9 Popular Android Apps That Are A Waste Of Your Money

It’s easy to let mobile app subscriptions pile up fast, and before you know it, you’re paying for stuff you barely use. Cutting back on a few subscriptions can save some of your money without sacrificing the features you actually care about. Not every paid app is a rip-off, they can really offer something extra. But also, you may be paying for something your phone already does out of the box, or an app with multiple free alternatives available.

Take antivirus apps, for example. People pay for them, but Android’s own security features keep most users safe enough. For most cases, that antivirus subscription just isn’t worth it. With that in mind, here are 10 popular paid Android apps along with free alternatives you can try right now. These freebies are not necessarily downgrades, in actual fact they hold their own and sometimes even outperform the paid options in everyday use.

Here’s what you’re paying for when you subscribe to YouTube Premium — an ad-free experience, background playback, and offline downloads within the app. The subscription will set you back $13.99 per month for the individual plan. It may not seem like much until you realize, you could get the first two features for free without spending a dime when you switch to the free privacy-focused Brave Browser.

Brave is a great Chrome alternative, given that Chrome is one of the browsers you should avoid using on your Android device for privacy reasons. This browser lets you watch videos with zero ad interruptions, and you can continue listening to your video after locking your screen. Furthermore, you can also download the PC version on your computer for the same ad-free YouTube experience. Besides YouTube, Brave also removes ads from any sites you visit by default. If you use Edge Browser on Android, there’s also a workaround if you just want to play YouTube videos in the background.

What if you want all of these options, plus to download videos for offline viewing? You can download an open-source YouTube client called NewPipe. It’s basically YouTube Premium with a different user interface. It even lets you subscribe to your favorite channels without a Google account and have them on one feed. NewPipe video downloads work differently too. The videos you download can be saved to your files. YouTube Premium offers less control over your downloaded videos as they are saved within the app.

NordVPN is one of the excellent VPN services you can purchase for your Android phone, alongside other devices. It promises high speeds, advanced security, and bypassing geo-blocked content. All this is great, but for $12.99 a month, this is one area to have a second look at if you want to trim your monthly expenses. Having a second look means checking if you really need a full-paid VPN. If your internet usage entails general browsing on everyday apps like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and occasional Googling, you might do fine without VPN protection.

And if you really need basic VPN protection, you can get away with a free VPN. The best one out there is Proton VPN, which has the most generous free tier without a data cap. Unless you want very high speeds and to unlock specific geo-locked online content, you don’t really have to pay for NordVPN. The Proton VPN free-tier offering has decent speeds and will, at the very least, offer you the privacy a VPN provider like NordVPN would offer. It should suffice for any casual internet user, even with the limited number of server locations available.

WPS Office is a great tool when it comes to handling document editing, but you have to pay to avoid ads. The free plan also comes with just 1GB of cloud storage. If you go for the paid plan, you’ll have to make do with just 20GB. Google Docs is the best free alternative in this case if you want to save a little money. The latter comes with 15GB of cloud storage absolutely free, shared across your Google account. Also, the user interface on Google Docs generally looks better and feels smoother on Android.

Furthermore, the cost vs benefit in this scenario is that if you are like most users who only need to read and edit documents, there’s no point in paying for WPS Premium. If you’re worried about cloud syncing and collaboration, Google Docs also comes with these features. To top it all, everything syncs up automatically to your Google account, which you most likely already have on your Android device.

LinkedIn Premium offers: inMail messaging, extra insights about job openings, seeing who viewed your profile, and other functionality features, at eye-watering subscription prices. The lowest tier will set you back $29.99 per month. However, having a LinkedIn Premium profile doesn’t necessarily translate to getting better job offers. An optimized profile with the right credentials will always be what determines whether or not you’ll land a job. For this reason, focusing on making your profile look good makes more sense than forking out your money for a premium subscription.

Profile optimization entails using the right keywords, networking with like-minded professionals, and, besides LinkedIn, utilizing job search apps like Indeed. Here, you’ll find actual job listings without having to pay for the illusion of being ahead of the competition. LinkedIn Premium may make sense for very specific individuals in highly specialized competitive niches, but if you’re an occasional user or in a not-so-competitive niche, the free LinkedIn tier and general job boards should get you over the line.

