Welcome to the 493rd edition of Android Apps Weekly. Here are the big headlines from the last week:

• Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, told MKBHD on Threads that he believes Android is better than iOS this week. This sparked a pretty big debate that was pretty entertaining to read. You can learn more about it at the link, but it seems some folks still can’t decide which one is better.
• YouTube Premium prices have gone up again. The changes affect a range of plans. Individual YouTube Premium plans cost $2 more than they used to. The annual plan jumped from $119.99 to $139.99. Student plans also got a price bump from $6.99 to $7.99 per month. Finally, YouTube Music Premium is going from $9.99 to $10.99 monthly. The only plan that doesn’t seem affected is the family plan, which received a price bump earlier this year.
• Netflix ramped up its removal of password-sharing this week. The restrictions are rolling out worldwide with subscribers receiving emails to let them know the change is happening. In addition, Netflix also removed its Basic tier in the US and the UK, so if you want to subscribe to avoid password sharing, it’ll now be more expensive.
• Google is testing an AI bot to write news articles. That’s a pretty big deal, especially for people who work at websites like this one. Google intends for it to assist journalists in writing news stories, and it’s been presented to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and News Corp. This is a hit-or-miss kind of thing, as AI bots still get a lot of things wrong. However, it’s still a step toward higher AI integration.
• Speaking of steps toward AI, details of Apple’s foray into the AI space leaked this week. It’s called Apple GPT, and Apple is working on it internally. Outside of being confirmed to actually exist, we don’t know much about Apple GPT. It uses an LLM platform based on Google JAX, and calls their own implementation AJAX, which is pretty adorable. Hit the link to learn more.

DC Heroes & Villains

Price: Free to play

DC Heroes & Villains is a match-three game mixed with a gacha RPG. The gacha part is fairly standard fair. You summon various DC heroes and villains, form a team, and use it to battle a new evil. The match-three system comes in during combat. You match shapes to generate attacks against the bad guys. There’s an element of luck to it, which doesn’t always feel great. Otherwise, it’s a pretty straightforward experience. We’ve seen this type of game many times, but this one has DC characters in it. 

Vio.com

Price: Free

Vio.com released their official app back in March, and we’re going to talk about it today. For those who don’t know, Vio.com is an app for surfing hotel deals. You can surf deals through the app, book the hotel, and all of that straight through the app. It also has a handy comparison tool so you can see the price from Vio’s competitors. The app itself is reasonably clean and worked fine during our testing. We didn’t experience any serious bugs or issues. There are likely some minor ones since most new apps have bugs, but this is a surprisingly solid app for how new it is.

Ace Fishing Crew

Price: Free to play

Ace Fishing Crew is a new fishing game from Com2uS, developers of Summoners War. Yes, you read that right. The game is fairly simple to play. You cast your line out, jiggle it around to entice fish, and then battle with the fish once it’s caught. It’s more of an arcade game versus the more realistic fishing games you may have seen before. The game also includes equipment upgrades to earn, stages to complete, and plenty of things to do. It’s tough to find good fishing games, and this one is good enough to recommend.

Budgeat

Price: Free / $3.99 per month / $39.99 per year

Budgeat is a meal planner, pantry organizer, and recipe app. The main part of the app is the meal planner. It helps you plan your meals, your grocery list, and managing the recipes for those meals. You can input everything you have in the fridge and pantry so you can come up with grocery lists that don’t have duplicates. Finally, the app boasts hundreds of curated recipes. There are multiple apps that do what this app does, and we recommend a full recipe app over a curated one. However, other than that, this app is pretty good.

Pokemon Sleep

Price: Free to play

Pokemon Sleep is a sleep tracker app fused with a Pokemon game. The app says to put your smartphone next to your head. It then records your snoring, sleep talking, and how long you sleep. It also comes with a smart alarm function, a white noise generator, and stats about how well you slept. The game part of it is all of the Pokemon that gather while you sleep. The ones that show up are dependent on how well the app believes you slept. You can also befriend Pokemon, take care of a Snorlax, and more. It’s new, so we think it needs some adjustments. If the sleep tracking is accurate, which we can’t possibly know after just a night or two of sleep, then it’s a fun way to do it.

If we missed any big Android apps or games news or releases, tell us about them in the comments.