8 Crucial Android Apps for Designers that will make you forget Apple

Android has become the world’s most-used mobile OS and some amazing apps for web designers have been created that you should take advantage of. Whether you are a graphic designer or you work with website coding, there are apps out there that will make your life much easier especially when you are not near your desktop.

After a comprehensive reading and a lot of research, I hand-picked this list of some of the best Android apps for designers. While this is by no means a complete list, the apps listed here will increase your productivity no matter where you are. It includes tools to help you create, edit, and save your design work on the go.

1. Adobe® Photoshop® Touch $9.99

An app designed for tablets, it transforms your images by using popular Photoshop features such as layers, selection tools, adjustments, and filters. If you want to create artwork on your phone and not your tablet there’s a version for cell phones as well.

Pros:

• Maintains the highest image quality -up to 12 megapixels
• Step-by-step technique tutorials
• Automatic sync for projects to Adobe Creative Cloud
• Open layer files can be opened in Photoshop Cs6 or Cs5 1
• Free membership to Creative Cloud 2GB cloud storage

Cons:

• Needs more brush options
• Needs an exit button
• Few font choices
• No ability to sort images (by name, date, size, etc.)

2. Color Pal Free

If you have trouble with color schemes this app has a wide variety of color palettes and schemes for any design project.

Pros:

• Includes HEX, RGB and CMYK color values which you can quickly email for easy reference
• A friendly and simple UI

Cons:

• Can’t move the app to the SD card
• Inability to email more than one palette at a time
• Unable to copy a color hex value to the clipboard

3. SwatchMatic Free

Need an app that generates beautiful color palettes from photos that you believe capture the mood you’re looking for?

Take any picture and quickly generate a color palette from the photo itself. Great for clients that have photos they want included in their web design!

Pros:

• Allows exporting the new palette in the Adobe Swatch Exchange format
• Ability to add colors inside of Adobe Photoshop or any other app that supports it

Cons:

• Limited to 10 saves
• No backup and restore option if you uninstall/reinstall app
• If your lighting isn’t fantastic the captured color will look different

4. Paperless $1.99

This is a tablet drawing app very similar to the app Paper for the iOS. You sketch and paint with water colors, feather, pencil, and brushes. The app allows you to set line thickness, size, opacity and smoothing.

Pros:

• Ability to save images as PNG files
• 3 layers are available and ready to use
• Toggle visibility and adjust Layer Opacity

Cons:

• No auto save feature
• Color matching tool doesn’t work for all brushes and stroke forms
• Needs better resolution on strokes

5. Skitch Free (with Limitations)

An app designed to annotating images and screenshots such as adding highlights and arrows and text to images. Need to explain something to a client or draw attention to something specific on the webpage?

This is great for that!

Pros:

• Faster than Adobe
• Made a recent change to allow saving edited images directly to gallery & bypassing Evernote
• Perfect for quickly annotating screenshots for design progress

Cons:

• PDF Markup requires either an in app purchase or an Evernote Premium account
• Absence of autosave feature
• PDFs larger than 30MB are slow to load

6. Adobe Edge Inspect CC Free (with Limitations)

One of the most useful tools on the marketplace at the moment, this is great for web designers who are targeting mobile browsers. You’ll be able to pair your devices, have them browse in sync with your computer, and perform remote inspection and debugging so you can see HTML/CSS/JavaScript changes instantly on your device.

Pros:

• Wirelessly pair multiple Android and iOS devices to your computer
• Take screenshots of devices saved on your computer, any errors you can adjust and fix them on the device, instantly see results

Cons:

• Requires installing Edge Inspect on your computer
• Works only with WIFI

7. Box Free

A useful alternative to other more popular storage apps on the market (like Dropbox). This company occasionally runs a deal to give away up to 50GB storage space, FREE. It will cut down on the problems when submitting and sharing valuable files with your colleagues and clients, and it can handle small and large data storage. File storage size ability will vary.

Pros:

• 10 GB free starting storage
• UI is easy to understand, easy to use
• Any file you save to your Box will automatically save to all your devices
• You can save email attachments directly, and it allows you to edit documents
• You can download entire folders or saving files for offline

Cons:

• File upload size is very limited at 200mb
• No batch delete option
• Loading a preview takes a long time

8. HTML5 & CSS Quicklook Guide Free

If you are a web designer needing to get back to the basics or a designer wanting to get involved in web coding with HTML5 and CSS, this 20 tutorial course guide is packed with useful information.

Pro:

• Good beginner information
• Videos have great progression

Con:

• Not a pretty looking app
• Video doesn’t play on some devices

 

Some of these android apps may be ones you already know and use. However, I’m sure there are a few on this list you haven’t seen! Before writing, I read the reviews on the android market to hear real-time what people think about these app and what they liked, didn’t like, and the app limitations.

Do you have an app that you use and feel should be on this list too? Find one that maybe doesn’t deserve to be on the list? Tell us in the comments and let’s discuss and educate your designer colleagues!