It’s been many years, but I still miss these obsolete Android apps so much

I’ve used some great Android apps over the years. Many of these still exist and still have a home on my home screen today. However, many apps have come and gone. Feeling particularly nostalgic, I put on rose-colored glasses and looked back fondly on some of the discontinued Android apps. I hope these apps are still not actively developed, listed on the Play Store, or shut down by their owners.

Weather timelines were way ahead of their time. Built by Buzzkill and Bouncer developer Sam Ruston, the app is rich in Material Design UI cues, pastel tones, and simple yet functional elements. The company took the data from Dark Sky, another platform and app that fell far too soon from Android devices.

Weather Timeline met an untimely end in 2018 when it was sold to another company and merged into MyRadar. It briefly revived a year later, but the damage had already been done. This app was a vestige of its former self.

Since then, I’ve replaced Weather Timeline with several weather apps, including Meteogram and Weather Today, but none come close to its look and feel.

Google is well known for its growing graveyard, which is filled with dead Android apps. Google Inbox was an experimental email app that offered more management and organization tools than the crappy Gmail of the time. The app included smarter email sorting and bundling features that intelligently place emails into their own storage boxes. We also provided useful design elements, from timeline email feeds to included reminder features.

I loved Inbox, but I knew it was probably going to be a short-lived venture. Inbox was never intended to coexist with or take over Gmail, and was retired in the fall of 2019. But we have Inbox to thank for its service, as many of its features are now built into the latest Gmail app.

Google Trips was one of my favorite Android apps. Until now. I didn’t travel often, but when I did, it was an essential part of my digital go-bag.

It was a smart travel manager that leveraged its relationships with Gmail and Google Maps to organize travel information, travel documents, and booking details under one roof. Trips also provided users with suggestions for places to visit and eat. More importantly, it worked offline too.

After Trips disappeared in 2019, it was never actually spun off into other Google services. This is unfortunate because there is no de facto successor.

To now

Google wasn’t the only company to name and publish apps in the 2010s. Yahoo used to have a lot of great products under its mobile umbrella, including Aviate Launcher and IntoNow, an innovative social media app specifically designed to complement the shows and movies you were watching at the time. Its biggest selling point was its ability to recognize the content you were watching with nifty voice recognition technology, sort of like a Shazam for video content.

However, the app won’t last long enough to usher in the golden age of streaming content. Yahoo effectively acquired the company in 2011 to beef up its technology store and shut it down three years later.

Sunrise Calendar was a great calendar app. It offers wide support for services and formats, and packs a pleasant UI inspired by early Material Design. It boasted snappy performance, extensive support for third-party apps and services, and a web interface that transcended its small screen. Everything worked fine.

Sunrise will become a victim of its own success. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 and faced obsolescence soon after, all to promote a new mobile version of Microsoft Outlook.

Remember when third-party Twitter apps were all the rage? It feels like a long time ago now. I couldn’t decide on a favorite and often defaulted to the standard app for ease of use. One app that I remember fondly is Flamingo. This is another project by Weather Timeline developers.

It’s worth noting that not every stupid decision Twitter has ever made was made after changing its name to X. In 2012, the company introduced restrictions that limit the number of users who can access third-party apps. Flamingo, launched in 2016, was severely hampered by this.

The app boasted a clean design with plenty of customization, a Material Design-friendly face, a modern Instagram-like hover preview feature, and support for multiple accounts, but it was difficult to overcome Twitter’s limitations. could not.

The app was removed from the Play Store in 2018, effectively making it unavailable to new users.

Opinions differ here. Many people love YouTube Music now, but many people, myself included, still remember Google Play Music. The vermilion borders, quick UI, and lack of videos made it my music platform of choice in the late 2010s.

Admittedly, the app had its issues. The UI was outdated, but mostly functional, like an old, rusty car. All it needed was a rebrand and refresh. Instead, a completely new app appeared, but it was less polished and didn’t have that annoying habit of messing with YouTube watch history.

Four years later, things have thankfully changed. Although YouTube Music is now a more focused platform, Google has failed to retain many traditional Play Music users.

