Introduction

The iPad may have been the pioneer among mass-selling consumer tablets, and its app selection certainly accelerated off the line like a V8 sportscar. But Android, over the last two years, has sped forward with equal gusto. Tablet sales for both platforms keep booming, and with that growth their respective app markets keep expanding. The Google Play marketplace, which sells apps and content for the Android market, now offers a dizzying number of apps created by independent developers. Note that the focus in Google Play early on was on apps designed for Android-based smartphones, but it’s diversifying; Play now features a more-than-respectable selection optimized for Android tablets, too.

We looked at scores of apps and picked out some of most essential ones for any new tablet. Google itself, the driving force behind Android, makes our Top 50 a handful of times. While Android is an open-source system and developers all over the world create apps for the platform, Google does a good job of developing core products and services for the Android OS, which it created. We also looked at apps from developers with lots of offerings on the market, as well as apps that serve as front ends for crucial, single-platform Net services, such as YouTube and PayPal.

Our primary filter for each app (apart from it being essential and great): It must be free. However, “free” comes in a whole bunch of flavors in the app world. While some apps are free outright—no strings attached—a few here are free only with a trial period, or have free base functionality but offer in-app purchases to unlock incremental features. And many of the totally free apps do have ads in them—the developers get revenue from the ads that enables them to offer the app for free.

We’ve broken down our list of the best free Android apps into five categories: Social Media, Productivity, Organization, Home & Family, and Diversions. Social Media, as you might expect, is among the most popular categories of apps used on tablets. As consumption devices, tablets are great paired with social-media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, allowing you to sit back and browse posts, swipe through photos, and tap out short messages to your contacts.

Other categories help you make your tablet time more productive and useful, and even help other aspects of your life. In the Productivity and Organization categories, we found apps that offer tips and strategies to better use your time (not the time you spend on the tablet, but away from it). We also found apps that help you schedule, manage, and delegate tasks. Home & Family, meanwhile, is a collection of apps that help the family operate better as a unit, as well as apps that enhance your time spent relaxing together. (Our fave? An app that lets you use your tablet as a big, touch-screen TV remote you can all vie for control of.)

Finally, Diversions is a mixed bag of apps that cross over a bunch of categories. These include media, health and fitness, entertainment, and personalization apps.

Source: www.computershopper.com