ANDROID APPS FOR TRAVELERS

Android apps are not only toys for fun, but pretty usefull while on the road.
Here's a small compilation of the best Apps we're using all the time, when traveling.

The Apps are categorized in

. Photo & Video
. Navigation
. Quadcopter | Drone Stuff
. Weather & Climate
. Camping
. Security
. Entertainment
Clouds
MISC


Clicking on the Apps' icon will bring you to the Google Play Store

PHOTO & VIDEO

PhotoPills is a "photographers swiss army knife" and an absolutley stunning tool for every serious photographer who plans his shots, before visiting a desired place.
It comes with unnumerous features like exposure calculation, DOF calculation, Hyperfocal calculation, lens comparions, Time Lapse calculation and last but not least a precise Sun-/Moon-/Milkyway planning feature.
Well... these are just a few of its features, but after testing thousands of apps so far, I dare to say, that PhotoPills is the very best app for the photpgrapher, googles Playstore has to offer. It's a little bit pricier, but worth every single cent.

Adobe Lightroom is the quasi standard for editing photos on a smartphone or tablet. It's very similar to the desktop application, but of course made for mobile usage

Photo Director is another fancy photo editing tool with lots of "just click" effects... easy to use.

VivaVideo is a very easy to use video editor. I'm using it primarily for editing some small aerial snippets for instagram.

The original App from Panasonic gives you full control over your Panasonic Lumix Camera(s)
I'm using it to remote controll my Panasonic GH5 and GX8, while driving and when it's mounted to the hood of the JEEP.

Mobile Observatory is - as PhotoPills - a second "swiss army knife" for the Astro-photographer. Its features are really unnumerous, so you really should check it out, when you're interested to photograph Deep-Sky Objects like, clusters, nebulae or galaxies.
It comes with a huge list of DSO's as well as with a live view and even if it is a little bit slower and heavier, it's a must have for every astronomer.

When you plan to shoot a "Milky Way Time Lapse", this App is pretty usefull. It's an augmented reality app and shows you, where the Milky Way will be at any given time and day. When not in augmented reality mode, it also shows beautiful zodiacal signs as well as many other informations.
When using Mobile Observatory, this tool isn't needed anymore, I just use it for double check planet and star constellations.

Planets is similar to Skyview and does nearly exactly the same, just faster 🙂

Nothing is more annoying for shooting the milky way, as a totally light overflooded area. With this app you're able to check, where you can find unpolluted areas (which you definitely won't find near cities)

Sygic is amongst others my absolute favorite navigation app. Also, because it's easy to import my personal waypoints. A more detailed article I've written here

Locus Pro is an inexpensive but great app, especially for offroad navigation. It comes with track recording and several types of maps, as well as online and offline navigaton. The im- and export function works very well.

We're using a pretty old version of Navigon on our iPhone as a fall back solution. The new versions are slow and not so intuitive anymore.

CoPilot is also a very good solution and the 2nd best navigation app we found so far. I just switched, because in the past it didn't come with a Japan map.

It does, what the name says. As many navigation systems and apps on the market do have their own coordinate format, this converter is usefull to converte for the different systems... just that

A simple and precise compass without any twirls.

QUADCOPTER | DRONE STUFF

DJI Go is the original App for my Phantom 3 Professional. The functionality is basic, but the App is bugfix and fast.

Litchi has much more functionality than the DJI GO App. It features VR Goggles and you can predefine a flight route, which lets the drone fly totally autonomous.
Take in mind: DJI does not cover any failures which occur by this App, but don't mind: It does a perfect job!

HD Sync just does one thing: It automatically synchronizes your flight data with Airdata, formerly "Healthy Drones".

Drones are heavily influenced by so called magentic fields, which are caused by solar activity. The KP index App shows, whether it's a good time to fly, or not. Highly recommended for every pilot!

WEATHER & CLIMATE

MyRadar is like "Animated Weatermap", a worldwide map, which shows the actual temperatures in realtime. Both of those tools are similar, I use both of them, just to see how precise the given data is.

Animated Weatermap is like MyRadar", a worldwide map, which shows the actual temperatures in realtime. Both of those tools are similar, I use both of them, just to see how precise the given data is.
I like this App a little bit more, as it has nice icons showing the wind direction and cloud formations.

