Truly wireless earbuds are great to have, but if you want to use them for extended periods of time, you have to bring along the charging case. Most cases are thicker than the average smartphone, and can be uncomfortable in your pocket). Aipower’s new Wearbuds wireless earbuds are more convenient to carry around than any other earbuds, because they can be stored on your wrist, and we’ve partnered with Aipower to give away four pars to Android Police readers.
The Aipower Wearbuds have all the features you would expect on wireless earbuds, including Bluetooth 5.0 support, noise canceling, premium silicon ear tips, instant pairing, IPX6 waterproofing (the band is IPX5), and aptX codec support. The included wristband is a bonus feature — not only does it serve as a charger for the earbuds, but it also works as a dedicated fitness tracker, and it can display notifications from your phone on its integrated touchscreen.
Battery life is also very good, with an estimated 5.5 hours of playtime for the earbuds (12 hours with the band), and seven days of life for the band. We’re giving away four pairs below, but you can also pre-order Wearbuds right now from Kickstarter. The early bird pricing of $49 is already sold out, but you can still grab a pair for just $99.
The contest will run from June 22nd, 2019 until 11:59PM Pacific Time on June 25th, 2019. Four winners will be selected, and each will receive one Aipower Wearbuds. The contest is only open to residents of the United States (excluding territories).
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. Today I have an amusing AR drawing app, a Marvel learning app designed for children, and a new release from ClockworkMod intended to help with home automation. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.
Please wait for this page to load in full in order to see the widgets, which include ratings and pricing info.
Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here.
Featured Product
Cover Your Kingdom
Our very own Jeff Beck has a hit tabletop game on Kickstarter right now called Cover Your Kingdom. Jeff is rather famous here at AP for his snarky comments and his epic pun battles with Rita. He's put that penchant for puns and humor to good use in producing this game. It funded in minutes and currently is more than 1,000% over goal.
Cover Your Kingdom is a highly aggressive take-that set-collection party game with easy to grasp rules but sufficient strategy to satisfy even the most ardent tabletop gamers. If you enjoy Exploding Kittens, Unstable Unicorns, or other games in this genre, you're going to love Cover Your Kingdom.
In addition to compelling mechanics, it's replete with dozens of the best kind of awful puns, featuring characters like UniqueHorns, Sighclops, PegLegasus, and Hentaurs. The game is $25 with free shipping in the US and has friendly international shipping rates. You can check it out yourself by heading over to Kickstarter.
If you’ve ever wanted to create drawings that you can then insert into real-world surroundings through augmented reality, then you’re going to get a kick out of our first app in today’s roundup DoodleLens. Using this release is rather simple to do, just draw what you want and then paste the pic into the camera function of the app, then you can tweak the pic in its surroundings before you capture a screenshot of your completed creation.
Marvel Hero Tales is an app designed to help children learn how to read. Each story is presented as an issue of a comic book, and so far you can Play through a few Ms. Marvel and Spiderman stories, with more characters and issues coming at a later date. The mechanics of the app’s word-based minigames revolve around selecting words that complete specific phrases, and once the sentence is complete the player is then quizzed on the meaning of those words by matching them with synonyms. It’s a simple setup that should appeal to children, though a $1.99 monthly subscription fee is required if you want to play past the first story for Ms. Marvel.
