Let’s face facts. Some apps are just pointless. They make little noises, do little tricks, and show fun colors. However, at the end of the day, they don’t do anything useful. They lose their charm quickly like those little doo-dads you buy from that one store at the mall. Or they pretend to do something useful but it’s really just hindering your life. Here are the most useless apps for Android.
Some honorable mentions that didn’t make the list are OEM backup apps, antivirus apps, and a few other types. Generally speaking, these kinds of apps have a function, but they’re superfluous to some better option. For instance, OEM backup apps pale in comparison to the built-in backing up that Google does. Instead of antivirus apps, you could just not do things that put your phone at risk. Stuff like that. Let’s get started!
Looking for more stuff that many consider useless? Check out these apps!
The Abu Moo collection of apps may be among the most useless apps ever. There are six apps in the collection and each one costs $400. What do these apps do? Not a damn thing. They sit in your app drawer. You can put a poorly constructed gem widget on your home screen to show people how rich you are, but otherwise the app doesn’t actually do anything. The developer seems aware of this and the descriptions for these apps are pretty goofy. You can check them out, but we don’t recommend you buy them. For real.
Here’s the thing. Clean Master used to be a pretty decent app. It was a minimal app that let you clean out your junk and give your device more storage. Over time, though, the app added a bunch of pointless, useless features that actually do more harm than good. Now, Clean Master (and similar boosting apps) try to overdo everything by including an antivirus, booster functionality (which doesn’t really work), task killer functions that don’t really work (none do anymore), and makes promises it can’t possibly keep like those medicine salesmen from the 1800s. There are plenty of cleaner apps disguised as regular apps (looking at you, ES File Explorer) which only adds to the mayhem of trying to avoid them. These are useless apps at best and battery draining lies at worst. Avoid them.
Coloring book apps are starting to make a splash in the Android ecosystem. Unfortunately, they’re not all great. Many of them, including the newly released Color by Disney, want you to pay a subscription service in order to use their coloring book app. Here’s how they generally work. You get a little bit of content for free (which usually isn’t very good) and then you have to pay every month to get the good stuff. Some of them charge as much as you’d pay for Netflix or Hulu. Subscriptions on some types of apps are perfectly okay, but coloring books aren’t one of them. These are expensive, useless apps
Fan Cooler (and apps like it) are cute, but ultimately pointless. These are gag apps where it makes your phone look like it’s doing something that it isn’t actually doing. Some of the more popular ones are fan coolers like the one we have linked, fake fingerprint scanners (which are especially silly since phones have real ones now), fake warnings, fake phone calls, etc. They’re used mostly to fool your friends once or twice and then you end up uninstalling them because people don’t fall for the same lame tricks more than like three or four times. They’re okay for what they are, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useless apps.
Hold On (and similar games) are extremely pointless. These games usually have some sort of super simple mechanic that it tries to excite you into doing a bunch of times. Hold On has a button that you press and hold to see how long you can go. The joke is on you, though, because pop up ads break your streak eventually anyway. These are different from games like Flappy Bird because the mechanic isn’t challenging whatsoever. Holding a button down on your screen while a timer ticks up is the virtual version of having a contest to see who can go the longest without blinking. It’s ultimately a waste of time and loses whatever charm it had very quickly.
Here are some apps that definitely aren’t useless!
We talked about random apps that don’t do real things. However, we felt like apps that did that to animals deserved its own slot. There are a variety of human-to-animal translators, dog whistles, animal sound effects, fake laser pointers, and whatever else people can think of. Obviously, they don’t work which means these are just really fancy noisemakers that your animals probably hate anyway. You can get squeaky toys at the pet store that make the same obnoxious noises, but at least you have the comfort of knowing your animal will eventually destroy them. We won’t tell you not to get these useless apps, but we really should. Please note, these don’t include apps that make animal noises for the purposes of education for kids.
You just knew that someone was going to make an app like this. However, what you didn’t know is that there are hundreds of these apps floating around. Unlike Abu Moo (above) where the app has a point but that point is stupid, useless apps like this one are just flat useless. The one we have linked comes with a button and that button does nothing when you press it. It also comes with a useless widget that also does nothing. At the very least, the app does exactly what it says it does, which, again, is absolutely nothing. Actually, I love this app. It’s kind of awesome.
There are two types of quiz apps on Android. There are ones that ask questions and the answers are reasonable. Then there are these IQ tests that ask questions that have no right answers. Or, rather, they do, but the questions are so ambiguously worded that you might as well just be guessing. You’ve seen questions like this on Facebook where 9000 people comment with 9000 different answers and then 9000 more people comment to let them know that all their answers are wrong and that someone else was right. We know a cheat code for these silly IQ tests, though. The uninstall button is always the right answer.
Tickle Me Timmy is in a family of very creepy apps that let you treat your phone like people. You can tickle your phone and it’ll react by laughing. There are others, each one somehow ends up more creepy than the last. There are french kiss testing games, apps that make your phone talk to you, and all kinds of other stuff. Ultimately, these are all useless apps. They don’t do anything and those adventurous enough to try them should definitely not try to use them in public. Your phone is not people. At least not yet. We still have high hopes for Google Assistant. Also, don’t like your phone. That’s gross.
Does anyone remember Yo? If not, here’s a reminder. Yo is a messaging app where all you can say is Yo. It is left up to the person receiving the message to figure out what you actually meant. The developer had some fun ideas with this one initially but none of them ever really took off. What we’re left with is an app that was last updated in 2015 that just bounces Yos back and forth forever. When Google Allo came out and everyone proclaimed that it was a useless messaging app, it became clear that all of those people forgot about Yo.
If we missed any of the most useless apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! To see our complete list of best app lists, click here.
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