Newsletter 
Prisma’s ability to turn everyday pictures into works of art is astounding.
Android apps are plentiful and they span just about every single category you can think of, ranging from productivity to entertainment to social to lifestyle, and it sometimes feels as if almost every one of them is useful in some way. Of course, not all apps are useful to everyone. That being said, a good amount of them have a fairly wide appeal and it’s these apps, the ones which have been extremely popular this year, which are a good fit for picking a winner as best app of 2016. Here’s what we chose.
Winner – Prisma
Smartphone cameras continue getting better and with each improvement they make we tend to use our smartphone cameras more and more for pictures. For many, their smartphone camera is their main camera and for some it’s their only camera. While there are a good few apps out there for editing photos to make them look their best, only Prisma has taken these pictures and turned them into unique works of art. There are 40 different art styles that you can apply to your photos, and while some of them do look a little bit similar, each one brings its own original blend of awesome to your pictures to make them stand out like no other.
The app makes it possible to create works of art with either photos from your gallery, or you can simply take one right then and there as a new photo from within Prisma itself. This sort of option is nice as it allows you to grab a fresh photo and make sure that you get the photo that you want without having to leave the app. Beyond having so many filters to choose from which is impressive in itself, is that you can adjust each filter to really fine tune the end result to look just the way you want it to. Of course, the beauty of the images that you get after putting your regular pictures through Prisma wouldn’t be as good if you couldn’t share them with family and friends, and Prisma makes it easy to share all of the best photos through Instagram and Facebook with direct buttons, or you can choose to share them with just about any other app that allows sharing, or simply download them if all you want is to keep them stored on your device to show people from your gallery. One of the best parts about Prisma is that it works rather quickly so you aren’t sitting around for five minutes until the app finishes its job. You simply pick a photo from the gallery or take a new one, then scroll through the massive list of art filters and select one of those to apply, it in just a few seconds Prisma is done and you have a cool new work of art to show off. That is, if you don’t have to use the adjustment tools to increase or decrease the filter effects.
While Prisma only works for photos right now, at least on the Android application, in the future the developers are planning to introduce the ability to add these filters to videos as well as Facebook Live broadcasts, both of which already seem to be available on the iOS app. This will only add further usefulness to the app and will surely make it more popular than it already is. Overall, Prisma is an application that you simply shouldn’t be without if you like to take pictures with your phone, and this is made all the more true since the app is free. If you’re a picture hound, or even if you just take a few pictures here and there, you need this app, which is why we felt Prisma deserves the winning award for best app of the year.
Runner Up – Letgo
Let’s face it. We all come into contact with stuff that we tend to buy on impulse, or we simply have things that we’ve grown out of and no longer want, or can no longer use. Whatever the case may be, when you come across these types of items the only thing to do is try to get rid of them, and while there are multiple ways to do so, Letgo is one method that’s been growing in popularity this past year quite a bit due to its ease of use and multitude of features. Letgo makes it super simple to create new postings on the go and take photos of your items right from within the app so you can do everything in one seamless motion. If you’re buying instead of selling, you can browse items that are near you so you know you won’t have to travel very far to find what you’re looking for, and when you’ve finally settled on something, you can talk with the seller or buyer via private chat to finalize the deal.
Honorable Mention – Allo
Love it or hate it, Google’s Allo app is a great little chat app to have and Google is only looking to improve upon it. Sure, it’ll be infinitely better once it has a desktop client to use when you can’t or don’t want to type from your phone, but in its current state there’s a lot of stuff to love, especially now with the included chat themes and the growing list of stickers that you can add into conversations.