Monetization: free / no ads / IAPs from $1.99 – $30.99
Scrypted Home Automation
Scrypted Home Automation is a new release from ClockworkMod, and its purpose is to make home automation easier by allowing you to create a home hub out of any Android device, even a Shield TV. You can integrate this release with Google Home, Apple HomeKit, or Amazon Alexa, and you can automate just about anything you can think of by setting schedules and creating events. This way, you can perform everyday actions after you’ve set up a few scripted events.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
Shade Launcher
Shade Launcher comes from Amir Zaidi, the same person that maintains the Rootless Launcher. This particular launcher differs from its predecessor as it is has been personalized by the dev to offer precisely a “home screen should be.” So expect a few extra beneficial features, such as a widget that can display all of your relevant notifications, as well as a bunch of customization options that should appeal to those that enjoy theming their setup.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
Hand in Hand
Much like Marvel Hero Tales, Hand in Hand is a release that blurs the line between app and game. This title uses augmented reality to mix documentary and fiction, allowing the user to experience an era of full employment to full automation. The premise highlights a future where humans no longer need to work thanks to advancements in AI, but the problem is that this AI still isn’t smart enough to replace all jobs. So it will be the player’s job to interact with this AI so that it can learn human emotions to become even more efficient, thus allowing for an even larger pot to draw from for the world’s universal income. So if you dig complex stories that reflect where our technology may lead, Hand in Hand offers exactly this type of experience.
Study from Facebook is currently only available to registered participants in the Facebook Study program for the purpose of market research. This means you have to be invited to the study, or else this app won’t work. So if you are not a participant, you can ignore this release.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
Yahoo Finance
Yahoo Finance offers free live market coverage specifically for Android TV users, so if you rely on Yahoo for your financial news, now you can kick back and relax on your couch as you watch up-to-the-minute streams. No subscription is required, and you can expect to find on-demand content that that can be easily streamed whenever you like.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
Fluent Forever
Fluent Forever is an app designed to help people learn new languages. It supports Spanish (Latin American & Castilian), French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, and Korean, which should cover most people’s needs. Instead of gamifying the learning process like most language learning apps, you are taught the proper pronunciation of the most common words in the target language so that you push them to your long-term memory.
Monetization: free / no ads / IAPs $9.99 a piece
Mubert
Mubert is a randomly-generated electronic music app that uses AI to tailor the sound experience for each user. Each stream is made up of random samples and loops that are chosen by the algorithm to best represent the favorite genre of the user. Mubert can even tailor your tunes to whatever activity you are doing at the time, which makes this a great release to listen to as you exercise.
Monetization: free / no ads / IAPs from $0.99 – $69.99
Manufacturer And Tie-In Apps
5G Moto Mod
5G Moto Mod is a tie-in release from Motorola that can unlock new features for the Moto 5G. Things like greater bandwidth frequency and faster data speeds are a few of the new possibilities added through this release. Of course, if you don’t own a Moto 5G, you can skip this listing.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
instax mini LiPlay
The instax mini LiPlay release is a tie-in app for the Fujifilm instax mini LiPlay camera. Much like the Polaroid of yesteryear, instax offers an easy way to take and share snapshots while also offering full control from your mobile device. This means you can share sounds recorded on your camera through QR codes as well as use your phone as a remote when your camera isn’t in your hands.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
RoboMaster
RoboMaster is another tie-in release for a physical product, and this time around, it’s for DJI’s RoboMaster S1. Much like all of DJI’s products, there’s an app available that will afford you an easy way to manage your equipment from the comfort of your phone’s screen. What’s really cool about this release is that multiple people can use the app at the same time with a single RoboMaster S1, which should prove to be a fun way to explore the tank-like drone.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
Sonata AR
Sonata AR ties into Westfield Comics’ Sonata comic book series. This release mainly serves as a promotional product that offers a few augmented reality features for physical comic books, such as being able to see how a comic was made or viewing behind-the-scenes content.
Monetization: free / no ads / no IAPs
Know A Worthy New App? Let Us Know!
If you have an application in mind for the next issue of the roundup, feel free to send us an email and let us know.
Important: there are 2 requirements in order for the app to be considered, listed below.
the app’s launch date has to be no longer than 2 weeks ago
it has to be original, ground-breaking, well-reviewed, interesting, fun, etc – the cream of the crop
Now, if and only if the above requirements have been satisfied, fire up an email to this address: [email protected].
1 sponsored placement per week is available (your app would be featured at the top and marked as sponsored) – please contact us for details.
