My Top 5 Mobile Google Apps for Everyday Life

Every day, I am constantly jumping between apps on my Android phone for a wide variety of things. My daily life practically revolves around my gadgets, especially my smartphone. And being an Android phone, I find myself between a few of Google's apps every now and then because, admittedly, Google does have pretty useful apps—and here are my top five.

• Calendar

Realising how occupied I can be on most days and how I tend to underperform without my schedule laid out, I explored Google Calendar a little more and harnessed some of its features. I slot in many of my activities, tasks, and events and set reminders to make sure I stay on track and maintain effectiveness.

Google Calendar also has this cool integration with many other apps, such as Gmail and Google Meet, and even Zoom and Notion. The meetings I set up on many other apps, like Zoom, show up on my Google calendar. Notion being a powerful productivity software, I find it incredible useful to be able to find all of my tasks, events, and reminders on Google Calendar right in it, interconnected with some Notion features.

Collaboration is another thing I occasionally use and find useful on Google Calendar. I have different teams and groups of people I share some schedules or reminders with. The ability to share calendars with others or even include them helps with collaboration and coordination.

• Photos

For a very long time, I never paid attention to Google Photos until I learned about its "group with face" feature. Ever since, I have always found Google Photos to be way more functional and "smart" with managing and sorting my photos, as well as some other features. And it only gets better with time, especially with Google rolling out pretty sweet AI features lately.

Google Photos is neat for organising and searching for photos. I can search by face, location, date, and even objects or things in my photos. By simply typing the names of people, I can find their photos quickly.

Another feature I enjoy is the automatic backup and storage of my photos and videos. Although I often turn this feature off when I am on a shooting spree to prevent it from backing up photos and videos that may be redundant,.

• Drive

Speaking of files, Google Drive has been my go-to cloud storage service for years now. I used to use Dropbox when I first learned about storing files on the cloud as a kid, but I quickly shifted to Drive as many of my apps and services on my smart gadgets became connected with my Google account.

It's an essential app for me, as it provides a simple and seamless way to access some of my files from different devices, wherever I am. Documents, photos, videos, and other kinds of files—backed up and accessible on Google Drive.

Just like Google Calendar, I can share files and folders with other people. And, interestingly, you can pick just what file (document, audio, image, or video) you want to share or a specific folder to share. You can grant certain levels of access to the files and folders you share—Viewer, Commenter, Editor.

• Files

Yet another Google app for my files is Google Files. Unlike Google Drive, however, this one is primarily for managing my local storage. It has no cloud services, so I only use it to monitor and optimise my phone's storage.

What I mainly use it for is to clear redundant files—the Clean feature. It has this smart algorithm that helps me find files that I do not regularly access, duplicate images and videos, and large files that I may be interested in letting go.

Another thing I appreciate about this file manager is its intuitive and easy-to-use interface. It's simple in design and has efficient functions.

• Lens

One time, I needed to change my mother's phone system's language from Mandarin to English when she first got it. To do that, however, I had to be able to read Mandarin, but I actually couldn't. What I did was use Google Lens to translate in real time as I pointed my phone's camera at her phone as I navigated. That and more are why I keep this Google app close to my chest.

I use Google Lens to identify objects, read text and translate them from other languages, scan documents, extract text, and search for information. I use it to identify plants, animals, places, and even products.

What I use it for the most is to copy text. It is so handy to be able to point my camera at a document or screen and be able to copy all of its content to my clipboard. It's fast and simple.

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And there we have it: my top 5 mobile Google apps for everyday life. They are probably apps that you also have and use on your mobile phone—if you are an Android OS user, that is. Let me know what you think about them.

By the way, there's a new community I started called Digital Lifestyle. It's a hub for interesting, insightful, and useful things that could potentially improve how you do things in this digital world. Check it out, will you? Read more here.