This late in the digital age, your company will only go as far as its technology can take it. People will always be your company’s number one asset, but they won’t fulfill their potential without the right tools. That’s why you’ll need to track down the best business apps to succeed in the corporate climate of 2019. Tools that worked last year might not work today, so you’d better have a fair idea of what great tools are out there.
Fortunately, we’re here to help. Mobile business apps are a dime a dozen– with a good calculator app, we’d know if the free ones were even cheaper– but they’re definitely not all created equal. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of the best business apps for the upcoming year. It will help you separate you the good from the meh and let you start narrowing your choices.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss the top android apps for business ion 2019. But first, we’ll provide some background information to help frame your decisions.
The Five Major Types of Mobile Business Apps
With 2019 coming, companies everywhere are preparing to meet a number of new and often unknown challenges. Some of these challenges will be new versions of old problems, while others will require more creative solutions. Either way, smart companies are using a ‘foundational approach’ to solving the problems they expect to pop up over the next twelve months. This means they’re searching for software tools that work at the root level of the way they do business.
Many of the top Android apps feature high levels of specialization. These apps are great at executing a specific set of critical tasks, but not so great at some of the others. That’s why companies will need a diverse set of tools to succeed in the unpredictable business world of 2019. Depending on budget constraints, many companies create this necessary diversity by using several specialized apps at once. This approach can definitely lead to great results, but only if you understand the problem areas a given app is designed to solve.
Here are the five types of mobile business apps companies will need in 2019.
1. General Productivity Apps
Just like the name says, a general productivity app is an app that doesn’t specialize one single thing. Instead, they focus on the bigger picture. General productivity apps stay out of the spotlight. They work in the background to make specialized apps more efficient and easier to use. Here are a few of the most common purposes general productivity apps serve:
- Precision note taking
- Document management
- Media storage and handling
- To Do lists
- Contact list management
This category can also include things accessibility tools, password managers, grammar checkers, and notification utilities. As you can see, these apps can assist you with a wide range of perennial business problems. You’ll see how they diverge from more specialized apps as you continue to read, but the upshot is that they make everything run a little more smoothly.
2. Project Management Apps
Essentially, a project management app is a sophisticated task manager that comes equipped with a variety of great collaboration tools. But while this definition is a great place to start, it doesn’t do justice to what these platforms can actually do. Every project management app works a little differently, but here are some of the most common functions they can perform:
- Detailed task management to synchronize your team
- Design and implement the workflow for a given project
- Provide an accessible hub for group communication
- Seamless integration with related business apps and systems
- Sophisticated notification system to track progress and alert team members of upcoming deadlines
Again, this is a very incomplete list of the typical project management app’s features. In addition to the functions listed above, these apps reduce redundancies, provide for an ideal division of labor, and give managers a wide angle view of multiple projects.
3. Dedicated Communication Apps
Many of the most popular Android apps are designed to aid in communication, but dedicated communication platforms transcend the limits of simple messaging tools. Designed to make clear internal communication a breeze, these apps put multiple modes of communication under a single umbrella.
4. CRM Apps
A customer relationship management app is a tool that organizes the relationships your business has with its actual and potential customers. A CRM app accomplishes this by managing contact lists, tracking customer interactions, and helping to locate possible new customers. Although the focus is on customer relationships, these apps also manage your company’s interactions with service users, vendors, and industry colleagues.
5. Small Business Management Apps
Small business management apps are designed to help small and medium-sized companies automate a wide variety of business procedures. This includes tasks like file sharing, accounting, and payroll systems. In some ways, these slimmed-down apps can be thought of as miniature human resource management systems.
The Top Android Apps in Each Business Category
Here’s our take on the top Android apps on each of the six business application categories.
