EDITORIAL · ARCHIVE · PAGE 44 OF 75
Articles.
The full editorial archive — every review and roundup the App Comrade desk has published, newest first.
Google Play services is the app you didn't choose and can't remove.
It runs every push notification, location ping, and account sync on your phone. You only notice it the day it breaks — and then you notice nothing else.
MAY 10, 2026
The Google app stopped being a search box and became a Gemini front door.
AI Mode is now the default lane, Circle to Search reads PDFs and URLs, and Discover keeps surfacing things nobody asked for. The result is the most capable mobile search client on Android — and the one most likely to confidently lie to you.
MAY 10, 2026
Gboard is the Android keyboard everyone else is measured against.
Google's keyboard is pre-installed on most non-Samsung Android phones, learns aggressively from your typing, and has quietly absorbed every feature a third-party keyboard used to sell.
MAY 10, 2026
Android Auto works beautifully until it doesn't, and that gap is the whole review.
Eleven years in, Google's phone-to-car projection layer has matured into a real product with a real interface — and a chronic reliability problem that the 4.1-star rating across 479,000 reviews is telling you about in plain language.
MAY 10, 2026
Groupon stopped pretending to be a daily-deal site and is better for it.
The 2026 Groupon Android app is a perpetual-discount marketplace with a local-experiences spine. The turnaround is real; the inventory thinness in smaller markets still is too.
MAY 10, 2026
HP Print Service Plugin is the boring driver doing the work HP Smart gets the credit for.
The Android system print plugin most users install by accident, blame for problems caused by HP Smart, and then leave installed because it actually works.
MAY 10, 2026
Castle Clash is thirteen years deep and still tuning the same paywall.
IGG's 2013 base-builder keeps shipping new heroes — Astral Mechanist this cycle — but the gem economy under it hasn't moved. The hero collecting is genuinely deep. The cost of staying competitive is the catch.
MAY 10, 2026
Temple Run is a museum piece you can still play on your phone.
The 2011 original that invented the endless-runner genre is still on Google Play in 2026 — frozen in time, ad-heavy, and historically essential.
MAY 10, 2026
Temple Run 2 is the endless runner that refuses to end.
Imangi Studios' 2013 sequel helped define a genre, then outlived most of its imitators. Thirteen years on, the running still works — the ad load less so.
MAY 10, 2026
Bank of America's app is the quiet workhorse of American retail banking.
Erica, Zelle, mobile deposit, and a credit-card hub that earns its keep — wrapped in an interface that nobody loves and nobody really needs to.
MAY 10, 2026
Among Us is still a great party game waiting for friends to show up.
Five years past its pandemic peak, Innersloth's social-deduction hit on Android is a polished, cheap, content-fed game whose biggest problem is that the lobbies have thinned out.
MAY 10, 2026
GO SMS Pro is a relic of an Android era you shouldn't return to.
A 2011-vintage SMS replacement, still updated, still ad-supported, and still carrying the reputational weight of a 2020 disclosure that exposed users' shared media on an unsecured public bucket.
MAY 10, 2026
Candy Crush Soda Saga on Android is a free-to-play machine wearing a candy costume.
The Soda variant tightened the match-three formula in 2014 and hasn't really left since. On Android, the ad-supported scaffolding and Google Play Games hooks define the experience as much as the puzzles do.
MAY 10, 2026
Farm Heroes Saga is Candy Crush in dungarees, and that's mostly the point.
King's match-3 sister title swaps sweets for cropsies and bolts a collection goal onto every level. It's competent, polished, and built to keep you playing past the point your lives ran out.
MAY 10, 2026
AdVenture Capitalist is the idle game that taught a generation what an idle game is.
Hyper Hippo's 2015 lemonade-stand-to-oil-empire clicker is still running, still satirising itself, and still selling gold bars to anyone in a hurry.
MAY 10, 2026
Capital One Mobile is the rare big-bank app that earned its rating.
Eno is the Android assistant that actually answers questions, mobile deposit clears predictably, and Zelle lives where you'd expect. The rough edges are in the seams, not the core.
MAY 10, 2026
The McDonald's app is a coupon vending machine pretending to be a loyalty program.
MyMcDonald's Rewards is the actual product. The ordering UI is fine. The login flow is the reason every other Play Store review is one star.
MAY 10, 2026
Outlook on Android is still the Acompli app Microsoft bought, and that's the compliment.
Eleven years after the 2014 Acompli acquisition, the swipe-to-archive, Focused Inbox, calendar-in-the-mail-app DNA is still the best thing about Microsoft's mobile mail client.
MAY 10, 2026
Minecraft on Android is still the best $7 a kid can spend, and the worst storefront they'll ever touch.
Bedrock's mobile build keeps shipping feature drops on a steady cadence — Chase the Skies, The Copper Age, Mounts of Mayhem — while the in-game Marketplace quietly doubles its prices and the Realms upsell never sleeps.
MAY 10, 2026
Coin Master dresses a slot machine in cartoon clothes.
Moon Active's village-builder is, mechanically, three reels and a coin pile. The cartoon Vikings can't fully hide what's underneath.
MAY 10, 2026
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