10 Exceptional Android Applications of 2018

The android apps experts of a leading Website Development Company in Delhi say that you all agree with us on this that Google Play Store is literally a galaxy of applications and software.  Though from far, the number of apps the store boasts is staggering and it’s really hard to tell which ones are phenomenal, which ones are mediocre and which one are a sheer waste of time and MBs or KBs maybe. But when you evaluate and compare each one of those in terms of usability, functionality, features, and quality, you’ll come across stark differences between them. With over 3.5 million apps plastered across the store, it is really hard to guess which ones to go for.

To remedy this, a leading firm in Search Engine Optimization in Delhi has put together a list of top 10 Android Apps in 2018 that are too good for their own good.

#1

Express VPN: We know the dangers of browsing on shady public Wi-Fis, we all do, but there is hardly anything we do about it unless of course, we finally see the ramification of it with our personal data and confidential information being hacked or threatened to be sold. So, if you don’t want to put your Android device in danger by recklessly browsing on sketchy public Wifi, you need to secure your mobile device with a solid VPN pin. Express VPN is a great app that provides an SSL-secured network with 256-bit encryption and unlimited bandwidth.

#2

1Weather: Human beings, in general, have this habit of staying up-to-date with the weather at all times and sometimes this habit stretches from being updated for second-to-second weather forecast to literally a month. 1Weather is the best weather forecast app you’ll find on Google Play Store with a simple, paginated design that tells the current weather along with a forecast for up to 12 weeks, a radar so you’ll know when the storm is approaching, serve weather notifications and a set of lightly customizable widgets.

#3

Google Opinion Rewards: Well you know, while some of the Android apps on Play Store are free, there are few intriguing and highly functional mobile apps that require you to pay few bucks to get them installed. Google Opinion Rewards is great for those who don’t want to shed a single penny form their pockets to buy these apps. The Apps wants you to fill in few surveys, and upon successful completion, you’ll be rewarded few reward points that you can spend in the store. This I must say is an app everyone should go for.

#4

Gboard- the Google Keyboard: Google is indeed a master of apps and software. They just hit the bull’s-eye with everything they come up with. Gboard is another example of this. This literally has everything a standard keyword should boast which includes Glide typing, the famous voice search and know what, Google search is built right into it, that means you can search anything, anywhere, then and there without leaving the chat. Want to send in a GIF, but don’t want to leave the chat? Send a Google GIF right away, problem solved!

#5

Google Drive Suite: Google has hijacked our list of top 10 Android Apps and I think they rightly deserve this attention. Another Android app which is indeed worth downloading is the Google Drive Suite. Google drive is an exceptional cloud storage solution where users are given permanent 15GB free for signing up; if you want to expand your storage space then you need to pay for that. The nail on the head is the plethora of other features that come with the suite including Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Keep. You literally have app for everything that might make your life and work life easier.

#6

Google Maps: Google makes sure you can travel and explore any part of the world with utmost ease and comfort that’s why they have devised an app which is a saving grace for people who are either bad with routes or are a complete stranger in a new city or a country. Apart from the obvious navigation facility, the app also provides a user with the access to places of interest, traffic data, and directions to things like rest stops or gas stations and now they are also providing offline map facility.

#7

Solid Explorer File Management: A paid Android app but definitely a must-have for those who keep their phones stocked to the brim. Organizing your phone without a file manager installed is likely shooting arrows in the dark. Answer this simple question; have you ever come across an Android phone which has a seamless way of navigating the areas of a phone? No, I don’t think so. So, this is where Solid Explorer steps in. It makes you move around your files a lot easier and clearing up those wasted mbs, along with the linkage to cloud storage systems to help you switch your files back and forth and also a security feature where you can lock your phone with a fingerprint.

#8

Datally: One must pay close attention to a new app being launched by Google because the company always does things for a reason and purpose. Datally is an extraordinary app that helps you monitor how much mobile data you have consumed on a particular day and hence device ways to minimize it. The apps show you how much data your apps are consuming and the “Manage Date” feature help you look at apps which are drinking maximum mobile data. Another feature which is the enable “Data Saver” will connect you to a VPN that will restrict certain apps from using your mobile data.