Wunderlist was one of Android’s best task management and to-do list apps in the mid-2010s. It offered all the features you would expect from an app today, from folder organization features to sublists to real-time syncing with various platforms.

Prior to Sunrise’s acquisition, Microsoft acquired the assets in 2015, but the app remained in limbo for the next four years. Eventually, Redmond’s company discontinued Wunderlist’s existence in 2020.

This story has a somewhat happy ending, as Wunderlist would go on to have a huge impact on Microsoft’s very good To-Do app.

Fluid navigation gestures

Fluid Navigation Gestures is an app I discovered much later in life than I’d like to admit. The static button navigation method in older Android versions has been improved to provide a quick and nifty full-screen swipe gesture. It also includes various other swipe gestures and zones, including support for swiping from the side of the phone screen and swiping and holding shortcuts.

I still use this app every day. Thanks to muscle memory, I actually have a hard time using the device without it. However, it is effectively abandonware and the last update was postponed to 2019.

Please note that it is still listed on the Play Store and available for download, but it is no longer maintained.

Back in 2016, there were few weather providers that offered more accurate data than Dark Sky (at least in my experience).

The platform also had its own Android app, which included many smart UI elements that made it easy to understand many weather conditions at a glance. I requested a minute-by-minute weather subscription, but that was not the reason for its disappearance.

In 2020, Apple added Dark Sky to the iOS family. The Cupertino company is usually happy to share its toys with Android, but it wanted to keep Dark Sky to itself. The app quickly joined the club of obsolete Android apps, with many users relying on it to get their predictions high and dry (or soaking wet, depending on the conditions).

Although this app has been discontinued, it lives on as a weather forecast provider. Some third-party apps on Android can still access that data.

The Nokia Z Launcher was ahead of its time in many ways, from its clean aesthetic with an emphasis on minimalism to its nifty search writing features. This set it apart from the leading alternative launcher options of the time, such as the venerable Nova Launcher.

Maybe it was a little too unique considering development tapered off just two years after it hit the Play Store. This coincided with Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s smartphone division, but I don’t think you can entirely blame Redmond for this.

Some people refuse to let Nokia’s innovation rot in a pile of dead Android apps. A third-party reimagined version called ReZ Launcher survives, and many other modern launchers like Niagara also take inspiration from it.

While making this list, I thought Titanium Backup was still alive and working. But one of my colleagues suggested adding it to this list, so I checked the Play Store listing. Yes, it’s still listed, but the app was last updated in 2019.

Titanium was once the best way to back up your Android smartphone, when the platform didn’t have reliable backup and restore features. Users can create a shadow copy of their device, from apps to Wi-Fi details, and save the backup to a third-party cloud storage service. Although this is still popular in the root community, it is no longer required in modern standard Android.

Unlike many apps that are canceled at their peak, Titanium’s demise was far less peaceful. With the proliferation of split APKs and the emergence of better solutions, it slowly faded into obscurity.

You can now add Google Stadia to Google’s pile of dead Android apps. Cloud gaming services are very promising, allowing users to play AAA titles from almost any screen. The concept was great, but the execution lacked polish and core user base.

Stadia as a service was discontinued in 2023, five years after debuting in closed beta, and the app was also discontinued. Admittedly, I personally don’t miss Stadia. Google doesn’t serve my country, so I haven’t had a chance to use it. But many of my colleagues still mourn its demise.

A few years ago, before the Reddit API fiasco of 2023, there were a number of great third-party clients that made the social media platform one of the best on the internet. My personal favorite was Joey. It had a nifty theme system, rich customization options, and ad-free presentation, all supported by active and dedicated developers.

Many of my colleagues used to use other Reddit clients such as Sync, Boost, RIF, and BaconReader, but these have all been discontinued thanks to the company’s restrictive API policies.

While some Reddit clients still exist, such as the absolutely awful Stocks app, browsing the platform on mobile just isn’t the same.

These are some of the discontinued Android apps that I still think about from time to time. Do you have any nostalgic apps? Be sure to let us know in the comments below.