AAW Super Tank Blitz screenshot
Welcome to the 238th edition of Android Apps Weekly! Here are the big headlines from the last week:
  • Ustwo, developers of the Monument Valley games, announced a new game this week. Alba is a nature adventure game where players work to clean up a polluted island. The game clearly involves a camera. Ustwo announced the game for Apple, PC, and consoles. However, there was no Android release date. We hope they bring the game to the platform.
  • Plex launched its new live TV service this last week. The service contains 80 channels and it’s all supported by advertising. The new service is available on Apple and Android products along with set top boxes like Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Some of the live channels include IGN, Fubo Sports, The Bob Ross Channel, Comedy Dynamics, and a few others. You won’t see any big channel names here, but it’s a lot better than nothing and some of those channels have some cool stuff.
  • Alexa voice commands are coming to Android and iOS apps in the near future. Basically, Amazon is letting developers add Amazon Alexa support to their apps. Some early adopters include Uber, TikTok, and Twitter. Hit the link to learn more details.
  • TikTok continues its path to being banned in the US. The House passed a ban for the app this week. The Senate should follow next week. The bill can obviously change a lot between now and when it passes, but for now it seems only government employees need to get rid of it. Again, hit the link to learn more.
  • Former Googler Marc Levoy joined Adobe this week. It’s actually a pretty big deal. Levoy is the mastermind behind the Google Pixel camera software and we all know how amazing that software is. He’ll obviously work with Adobe on computational photography, likely via Adobe’s camera app. This could be huge depending on what Levoy does with Adobe. Keep your eyes peeled.

Super Tank Blitz

Price: Free to play

Super Tank Blitz is a new free to play mobile game. It’s an online PvP game and the primary game play element is one versus one duels with other players. You can unlock and build tanks and then fight those tanks against other players. There is also a two versus two game mode as well. Games only last about two minutes at the most and there are various characters with various abilities. The game has some early connection issues, but the game play is solid and people seem to actually like this one.

Energy Notch

Price: Free / Up to $26.99

Energy Notch is a new app from the makers of Energy Ring. It also works the same as Energy Ring. It basically turns the notch on your phone into a battery monitor. There are some decent customization options and support for several different devices. The biggest issue here is the number of potential notch sizes so it’s not compatible with all phones with a notch. However, the developer added support for a variety of OnePlus, Xioami, Redmi, and Motorola devices. We recommend asking the developer to support your device since the developer seems to be rather responsible to requests.

Energy Notch screenshot

WinWing

Price: Free to play

WinWing is a top-down aerial shooter and bullet hell game. It plays fairly similarly to most bullet hells. You fly around and shoot at bad guys while they shoot tons and tons of bullets at you. The game has colorful graphics, a decent pace to the game play, and tons of upgrades and unlockable stuff. There is also a co-op mode and single player campaign. It’s free to play with ads or you can pay a subscription to remove the ads and get other perks. To be honest, we’re not big fans of subscription service games, but the free version is still fun.

Discover from Facebook

Price: Free

Discover from Facebook is a new app from, well, Facebook. It basically helps people get free data to surf the Internet with every day. It doesn’t support things like audio or video streams (or other super intensive content), but you can still do things like search the web, read news articles, and perform tasks like applying for jobs. The app wasn’t available to me for testing, so I can’t really tell you more than that. However, the biggest complaints right now is the hilariously small allotment of data. It’s capped at 10MB per day.

Discover from Facebook screenshot

MudRunner

Price: $5.99

MudRunner is an open world off-road simulator. Players drive vehicles around open world maps and enjoy yourself. There are various vehicles to unlock. Additionally, the game boasts realistic physics, tons of terrain, and plenty of paths to drive through. This is a direct port from the Steam version of the game. It’s a fairly solid port. The game runs for $5.99 with no additional in-app purchases or ads. 

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If we missed any big Android app or game releases or news, tell us about it in the comments!