Best Android Apps of the Week: Echo Notification, Beats Music 1.1, Google I/O 2014, SwiftKey 5.0, and More

It’s Monday and if you are one of our loyal readers you are probably here for another round of our Best Android Apps of the Week column.

For those of you hitting our weekly column for the first time, I remind that the Best Android Apps of the Week article aims to bring you the most noteworthy applications that were released in Google Play in a week’s time. You will also encounter older apps that received major updates in the past week.

It’s also worth noting that some of the apps are available for free, some are payed apps, and others might have in-app purchases. Let’s have a look at this week’s best Android apps.

Echo Notification Lockscreen – Free

I know that some of you get loads of notifications and if, let’s say you are in a meeting and away from your phone for more than an our, the notification bar is a mess. I know that mine is.

Echo Notification Lockscreen aims to address this particular annoyance. The app is still in alpha and it’s available for download for free.

Using Echo Notifications your lockscreen will look cleaner, each notification being automatically tossed under an appropriate category: missed calls, texts, emails, priority, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Priority notifications will briefly show on your screen and you will be able to interact with them.

Even though Echo Notification looks a bit too iOS-ish it’s a nice and useful app. You can find it in Google Play Store at this link.

Copy Bubble – Free

Copy Bubble is a free app that comes in handy when it comes to copy-pasting multiple items. In fact it’s the best way to manage your clipboard on your Android device.

The Copy Bubble bubble will float on top of your opened apps and count the number of items you have in your clipboard and allow yous to find them more easily.

You can tap the bubble to open the clipboard and see all the items you’ve copied. Usually when you paste the last item you have copied will be pasted. To paste a specific item, open the bubble and select that particular item. If it’s a link, Copy Bubble will show a preview directly from the clipboard. To remove items simply click on the “x” button.

You can find Copy Bubble in Google Play Store at this link. The app is completely free.

BallTune – Free

World Cup 2014 is currently taking place in Brazil and if you want to play for your national team in 2018 then BallTune is a must-have app.

BallTune is supposed to help you measure the pressure of your foot ball by watching it wit your smartphone’s camera, then tells you whether the ball is over-inflated, suited for power, accuracy, or control, or if it’s under-inflated.

You won’t become Cristiano Ronaldo over night using this app, but at least your ball will be inflated properly. Give it a try. It’s free. Here’s the Play Store link.

Beats Music 1.1 – Free

Apple acquired Beats Music a couple of weeks ago. In the meantime the Beats Music app for Android got updated to version 1.1.

Beats Music 1.1 arrives with a new landscape mode and support for saving offline downloads on an external SD card, as well as transferring offline downloads between SD card & internal device storage. The new version also changes the “Find it” button with “Browse” in the navigation bar, improves playback, and fixes bugs.

Beats Music 1.1 is already available for download in Google Play Store. Here’s a link to it.

Facebook 10.0 – Free

The official Facebook app for Android has been updated to version 10.0. No, there are no interface improvements, but you’ll encounter a handful of new features.

Facebook 10.0 allows the users to like posts, photos, and pages while offline, to remove tags they’ve crated, to remove tags of yourself that others have created, and to turn post notifications on and off directly from your smartphone. There are also bug fixes and speed improvements.

Facebook is free and it can be found in Google Play Store at this link.

Google I/O 2014 – Free

Google I/O 2014 kicks off in less than two weeks and the Mountain View-based company has released the official app for their developers conference.

After you install Google I/O 2014 you will be able to explore the conference agenda, to add events to a personalized schedule, to get reminders before events, watch the Keynote and sessions live, and other I/O-related actions.

The Google I/O 2014 app is free and it can be downloaded from Google Play Store at this link.

SwiftKey 5.0 – Free

SwiftKey is by far the most popular Android keyboard and it has reached version 5.0, becoming free on this occasion. If you happened to pay for SwiftKey, you will be able to download a premium themes pack for free.

The new SwiftKey 5.0 arrives with SwiftKey Store which has more than 30 keyboard themes, has a new icon, emoji support, emoji prediction, and optional dedicated number row. The SwiftKey team also announce they added new languages, improved prediction engine and flow accuracy, and that they fixed some bugs.

You can download SwiftKey from Google Play Store at this link.