives it a bit of a genuine flavor to everything you find. Most of the stuff is also relatively inexpensive and not overly time-consuming.
Price: Free / $3.99 per month / $29.99 per year
Reddit is a lot like Pinterest when it comes to Thanksgiving apps. It doesn’t provide any specific benefits. However, you can find subreddits for all kinds of Thanksgiving stuff. That includes funny stories, memes, and photos as well as recipes, decoration options, and advice. It’s a bit challenging to find the proper subreddits, but the information is good. We recommend the official Reddit app for starters. There are plenty of excellent third-party options as well. Most of them are free or at least very inexpensive. We recommend checking our r/Thanksgiving and r/Cooking for some great ideas.
See also: The best Reddit apps for Android
TickTick
Price: Free / $27.99 per year
TickTick is one of the better to do list apps. It allows you to create tasks as well as lists. That way you remember to actually do them. Thanksgiving (and other holidays) usually require a lot of planning. To do list apps like TickTick remind you to get all of those tasks done. Additionally, it lets you share tasks with other people. Thus, you can create a single grocery list that you can share with everybody in the family. The app is free for most use cases and we can’t really see anybody needing the $27.99 per year upgrade. It’s truly one of the best in its class.
See also: The best to do list apps for Android
YouTube
Price: Free / $11.99 per month
YouTube is probably the overall best Thanksgiving app. I am not embarrassed to admit that I carved my first turkey by following a YouTube tutorial. YouTube personalities like FoodWishes and Basics With Babish offer up tons of fun variations on classics. Of course, you can find tutorials for the basics as well. There are also all kinds of Thanksgiving music and sketches there as well for some quick fun. It won’t replace football on the TV screen, but you can definitely learn a lot if you follow the right people. You can go ad-free with background play for $11.99 per month.
Zedge
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Zedge is one of the most popular apps for ringtones, notification tones, and wallpapers. They have an absolutely massive selection of stuff and yes, that includes Thanksgiving stuff. You can get something simple like a turkey gobble for a notification tone or some decent-looking Thanksgiving wallpapers. It’s a quick and neat way to theme your device for the holiday season. Plus, you can keep Zedge after Thanksgiving and move right along to Christmas if you want to. The advertising in this app is a little annoying, but you get used to it. It also has a selection of premium content that you can buy if you want to.
Whatever streaming service you like
Price: Free / Usually around $9.99 per month
This is a bit of a weak pick, but it’s still highly relevant. Most streaming services have a bunch of Thanksgiving content. Netflix and Hulu have Thanksgiving movies and Thanksgiving episodes of popular TV shows. Most streaming services have Thanksgiving playlists. We have iHeartRadio linked up because it’s probably the easiest solution. Their radio is 24/7 and you can just hit play and forget about it. Apple Music, Google Play Music, Spotify, Pandora, and others have similar stations and playlists available as well. It’s nice to use one of these on Thanksgiving Day and have good music and shows going for the family.
Whatever live TV service you like
Price: Free / Varies
Thanksgiving has a lot of traditions and a few of them take place on a TV screen. There’s always a big football game playing and, of course, there are movies for both kids and adults with a Thanksgiving theme. Short of getting cable, our best recommendation is a live TV streaming service like YouTube TV, Sling TV, and other such apps. These apps show you the big game or the good movie playing that day. This year, a few streaming services like Sling TV are missing some sports channels like Fox Sports. Until that little conflict gets resolved, we recommend sticking to apps like DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, and YouTube TV.
Device themes
Price: Free / Varies
Many devices have built-in theme stores with a variety of holiday and topical themes. Some of them include HTC, LG, and, of course, Samsung. These theme stores can have themes with holiday colors like brown and orange for Thanksgiving. Others, like Samsung’s theme store, has wallpapers, icons, and full themes with Thanksgiving elements. These themes are usually accessible in the theme stores on the devices. That means you can’t really find these apps on Google Play. We recommend checking out the settings menu on your phone to see if it has a theme store. If you want some apps that work like this, SwiftKey and Gboard are keyboard apps that let you create custom themes as well.
See also: The best Android themes, theming apps, and customizations
If we missed any great Thanksgiving 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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