#9

LastPass: We know how well we are in memorizing our phone, social accounts or other security-related passwords. To help secure the passwords we change every few months, just because we can’t memorize them, LastPass is an Android App everyone should have. LastPass helps users manage and safeguard their important login credentials in a safe and secure way. This password manager also helps users generate impossible passwords for your accounts that are absolutely unhackable and this all is secured with the help of a master password.

#10

Pocket Casts: For the podcast lovers sometimes it becomes difficult to download that one podcast app that is worth your phone mbs. Pocket casts should be the one and the only app for the podcast lovers. The app allows you to download and stream multiple podcasts with both audio-only and video podcast support. It comes with two basic themes-light and dark, a sign-in feature so you can sync your podcasts across devices, and a pretty decent recommendations function.

How Google Plan to Make the Whole Web as Fast as AMP?

The web developers of a top Web Designing Company in Delhi wants to tell its users through this blog the latest stunt carried out by the most popular, lately naïve and forever dynamic search engine, Google. Google is working towards convincing the entity who is the watchdog of web standards to embrace its interesting technology inspired by Accelerated Mobile Pages. Is it really that important that every single website owner have to devotedly succumb to Google’s technology? The picture the Google is trying to present over here is that they want every single web page to gain the advantages of AMP and offering prominent search positioning to sites that are using Google’s proprietary framework.

Launched back in 2015, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is Google’s most controversial development that has been a topic of debate for last 3 years within the web community. AMP is crushed, compressed and diet version of HTML, JavaScript and other web technologies packed with a number of non-standard modifications and restrictions to achieve multiple numbers of merits that are beneficial for mobile browsers. These merits bring under the umbrella the following benefits such as- instantaneous page loading, distribution on multiple platforms and a better search ranking on Google SERPs.

There are three major aspects of AMP,

  1. A restricted version of HTML with custom AMP-oriented tags for website components like images, audio, and video.
  2. A unique, custom mandatory JavaScript library that manages the AMP-specific tags, a few numbers of animations and other unique features.
  3. A personalized caching proxy system, wherein Google check the accuracy of AMP pages and then present them to clients

The sole reason behind the development of these alterations and restrictions is to ensure that the AMP pages are small, easy to load and consistent. Google’s David Besbris explained in an interview that they were trying and desperately wanted to turn AMP into a standardized technology.

“The trend in the industry at the time was the simple way of solving these problems, where you guaranteed that you could control the experience … but that comes at the cost of the web.”

“Based on what we learned from AMP, we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more fast-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this like the Top Stories carousel.”

But it is not a standard yet; many people think that Google is trying to force websites to adopt its proprietary format and give a back seat to web standards in favor of Google’s proprietary format.

With this announcement, Google has also mentioned that they’ll continue to work on the development of AMP technology and serving the same search engine positioning benefits to a site that have adopted the AMP technology. Without a specific timeline or roadmap, it is still yet to be determined how Google’s revelation would mold the world of web.

Shopify vs. Magento Community Edition for Ecommerce

The experienced web developers of a Best Website Designing Company West Delhi, Web Solution Centre says that before taking a final decision of an online store platform, you want your ecommerce website to be built on, let’s just clear out few important things.

  • Choosing an Ecommerce platform for building, managing and maintaining an ecommerce website is critical to the success and failure of your ecommerce website. This is specifically true for small businesses that have to literally make things work on limited time and resources.
  • Before deciding on the ecommerce platform, make sure you have forensically evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of your business. This will give you a rough idea as to on which ecommerce platform your business will be more suitable.
  • Look at the options carefully and take into consideration the ins and outs of each one of those options.

Someone who is working towards taking their business online, or is orchestrating a shift from one brand to another, the chances are fair that you might be weighing your options. Web Solution Centre brings you the comparative analysis of two of the most popular ecommerce website creation and management platforms – Shopify and Magento.

