Welcome back to the best Android apps of the year—this time for January 2026. Because it’s a brand new year, I’m bumping it up to 20 apps instead of the usual 15, and the whole point is simple: help you build a better Android setup with apps that actually feel useful day-to-day. I’m mixing in Play Store gems and open-source finds, plus a few apps that fix annoying Android gaps that somehow still exist in 2026. I kick things off with some absolute bangers like Orion Store for grabbing modded apps easily, and Essentials, an all-in-one open-source toolkit that unlocks tweaks like Google Maps’ power-saving navigation view on basically any phone, plus button remapping and smarter Night Light behavior. From there, I get into Arc’s floating AI sidebar, GitHub Store for a clean “App Store” experience for GitHub releases, and a way better Fork of Shizuku that makes reconnecting after reboot way less painful. Then it’s all about quality-of-life: Glance Weather Widget’s timeline forecast, FlowStack’s timer-based productivity stacking, Momentum for effortless photo-a-day time-lapses, DNSNet for modern ad blocking without root, Transfer as my Quick Share alternative, and mpvExtended for a clean, ad-free video player. I also cover niche lifesavers like PutMask for tracking blurs in video and Super Alarm for people who sleep through everything.