Apps & services

A quirky watercolour-style Pixel icon pack that looks beautiful in person.

Bold, card-style Pixel-inspired widgets with neon glow that still look clean.

Subtler widgets in bright blues and purples that pair well with stock Android's white.

Adds virtual 3D surround and volume boost, but works better on phones with more capable speakers.

Worth the 15 minutes of setup, as it replaces the navigation bar with something more functional and better looking.

Vibrant, clean widgets inspired by an LA sunset that suit pastel wallpapers.

One of two amazing KLWP presets, with home, weather, music and news pages of widgets.

A minimal preset that favours space over functionality and makes the phone feel like a slick gadget from the future.

An abstract photo editor he rates as probably the coolest way to build a custom wallpaper.

Complex but powerful wallpaper maker that is worth the effort, especially if you start from presets.

A colourful, fun keyboard with very accurate prediction and lots of personalisation.

A keyboard that changes colour to match the app, packed with gestures and with improved autocorrect.

A neat swipe-in volume slider that helps on phones where your fingers don't rest on the buttons.

Improved pixel-style live wallpapers with a hexagonal grid that he finds artistic, though the look divides people.

A good-looking KWLP preset that needed one quick animation tweak to scroll properly.

Lets you hold the home button to turn the screen off, with no root needed.

A global equaliser that works with Spotify and is one of his favourites on the list.

A powerful theming tool that can give a system-wide dark mode, and works without root via Andromeda.

A small bar that adjusts all volumes at once, which he finds better than Android's default handling.

A neat reachable control bar inspired by the MacBook Pro Touch Bar, but it only worked on about half the phones he tried.

Collects messages from social apps so you can read them without the sender seeing.

Lets you speed up or slow down WhatsApp voice messages and skip silences, which he really appreciated.

A customisable Facebook client with dark mode that strips out sponsored posts and downloads videos.

His favourite battery indicator, adding a notch-style percentage display that shows over any app.