4 Apps Android Users Rarely Use (But Should) – BGR

After purging roughly half of all apps on its storefront, the Google Play Store has nearly 2 million applications available to download. Sorting through millions of apps to find the best one is not practical, but there are some apps that you should be using more.

Apps like Blackmagic Camera, which is free to use, enhance the shooting experience by adding features like Open Gate recording. With so many settings and ways to customize the image, the app can seem daunting, but it’s worth giving it a try. Apple TV is another standout that deserves recognition. Although it’s made by a competitor and was only recently made available on Android, Apple TV is considered a spiritual successor to HBO, delivering incredible series like Foundation and Slow Horses.

For this list, we leveraged our experiences as Android users to choose four apps we believe encompass the spirit of this headline. These apps are a bit underrated or forgotten, yet they offer a lot of value. To see the full list, keep reading below. 

Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, and YouTube Music are all popular music streaming services. While they bill themselves as different, they all offer many of the same songs and features, especially now that Spotify has added lossless streaming for Premium members. If you’re looking for a truly unique music streaming experience, look to the folks who have delivered decades’ worth of memories: Nintendo.

The Nintendo Music app is unlike the other apps mentioned earlier because it doesn’t offer music from top-charting artists. You won’t find Sabrina Carpenter on this service, but you will find music from Nintendo games, such as Super Mario Odyssey, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Splatoon 3, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is considered to be one of the best video game soundtracks of all time. It’s nearly impossible to buy Nintendo music or to stream it anywhere else due to Nintendo’s tight hold over its IPs. You can’t even listen to music from Nintendo games on YouTube — illegal streams that do this get shut down relatively quickly. That leaves the Nintendo Music app as your only option if you want to enjoy your favorite games’ soundtracks. 

The Nintendo Music app may be seen as a cash grab by cynics, but it’s more affordable compared to other music streaming services. Access to the app and the Nintendo music catalog requires a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, which costs $3.99 per month, or $19.99 per year. While the Nintendo Music app doesn’t have every soundtrack, new music is added weekly. The app features curated playlists based on moods, genres, and characters, which keeps things interesting. The “Extend To” feature is a favorite, allowing you to loop a song for up to 60 minutes of seamless playback. 

The app wasn’t always available on Android. The app only came to Android in early 2025, giving Android users access to everything Apple TV has to offer. This is great if you have an Apple TV device at home to stream content on your TV, but you use an Android phone. Essentially, you can pick up right where you left off, and you don’t have to buy into the Apple ecosystem to do it. 

The user interface and experience are very similar to those used on the Apple TV devices, so using it on Android feels seamless. You can view all of the Apple TV content on the home page, with the top row displaying content you’re currently watching. You can also download content straight to your phone for offline viewing, a neat feature if you’re traveling or going off the grid. While the content on the Apple TV app is limited to series and films made by Apple, it’s still a great way to catch up on popular titles like Slow Horses, Down Cemetery Road, Foundation, and For All Mankind.

If you’re a fan of soccer, you’ll be glad to know the app has a dedicated MLS tab, where you can catch up on all the action from MLS teams. Up until this season, you did need to sign up for the MLS season pass to get access to every game, but that’s no longer the case. Starting next season, MLS matches will be free in 2026 for Apple TV subscribers. That means you can watch Messi embarrass defenses every week, sometimes twice, without paying more than you do now.

Your smartphone already has a default camera app. It’s not bad for taking video, a time-lapse, or even a slow-motion clip. Though if you’re serious about the quality of your video, the default camera app on your Android phone doesn’t give you advanced tools to dial in the look you’re aiming for. For that, you need the Blackmagic Camera app made by Blackmagic Design, the company behind the DaVinci Resolve Video Editor and various cinema cameras. 

The Blackmagic Camera app is nothing like the default camera app on your phone. In fact, it’s a lot better and more in-depth, allowing you to fine-tune the camera on your phone. For example, without having to jump into any menus, you can click on various aspects of the camera to adjust settings, such as ISO, focal length, shutter speed, white balance, and even resolution. You can also activate a grid for better composition, turn on the zebra pattern to pinpoint over- or underexposed parts of the scene, view the RGB histogram in the bottom left corner for more accurate color readouts, or monitor sound with the audio levels meter. 

The settings menu unlocks even more functionality. For example, you can opt to shoot in the Open Gate aspect ratio, which uses the entire sensor instead, making it easier to crop in post without losing detail. You can also connect the app to the Blackmagic Cloud. This is crucial if you use DaVinci Resolve to edit, as the clips can be accessed from the editor once uploaded to the cloud directly from your phone. It makes shooting, editing, and publishing a heck of a lot faster. And the best part is, the app is 100% free. 

Valve’s Steam software is well-known to gamers as the most popular digital storefront for games. The company, which just announced its own PC, has been around for decades at this point, offering almost any game you can imagine. The Steam app on Android works a lot like the desktop version, except you can’t download and play games directly on your phone. What you can do is browse the Steam store and purchase games. It’s great to have during the famous Steam Sales, which kick off a few times a year and offer discounts on a vast number of games. Rather than wait until you get home, you can start browsing and putting items in your cart.

The Steam app is also useful for downloading games on your computer or Steam Deck. With many games having massive file sizes, this helps you get a jumpstart on the download, which can take hours depending on the size of the game and your internet connection. To do this, open the app, click on the hamburger menu icon, select Library, pick your game, and then choose Remote Download. If you have more than one device, you can choose which one to download it to. You can follow the same process to uninstall a game from your device. 

The final reason to have the Steam app is because of Steam Guard, which is an authenticator that secures your account and makes it quick and easy to log into Steam on another device. The Steam Guard icon is located centrally at the bottom of the screen and is represented by a shield logo. To use it, aim your Android phone’s camera at the QR code shown on the device you’re using to log into Steam. Doing so will immediately log you into the new device.

Whether you’ve forgotten about default apps on your Android or don’t keep up with new apps, we created this list to showcase four underrated apps on Google’s ecosystem. To create the list, we relied on our own expertise as Android users to select apps that provide real value. While we chose apps that were free to download, not all are free to use, like the Nintendo Music app, which requires an active subscription to the Nintendo Switch Online service. It was our goal to put together a list of four solid Android apps that each offered something different.