 

Basis of Differentiation Shopify Magento

 Basic Information

Shopify is a proprietary product for which you have to pay according to your usage requirements.

Magento on the other hand, is open source platform that you can use as per your liking to create your own online store.

 Level of Functionality

Shopify is easier to setup and run as compared to its counterpart.

Magento needs a little understanding before you start using it.

 Inventory

Shopify offers unlimited inventory management at a premium price.

Magento offers unlimited inventory management for free.

 

  Hosting

Shopify is a fully managed and hosted solution.

In Magento you need to have separate hosting, download, installation and set up.

  Shipping charges

You can improve your average order size by offering free shipping to your customers with their free shipping calculation software.

Offers powerful and flexible options for calculation of shipping charges.

 

 

Coupons and Discount Codes

Shopify does not offer provisions for coupons and discount codes

Magento allows options for coupons and discount code generation and calculation.

Payment Gateway Options

Shopify offers support for 70 payment gateways.

Magento allows limited support for payment gateways.

More payment gateways can be added through third-party add-ons.

Themes and Templates

Shopify offers a limited collection of free themes and templates, but they are more contemporary as compared to the free ones offered by Magento.Shopify premium themes start at $80.

Magento offers a massive collection of free themes and templates to give your online store a look and feel similar to the products and services you are selling.

Magento premium themes start at only $1.

Apps and Add-Ons

Shopify offers over 100+ apps and add-ons to enhance and expand the functionality of your online store.

Magento offers whooping 5000+ apps and add-ons.

   SEO Capabilities

Shopify offers only basic essential features for SEO including robots.txt and sitemap.xml files, Canonical URL tags, and editable meta descriptions, URLs and title tags.

Magento offers impactful SEO features like URLs, meta info, Google sitemap and Google content API.

 Customization Capabilities Offers robust customization capabilities that allow you to tweak the raw HTML/CSS code

Offers extreme level of customization that allows even the smallest of components to be customized.

 

 

 Cost

 

Shopify is a commercial ecommerce development platform which charges from $29/month to all the way up to $299/month depending upon your package.

Magento is a free open-source commerce innovation platform.

You just have to pay for periodic hosting charges and the cost for hiring certified Magento developers.

How Is Artificial Intelligence Changing The World of Mobile Applications?

What are the few names that come to your mind when you talk about smartphones, mobile apps and artificial intelligence in one breath? The mobile app developers of one of the leading Web Designing Company in Delhi, Web Solution Centre can think of few, naming Amazon’s Alexa, Apples’ Siri, Google’s Assistant, and Microsofts’s Cortana, well there are plenty of names one can jot down when talking about the apps that are the true embodiments of artificial intelligence in mobile applications. A countless number of professional developers and software masters dedicate plenty of hours molding these services into responsive personal assistants so that they can perform tasks for which they are so graciously developed. Personal assistants today are tracking, solving queries, sending messages, launching services and what not.

Stretching from the oh-so-famous chatbots, context-oriented intelligent sensors to the trending predictive analysis, linguists and software developers are digging for new and innovative ways to inculcate artificial intelligence in mobile apps to enhance business customer service solutions, deliver new and technologically advanced products and reimagine business services.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning together are changing the landscape of how software developers, businesses, and users think about building algorithms and intelligent-humanized interactions within mobile applications.

It’s way past the time when you can think of machine learning as a novel technology. We are now living in an era where we are aware of our needs and wants, what pleases us and what irks us. The time has come where users are now expecting flexible algorithms for a seamless experience. The incredible gust of Artificial Intelligence has completely modeled the way developers, users, and businesses are previously viewing intelligent interactions within mobile applications.

More Personalized Experience: Personalization is a core of every nook and cranny of the web world. If you are not giving users a personalized experience, then you are surely missing out on a huge one. The new availability and advancement of AI have pushed users to the edge where they have nowhere else to go but take the plunge for a seamless experience. That’s why developers and linguists need to up their game when delivering human interaction mobile experiences. This is what Starbucks did with their mobile app. The customers don’t have to click on anything to place the order, they have to speak what would they like to have to the app and it places the order for them.

