The Must Have Apps for College Students : Android and iOS

A new semester is about to begin for most of the colleges in India, and what better to get you excited than using a few apps on your smartphone to get through your day in college. The apps in this list range from the productivity apps that could help you boost your grades or apps that you can use to entertain yourself during breaks or while travelling.

You can find most of these apps on both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, but if a specific app is available only on one platform, I’ll be sure to mention it for that app.

Media Streaming Apps

Media streaming is the next big thing these days. People don’t prefer to keep their music, at least, on their phones anymore. They might as well just stream it from an online service, when needed. This has been made possible because of high speed data connectivity (3G/4G) on your smartphone. The three most popular apps that you can get for audio streaming and the best one for video streaming are listed below.

Apple Music (Android, iOS)

Apple Music is a fairly new competitor in the market, but has managed to woo everyone who has used it. It has an immense library of songs, and playlists that you can listen to whenever you want. The only thing about this service is that it is paid, and you can not use it for free. However, Apple is offering 3 months of free subscription to you as a new Apple Music Customer, so go and get it right now!

Wynk Music (Android, iOS)

Wynk Music is a music streaming app that is owned by Bharti Airtel. Airtel provides its customers this service for a very cheap price, and it isn’t expensive to subscribe to by other users either. You can also use this service for free, without paying any subscription but the quality of the audio that you get will not be the highest. Also, you might get bugged with the advertisements every now and then.

Gaana.com (Android, iOS)

Gaana.com is a popular music streaming service for your computer, and available for Android and iOS since a long time now. It has a good collection of songs, and awesome quality when you’re listening via a paid subscription. Gaana.com also offers free to listen to music, but again the quality for this section of users will not be the maximum that you can expect.

Hotstar (Android, iOS)

Hotstart is a video streaming application that you can use to watch your favorite TV shows from any Star Network, or even live cricket matches on your smartphone. This app comes in handy for people who are cricket fans, and wouldn’t miss a cricket game under any circumstances. You can just open the app and start watching the live matches, right in your class.

Calendar & Timetable Apps

Managing time, and knowing when your next class is something that is really important for college students. To help with this difficult task of managing your time, making use of an application that is designed for that purpose is necessary.

Google Calendar (Android, iOS)

Google Calendar is the default calendar app on your Android smartphone, and you can download it for your iPhone as well. It allows you to create multiple calendars, share them with friends and at the same time sync with your Google account so you can view it on the computer or on another device easily.

Homework (Android)

Homework is an Android only application right now that you can install on your phone right away. This is the application that got me through the first 2 years of college. You can simply add your subjects, and then set the class timings for all those subjects. You can also set reminders for homeworks or exams for those subjects as well. The best part is that the application has a homescreen widget that tells you the time table for the day, eliminating the classes that you’ve already attended today.

Note Taking Apps

Taking down some notes that you don’t want to lose is a very difficult task for students. Most of the time, when you note down something on a piece of paper, you tend to lose it very easily, but when you note it down on your phone, it is comparatively hard to lose it. You might still forget it, but that’s a different case! 😛

I’ve already covered the top 5 note taking apps for Android in an article earlier, and most of those are available for iPhones as well. But the two of my favorite apps are the following.

Google Keep (Android, iOS)

Google Keep is the default note taking application on your Android smartphone these days. It allows you to write notes, and then do some things on that note. The best thing that I like about this is that you can set reminders for your notes to pop up on your phone, either based on the time of the day, or your location. The location reminder feature is really interesting because you can set a reminder to remind you to do your assignment when you reach home, no matter what time you reach home. It will automatically remind you when you reach home, using your phone’s GPS.

Evernote (Android, iOS)

Evernote is another awesome note taking app that I adore. It offers various features like Notebooks, tags etc. You can easily sort your notes into notebooks, and tag them as you like it. You can know more about in the older article that I talked about.

Other Essential Apps

There are other apps that can be beneficial to you in the long run in your college, and these are the ones that don’t fit into any other category. Most of these apps are great to use on either of your smartphone operating systems.

CamScanner (Android, iOS)

CamScanner is a phone scanner application that you can use to click pictures of your notes, and save them as PDFs on your phone. You can also share these PDFs with your friends instead of getting the notes Xeroxed. You will end up saving a lot of paper and hence saving the environment. The only thing that you need to keep in mind when using this app is that it will have its own watermark at the bottom of the page, which can be annoying at times.

Office Lens (Android, iOS)

Office Lens is Microsoft’s take on phone scanning. This app allows you to easily take a picture of your paper, and save it as PDF on your phone, similar to CamScanner. However, this app is still under development and needs some good features that CamScanner has to offer. The good thing however is that there is no watermark at the end of the page, so it does look neat.

Google Photos (Android, iOS)

Google Photos is an application that I simply adore. I can’t live without app and I’ve been using it since it’s launch in June last year. This app allows you to backup all your photos and videos to the Google servers, for free. Yes, for free you can upload unlimited photos and videos in high quality. It then also sorts your photos based on location, tags them based on the faces in the picture and even based on the items in the picture. If you don’t use Google Photos yet, you should download it today and upload all your images there to free up space on your smartphone and have a good backup of all the images.

AndroMoney (Android)

Tracking finances when in college is one of the most important things. You never know when your entire pocket money finishes, and mostly you don’t even realise where you spent that much. For such a scenario, you need to make use of a finance tracking application. The best one for Android that I’ve used it called AndroMoney and it allows you to categorize your expenses into different categories and then view your monthly/daily/weekly expenditure on a particular category. It also shows you how much money you have left in your pocket so you know how much to spend. You can find a similar app for iOS as well by searching in the App Store.

Well, that’s it for this long post. I hope that the apps mentioned in this post help you out with your college routine. If you liked the post, let me know in the comments section below and also let your friends know about these apps by sharing this post with them.