1. Wunderlist and Pocket for General Productivity
Wunderlist stands near the top of our list because of the following features:
- Sophisticated to do lists that allow for individualized assignments
- A reminder system that removes excuse making from the deadline equation
- Automatically synchs for all relevant devices
- File organization and sharing
- Can be used to add web content to your to-do list
Pocket might not have the depth you’ll find in Wunderlist, but it’s the ideal replacement for the cluttered bookmark system we once used. To put it simply, Pocket is like a to do (or to read) list for websites you don’t have time to visit right now or want to return to later. With the click of a button, Pocket will store web pages, articles, and videos in a single place.
2. Better Project Management with Basecamp and Trello
There’s a ton of great project management apps out there, but Basecamp and Trello stood out to us for a number of reasons. Here are some of Basecamp’s most notable features:
- Streamlines a wide array of internal business procedures and puts them in one place
- To-do lists that allow for multiple participants, comments, and file attachment
- Easy-to-use and customizable message boards
- Advanced Scheduling Capabilities
- Ample room for document storage
- Forums for group chats in real time
Trello is another excellent cloud-based project management solution. Available in both free and pro versions, Trello is designed to organize company projects and improve team collaboration. It uses what’s known as a ‘board-based’ system for optimal project organization. These boards are categorized by task type and let administrators assign subtasks to individual team members. Trello features an attractive interface and gives everyone a bird’s eye view of a given project’s tasks, subtasks, and interdependencies.
3. Team Communication with Slack and Skype For Business
Our top picks for communication apps are Slack and Skype For Business. Slack’s impressive features include:
- Dedicated chat rooms that are categorized according to specific topics, groups, or other custom criteria
- The ability to store thousands of searchable messages
- Easy integration with many important third-party services
- Sophisticated data protection
- Easy creation of side threads to prevent chats from veering too far off course
Skype for Business is a greatly enhanced version of Microsoft’s popular Skype platform. It does everything the original can do and much more. First, Skype For Business comes equipped with enhanced video conferencing capabilities. Along with its advanced screen sharing features, these capabilities will transform your remote team meetings into high octane collaborative sessions.
4. Seamless CRM with Nimble and Streak
The Nimble app is a slick way to manage your company’s customer relationships. It manages your contacts flawlessly and automates important aspects of your marketing efforts. Nimble also integrates relevant contact info with employee task lists.
Streak is another fantastic CRM tool. First, streak can be completely integrated with your Gmail account and the rest of your Google Suite applications. Embedded in this way, Streak adds comprehensive email tracking to its advanced contact and task management features.
5. RescueTime and Gusto for Small and Medium Sized Businesses
The tight budgets of small budgets make excellent time management a must. And excellent time management is exactly what the RescueTime app provides. It records the amount of time you’ve spent working on various applications and websites, with detailed reports that help you get the most out of your workday.
Gusto is another great app for small to medium-sized businesses. It offers automated management of payroll systems, benefits, and other key HR functions. Designed specifically to meet the needs of small businesses, Gusto is an affordable way to perform core HR duties in a single and accessible space.
Using Mobile Business Apps to Soothe Your Mixed Feelings
Hopefully, you don’t need us to deliver the cliche about how the digital age is here to stay, hard to navigate, and always evolving. It’s all these things, yes, but please don’t make us say it. You need solutions right now, not cliches. And that’s what we’re trying to help you find– solutions to the problems you’ll face today, tomorrow, and well into the future.
And like it or not, these solutions live in the tech world. There are some truly amazing tools out there. You just have to know where they are. Oh, and you also have to use them. Your competitors certainly are, right? That’s why the use of business-oriented add-ons, SaaS platforms, and dedicated applications are is longer optional. And putting in the time to find the technology that best fits your needs isn’t optional either. That’s what you need to know going forward. The start of a new year often brings with it a mixed bag of feelings. Whether these feelings are good, bad, or something in between depends on how things are going with your company. But there’s at least one thing you should be clear on – using the best business apps is a requirement for 2019 and every year after that. And find out the five cyber threats that small business should watch out for. Also check out which 2018 apps made it to this list.
