Top 5 of the week: Be sure to try these Android and iOS apps

Otherwise, colleague Antoine takes care of offering you the best possible apps or mobile games that are neither data mining traps nor micro transaction traps. Today I take care of these five apps and hope you can do something with my selection. Let’s not waste any more time and get right to it. Here are my five app suggestions for you this week:

Erase.bg (Android & iOS)

Erase.bg is an easy-to-use web app for Android and iPhones that allows you to easily remove background elements from your images. This suggestion came from Luna from the French community(thank you!) and would have saved me time editing the article image above if I had spotted it beforehand.

You can upload files from your phone’s gallery or take a new picture with the camera. After a quick upload and analysis, the app will display the resulting image with a link to download the transparent PNG file, with no watermarks, ads, captchas, or artificially imposed waits.

• Price: Free / Ads: No / In-App Purchases: No / Account: Not required

Bath timer (iOS & Android)

Ok, I’m cheating a bit here. Bathtimer was proposed a few weeks ago, but now it’s made its way to iOS too. Isn’t that a good excuse to introduce the app again? Especially when you consider that energy prices are increasing all over the world.

Set (realistic) goals for each step of your bath and enter how much time you currently spend in the shower. Bath Time suggests you a schedule by cutting off parts of your shower routine by a few seconds and offering a timer to track your progress. The Play Store informs that the app contains ads, but we didn’t see any during testing.

• Price: Free / Ads: No (Yes, according to Play Store) / In-App Purchases: No / Account: Not required.

Chameleon (Android)

Another tip from the French forums, Chameleon is a simple app for Android that suggests palettes based on a color you choose. Combinations include complementary colors, spaced colors, analogous colors, shades, or tones.

You can save your favorite colors to recall later and also create random palettes that can be exported as an image. There are no ads or in-app purchases. I only wish there was an export tool to save the suggested combinations – which are only displayed in hexadecimal – in different formats.

• Price: Free / Ads: No / In-App Purchases: No / Account: Not required.

Wake On Lan (Android)

Admittedly, this proposal is a niche issue. But since Antoine will be back from the Bahamas in a few weeks, hopefully there’s not enough time to ruin this column with more apps like this one. And who knows: maybe some of you will find Wake on Lan useful… In short, this app allows you to switch on compatible devices in the local network with a short tap on the phone.

Setting up the app isn’t that easy, although it offers a network scanner that detects available IPs: you need to provide the device’s MAC address, enter a name and the broadcast address (the default address should work). After that, just tap the button to turn on the device. You can also set a shortcut in the quick settings.

• Price: Free / Ads: No / In-App Purchases: No / Account: Not required.

Up Left Out (Android & iOS)

This game isn’t particularly new and was featured in NextPit’s free apps of the week list months ago. Still, I’m a fan of minimalist puzzle games like Andrey Spencer, Hamster on Coke, and Rainbow Train.

With a (REALLY) simple mechanic you have to clear blocks from the playing field in Up Left Out. So the only challenge is to discover the new possibilities that open up as the game progresses – and try to complete the stages in as few moves as possible or faster. There is a soothing (optional) soundtrack and only the ability to replay previous stages.

Price: 0.99 euros / Ads: None / In-app purchases: No / Account: Not required.

What do you think of this selection? Have you already tried some of the apps on this list? What would be your Android and/or iOS apps of the week?