Great Apps: 5 design-focused Android Apps

To honour the launch of Path 2.0, easily one of the most beautiful Android (and iOS) apps released to date, we’d like to give a shout-out to five beautifully-designed Android apps. While Android has always been me-too sibling in the mobile platform rivalry, especially when it comes to app design, there are a few fastidious developers who work hard to bring out the potential in Google’s popular OS.

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list, and if you have some great examples let us know in the comments and we’ll add them to our next round-up!

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1) Any.do (free)

This awesome to-do app is currently Android-only, but take one look at it and you’d think you were using a completely different operating system. With smooth, touch-friendly controls and a minimalist design, Any.do combines basic semantic input (“Call mom tomorrow at 3pm”) and an intuitive interface. From the makers of Taskos.

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2) Feedly (free)

This RSS Reader is more like a magazine than an old-world list of content. It invites you to scroll horizontally through pages with a four-articles-to-a-screen format, interspersed with one big article every few pages based on popularity. The app is designed with content in mind, with featured providers and full Google Reader capabilities. Since syncronization is taken right from your Google account, there is no need to log in to Reader separately: just approve the app and you’re on your way.

The app can act as a traditional RSS reader, too, with lists of individual streams that are easy to get to and can be shared on various social networks or saved for later.

Feedly is joined by a couple more beautifully-designed apps, including Pulse Reader and Taptu.

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3) ScoreMobile (free)

If you’re into sports, ScoreMobile is the only way to view every stat, score or result from every game, for any conceivable (North American) sport. The design is simple and gets out of the users’ way, inviting big, bold charts and easy navigation.

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4) Path (free)

With the launch of Path 2.0, the intimate social network has launched one of Android’s most stunning apps. With full 720p support and a clean, simple interface, it represents the pinnacle of what is possible with Android app design.

That, and it’s incredibly fun to use. Treating it like a journal of sorts, you can post photos, music, check-ins or just random thoughts and share them with your closest friends. This is not Facebook, but the opposite of what the juggernaut has become: it encourages you to share with a maximum of 150 people.

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5) Plume (free, ad supported / Premium, $2.78)

Plume is one of the best third-party Twitter apps on the Android platform, and there are a lot to choose from. It has a swipe-friendly, easy-to-use interface with an enviable tweet mechanism: just pull down from the top of the screen like a notification bar. It supports TweetMarket to sync your timeline location with other applications, and has granular display settings to control the way each tweet looks, from single or multiple accounts.

It is constantly improving its feature set, and will soon be launching push notifications for replies and direct messages.