A writer says free Android and Gemini features replaced his paid apps

A longtime Android reviewer says he wasted money on paid apps that his phone now covers for free. In a piece for Android Police, Jade Bryan Jardinico lists apps he wishes he had skipped, from caller ID to PDF tools. His point is simple: as Android and Google's Gemini AI assistant improved, many paid tools started doing the same work.

What changed

He says Android once felt rigid, so paying for add-ons made sense. That has shifted. Google's own apps and Samsung's software have picked up features that used to need a separate purchase. He says the paid tools now overlap with what comes with the phone, and he stopped using several of them.

The apps he dropped

• Truecaller Premium: he paid for almost two years before Google's Phone app added stronger caller ID and spam protection.
• Adobe Acrobat: Google Drive now scans, cleans up and converts documents to PDF.
• Launchers: he has seven, including Nova and Action Launcher, that he has not touched.
• IFTTT: Samsung's Modes and Routines handle multistep automation more simply.

On the Phone app, he says Google keeps adding things like real-time scam detection and automated call screening. On Drive, he says Gemini can summarize long PDFs and answer questions about them. A launcher is an app that changes how your home screen looks and works.

Where free falls short

The switch is not perfect. He notes his Truecaller experience included a few false positives, meaning real calls flagged wrongly. He also dropped Lightroom after slowdowns when exporting on Android and moved to the free Snapseed. He admits Snapseed is less capable for RAW photo files and lacks cloud sync across devices. It suits casual editing, he says.

The article text provided here is cut off. It covers only some of the ten apps in the title, so the full list is not known from this material. His examples also come from a Google Pixel 9 Pro XL and Samsung Galaxy phones, so what you get depends on your phone.

What to do

Before an app subscription renews, check what your phone or Google account already offers. Look at the Phone app, Google Drive and your phone maker's settings first. If the free option does what you actually use, cancel the paid one.