Worldscope Webcams is a really great App, which shows a huge amount of webcams, which are covering nearly any area of the globe. I'm primarily using this App to see, where it looks like at a specific place, before I drive there.

If you're an Aurora Borealis chaser, then this is the right app for you. It forecasts the ability to see the beautiful polarlights. A highlight is, that you can set your own alarm for a desired area.

CAMPING

iOverlander is a pretty cool database of places for overlanders and travelers. In our case we just use it for finding POIs for wild camping, but it offers much more, like camping hotel, restaurants, mechanics, water, propane filling and may other categories.

At the moment "Camping.Info" is all we need for visiting official campsites. As we rarely go on campsites and haven't such high demands, we are able to find nearly everywhere a nice campsite, if needed. It covers the whole Europe (24000 Campsites so far) and is very intuitive, as you can tap on a map and it zooms in and shows you all campsites in the tapped area with lots of information. The best is... it is free!

Before we used "Campsite.Info", we used ACSI., which has also been very reliable. In times, when we used it, we more often have been on campsites. But nowadays it's not free anymore, but anyway a pretty good "must have"

SECURITY
KeePassDroid is our ultimate Data-Safe! We're using it on our PCs too (KeePass) and it synchronizes every device via dropbox, which works perfect. It has a very strong encryption (256 bit) and works with different cryptographic algorythms. For us the best solution to keep our data safe, while we're on the road!

This app only works with its hardware. It's a small bluetooth dongle which will be connected to your batteries (starter and service). It continuously monitors the health and load status of your batteries and reminds you, when they should be charged.

ENTERTAINMENT
BubblePNP is my favorized DLNA player, when it comes to streaming. As we're using lots of different devices at home or while traveling, BubblePNP streams from one device to the other, no matter what. At home, I'm using it with a Synlogoy Media Server and together with my smartphone, I'm easily able to stream movies directly onto my Samsung TV.
 The MXPlayer Pro is a versatile multimedia player, which is able to play nearly every file format, which lies on my servers, my smartphones or my tablets and laptops. With a special codec it is even capable of decoding DTS and Dolby Digital streams. Perfect, Fast, Reliable!
 Poweramp is our audio player. Together with our JBL Charge+ Bluetooth Player it's our first choice for streaming music from smartphones, tablets or laptops to our In-Car Navigation system or our wireless Bluetooth speaker. It has dozens of options, a nice equalizer and the sound quality is outstanding. For me, the best so far!
 I've tried several photo-gallery Apps, but found this one the most versatile.
CLOUDS

We're using all the CLOUD services below for backups of App-settings, smartphones, servers, our wordpress-installations, SQL-databases, as well of photographs and videos. We still have doubts, how secured these CLOUD solutions are, therefore we only save uncritical or highly encrypted data there.

MISC

Torque Pro is a must have for every car driver with an ECM inside his/her car and it only works together with an OBDII device. Once the device (I own an ELM327 Bluetooth Dongle) is plugged in the cars OBDII plug, Torque gives you every important information about your car.
An ab-so-lu-te-ly recommended app and the de facto most important app in my JEEP.

We're using the Total Commander also on our PC's for more than 10 years now. It's a double windowed file manager with dozens of functions and can be highly enhanced by additional plugins.
It's the so called "Swiss Army Knife" of all file-commanders, so far and works absolutely great on all smartphones and tablets.

In case of losing our documents like passports or whatever certificates, we need do be able to get access to our file-servers at home. Every single document is stored there and with the Teamviewer we are able to safely connect to our infrastructure at home.

gAnalytics is like the name says an analytics tool, to keep track of our blog. At the moment it does its job, even if we don't know, if there maybe is a better one.

Our infrastructure at home is based on several servers from Synology (overall space of 45 terabyte). Synology servers are most reliable, they're already working for years now, without any problems and DS File grants us the perfect, fast and reliable access to all of our servers... from anywhere in the world.

What Apps are you guys using?

I'm permanently seeking for useful and reliable apps and would appreciate, if you would name a few cool ones. I'm also interested in some Survival Apps, but really don't know, which ones are good or not.

Leave your comment

to top button