6 great Android apps that were sadly abandoned
Android is now over fifteen years old and since then, some very good applications have emerged. Let us take a moment to honor some of our deceased brothers who have truly served us well.
Dashboard clock
Some widgets work better on your home screen. Some are most useful on your lock screen, where you can see some information without unlocking your phone. Both types of widgets have languished a bit, but the latter especially. Long before lock screen widgets began their recent comeback, there was an app called DashClock that showed us just how useful these widgets could be.
Lock screen widgets existed before DashClock, but they still had a long way to go. DashClock introduced widgets that looked great on your phone while sleeping. The weather could be called up by a small monochrome icon. The number of messages in your inbox appears next to a small envelope. You can get detailed information about your battery status. Some of these widgets are available in modern versions of Android, with One UI in particular letting you go wild. But on many phones, there’s a giant hole that a Dash clock once filled.
We covered DashClock ourselves back in the day, but we can thank our sister site PocketNow for the following trip down memory lane.
iA Editor
Android has a few distraction-free writing apps, but we writers can be a picky bunch, and most have a few design decisions and quirks that I ultimately always find distracting. For a while my favorite was iA Writer. Unfortunately, the Android version did not have feature parity with that of iOS and the application remained without an update for a long time. Then I discovered why.
The developers claimed that Google had changed the app developer guidelines such that the app could no longer work as the developers wanted, and that it would have been prohibitive to continue for the amount of money they were bringing in. They finally decided to pull the plug on the Android version of iA Writer.
Nova Launcher
Nova almost needs no introduction. For years, it was the default alternative launcher for many of us who weren’t happy with the customization features our phones offered. With Nova, you can change just about everything about your home screen.
Unfortunately, the app was eventually purchased and development priorities changed until work on Nova ceased altogether, as this story often recounts.
TweetDeck
Many people’s hearts are still aching over the loss of TweetDeck, an invaluable app for many that offered far more flexibility than the official Twitter apps. You can open multiple feeds side by side, set up detailed filters, and send tweets on your own schedule. It was an application that careers were built around, whose usefulness was significantly reduced by changes to the Twitter API long before the site’s eventual acquisition and renaming.
TweetDeck was so popular that Twitter bought the app in 2011, and technically it still exists in the form of X Pro. Don’t look for an Android app, because you won’t find one.
For that nostalgia kick, we’ll turn to an old, fuzzy interview with TweetDeck’s founder, courtesy of TechCrunch.
Poached
Here’s a recent addition to the list, given that Pocket was only recently shut down in the summer of 2025. The app was a place where you could save web pages to read later, reformatting them into a much more readable format. As the application grew, you could save and share sources other than web pages.
Mozilla purchased Pocket in 2017, just a few years into its lifespan. The feature was bundled with Firefox, where Pocket was a built-in feature. But Mozilla never delivered on its promises to open source Pocket, limiting the service’s appeal to many of Firefox’s most die-hard fans. Eventually the nonprofit shut down the servers, but at least there are alternatives to Pocket that do much of the same thing.
Humble package
It’s less about the loss of an application and more about the loss of an era. There was a time when Humble Bundle was the best source for DRM-free Android games. I built up a small collection by purchasing several Humble Indie Bundles. The Humble Bundle app was an alternative way to install apps over a decade ago, allowing you to download any Android game from your Humble library.
Even though the lack of DRM meant you actually owned your games, it didn’t mean you’d be able to play them for long. As new versions of Android were released, these games gradually stopped working. Since no one was offering updates for these old Android games, players were left with APKs that they couldn’t do anything with. The Humble Bundle team struggled to keep up with new Android releases and ultimately shut down the app in 2021.
Although the app no longer exists, you can still purchase a small selection of Android games from Humble Bundle through your web browser.
Everything comes to an end and apps are no exception. Fortunately, there are still some apps that have managed to stand the test of time, like my favorite podcast client and one of my favorite live wallpaper apps. What do these two applications have in common? They are both open source.
