Our top 5 Android and iOS apps of the week

Since our usual curator — and resident-note-taking-app-evangelist — Antoine is on vacation, we had to scour the internet to bring the best possible apps that are not data traps or microtransaction nests. As always, we highlighted gems discovered by the NextPit community and shared on our forum — thanks, Luna!

Metriport (Android and iPhone)

Following last week’s suggestions to help you keep your New Year’s resolutions, our first suggestion is Metriport. The app is a powerful, yet easy-to-use tool to log your wellbeing, health, and all sorts of goals using the smartphone.

In the default mode, the app helps you track your daily life, offering to register how your day was, what you ate, activities done, and so forth, like a journal, including the option to set daily reminders to add your daily data. Metriport uses the data to present graphs to show your evolution over time, with lots of options for customization, backing up, and export.

Metriport can optionally sync your data with Googie Fit or Apple Health. Apart from that, the app requires an account, but according to the developers, all data is encrypted. Unfortunately, even simple features like biometric authentication to lock access to the data require a subscription, costing $39.99 per year.

• Price: Free / Ads: No / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Required

ColorSlurp (iOS)

If you ever needed to create color palettes for design projects, you may have probably spent hours looking for perfect combinations. ColorSlurp promises to help you in that process, touting itself as “The Best Color Picker in the Universe”.

Also available for macOS, this Apple-only app can use the iPhone camera to pick colors from anything around you — just remember that iOS’s camera may change the color saturation — or from any image on the camera roll.

You can arrange different colors into palettes (called “Collections” in the app), export them in different formats — 8-bit RGB, HTML, CSS, JSON, etc. — and Pro users can even sync selections using iCloud after paying $2.99, or $7.99 for macOS syncing.

• Price: free / Ads: No / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Not required

Suggestify (Android and iOS)

Suggestify is a (really) niche app to create polls and surveys, which also has a social element, where you can take part and answer other people’s polls. The app is easy to use and has a nice interface, and you can ignore the social aspects to go straight to create polls, just remember to deactivate the app’s notifications; otherwise, you may be flooded with alerts for new polls created by other users.

You can use images — including animated GIFs and free stock pictures —, create Q&As, or simply create meme-like images to share on Facebook, WhatsApp, or other apps.

The app can use your Apple or Google account for syncing, but you can use the app without logging in. Some features need to be unlocked by paying a subscription, but the basic features are enough to check if you like the app.

• Price: Free / Ads: Yes / In-app purchases: Yes / Account: Not required

Fancy Clock Widget (Android)

Do you miss the good old days of analog clocks? Looking for ways to customize your Android phone’s home screen with a customized clock widget? Fancy Clock Widget can help you solve that.

As the name implies, the app offers a simple round clock widget that can be customized with background pictures — including the option to use pictures from your phone’s gallery. You can also change the outline, numbers, and even the arm types.

Some of the options are not free but can be unlocked by watching an ad in the app. The only thing it couldn’t help me with was to create a tasteful widget. And unfortunately, you can only have one widget customized at a time.

• Price: free / Ads: Yes, optional / In-app purchases: no / Account: not required

Sunshine Days (Android and iOS)

Sunshine Days is an early access game with some similarities to Nintendo’s Animal Crossing franchise. Explore your village and make it as comfy as possible, build a cozy home, interact with friends and neighbors, and, of course, take care of your garden.

The game has a cute ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ, perfect for taking screenshots and sharing on social media. The relaxed vibe helps pass the time, especially on a rainy day — or any pandemic-related restrictions. You begin customizing your character with lots of options that can be combined into thousands of combinations.

Just remember that the game is still in development, so it is still not clear how the devs will monetize it. Currently, Sunshine Days is free from ads and in-app purchases, but that can change when it officially launches. Also, beware of game crashing bugs.

• Price: Free / Ads: No / In-app purchases: No / Account: Not required