CCleaner and other phone cleaning apps like Clean Master, PhoneMaster, etc. promise to help your Android device by removing junk, optimizing RAM, clearing cache, and ultimately speeding up your phone. While the cleaning apps may appear to be doing something with some fancy animations, they are doing little to help your phone become cleaner and faster. First of all, most Android phones come with junk removal tools built-in, such as Files by Google. This app will do the same job, and you can always download it for free if it isn’t preinstalled on your device. For this reason, it doesn’t make sense to pay for junk removal and optimization features.

In fact, your device may end up being slower since most of these apps have to work in the background or disable your device’s battery optimization. Also, clearing the cache on your Android phone is something you can do yourself with a few taps on your screen. However, modern Android phones do a pretty good job when it comes to cache memory management, so don’t install or waste your money on a third-party app to do that.

Adobe Express Premium will offer you advanced stock assets, more templates, branding tools, watermark removal, and a few extra features inaccessible in the free version. But the question is, will you be using the additional features frequently enough to justify committing to a recurring Android app subscription? If your answer is no, avoid or cancel your subscription. Alternatively, you could opt for Canva instead for your basic editing needs. Canva also has a paid subscription, but the free tier offers a lot more than Adobe Express does, specifically on Android.

If you’re working on personal projects and don’t want the stress of learning a new editing app like Canva, you can easily get by with the Adobe Express free tier. Even better, you can combine the two to complement where each falls short — if you have the space on your phone and don’t mind jumping between two apps. Nevertheless, you can survive with the free versions of either editing app on Android.

CamScanner has been one of the best scanning apps for a while, but you have to pay to get rid of ads, remove watermarks, enable cloud integration, and get higher resolution scans. An alternative like Adobe Scan for Android will get you almost as much functionality, while Microsoft Lens is another great alternative that is certainly worth considering. Either of these two options should suffice if you only do occasional document scanning, without you having to spend money.

There are only three scenarios in which you should pay for CamScanner, Adobe Scan, or Microsoft Lens. And that’s if you work with large document batches, or need advanced PDF workflows, while also requiring tons of cloud storage. If you’re a casual user, ditch the former and try either of the latter. Adobe Scan or Microsoft Lens will complete your scans smoothly and they won’t bombard you with ads in the process. 

Evernote is a great note-taking app, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the free version. This plan will limit you to a measly 50 notes, limited to just one device, which you can easily use up within a day. The base paid plan will cost $14.99 per month, which is quite pricey if you consider other similar options out there. But you really don’t have to pay to take basic notes when you can download an app like Google Keep, which is 100% free.

Google Keep will let you take notes, allow you to attach images and audio, collaborate, mark off checklists, and sync your work on as many devices as you’d like with your Google account. It should be more than enough unless you work on heavy professional projects or need advanced notebooks and specialized AI features. Evernote’s high pricing isn’t justifiable at any non-professional level.

Being the most used operating system, Android is definitely a target for malicious players as far as viruses are concerned. For this reason, you may find yourself feeling the need to install an antivirus like Kaspersky on your Android device. The problem is that most antivirus apps aren’t free. But the truth is, you can easily get by and avoid viruses without the help of these paid apps. Android phones come with a built-in feature called Play Protect that serves as the first and probably only layer of defense you will need to secure your phone.

Play Protect will actively scan your apps, including sideloaded ones, and notify you of any potential threats to your device. Besides this feature, you can benefit from an additional layer of security by activating a new, powerful feature called Advanced Protection. This extra layer is available only on devices running Android 16 and above. These free built-in solutions should suffice for everyday users without the need to spend hard-earned money. For further protection, avoid doing these 14 things on your Android phone.

The app selections here are based on a number of things: the writer’s personal experience with each paid app and its alternative, an app’s popularity in the Google Play Store, and the pricing, which is free for most provided alternatives. This is not to claim that these are the only options you should consider; other alternatives exist — but these handpicked options avoid the noise so you can switch to a good app as quickly as possible.