Which takes us to the next step, that is Speech Recognition.

Speech Recognition: While voice search or speech recognition is one thing, how to do it with accuracy when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, is a completely different tangent. While developers are integrating voice recognition into their mobile apps, the accuracy it takes for a machine to recognize a human voice is not there. There are few things that need to be kept in mind when incorporating voice recognition in AI induced mobile apps.

  1. Automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is a way of transcribing voice into text. This facility is provided by few mobile platforms like Android and Google, but iOS still need to master it. There is software available that can help you with speech recognition, if it’s not available on your platform, api.ai, wit.ai, and Nuance.
  2. Natural language understanding (NLU): Now, this is difficult to achieve and specifically where Artificial Intelligence steps in. The developers need to put in multiple words and phrases that an app can understand and then machine learning technology is put to use to help system understand the various terms similar to the provided ones.

With increasing boom of technology, consumers are always on the lookout for new and innovative ways of going about things online, which pushes developers to come with more personalized and intuitive experiences.

Let’s Understand URL Query Parameters

The SEO experts of a proclaimed digital agency in Pay per Click Marketing in Delhi, Web Solution Centre believe that query parameters can be a real pain for the website owners. I don’t know how many have you noticed this, but let’s just take a guess and say that most of you might have noticed this. WHAT? Have you ever visited a website before, and came across a weird thing in the address bar that the URL you have typed in www.abdce.com has transformed into something very long, extended, mixed and complex, laced with numeric values, words and phrases, question marks and equal to signs? Yes, then you are seeing the URL filled with query parameters, which can be pretty complicated to read and understand.

Query parameters or query strings transforms an ordinary and easy to understand URL into something really complicated, more like a never-ending query string of characters. It is to be believed that these query parameters are usually added to the URL when you visit a specific page of a website, explore the deep nooks of a website or when you visit a website through a specific campaign.

Query String Example:

https://www.websolutioncentre.com/blog/?pagetitle=nextsteps&code=a123&x=a009

What is complicated is the “?pagetitle=nextsteps&code=a123&x=a009” part.

Let’s break down this URL so that you can understand it better.

Let’s dissect it.

E.g., https://www.websolutioncentre.com/?pagetitle=nextsteps&code=a123&x=a009

There is a lot going on in this URL, and you can see lots of numeric values, question marks and equal to signs.

https: This is the first part of the URL which is, of course, the protocol. There is a list of other protocols that you might see in other website URLs, ftp://, https://, git://, webcal://, and gopher://, etc.

www: This is the subdomain which comes after the protocol. You can choose a subdomain of your liking and the list is endless. But just to make you understand here are few examples, www., secure., www2., mail., blog., webmail., etc. But, it is completely OK if you choose not to have a subdomain and there are lots of websites on the internet that choose not to have a subdomain.

websolutioncentre: This is the host or the domain name. Now you can put anything after the domain name, which largely depends on the configuration of the server configured to respond to the URL. There are lots of domain registrars on the Internet from which you can buy domain names like GoDaddy, 1&1, Bluehost, SiteBuilder.com etc. Domain names often end in .com, .org, .net, .info, etc.

?pagetitle=nextsteps&code=a123&x=a009: Now this is the query string. You can recognize a query string with its complex formation and it always starts with a question mark.

This URL contains three parameters in it: pagetitle, code, and x.

Now each parameter will have a corresponding value indicated by the equal to (=) sign, in this case, it is nextsteps, a123 and a009.

The multiple parameters are always separated with ampersands “&

Here is the consolidated list of the three query parameters and their corresponding values.

  1. pagetitle=nextsteps
  2. code=a123
  3. x=a009

My name is Harneet Kaur Anand and I work for a digital agency in Delhi, Web Solution Centre as a content writer. I write articles on different industries including, Website Designing and Development, UX, UI, Video Marketing, Ecommerce, FMCG, Automobiles and many more. I write articles with the sole purpose of providing as much information as I can on a topic you are looking for.