We’ve defined an eligibility criteria to guide us when selecting apps for this series. See the bottom of this article for details.
VLC is a highly respected free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as various streaming protocols, and more.
There’s an app for Android. It’s a fairly complete port of VLC media player to the Android platform. The app plays a wide range of video and audio files, network streams and DVD ISOs. There’s also good support for subtitles, teletext and closed captions. And it’s implementation of network support is commendable.
There’s also a music player, a media database, equalizer and filters, and numerous other features.
VLC for Android is a capable video and audio player supporting a huge range of formats including MKV, MP4, AVI, MOV, Ogg, FLAC, TS, M2TS, Wv and AAC. When it comes to audio playback, it’s not quite as strong.
For a free music player meeting the eligibility criteria below, we recommend Musicolet as VLC lacks some essential features in the audio department such as gapless playback. However, it does have the virtue of network playback whereas Musicolet is strictly a local storage player.
| Find all the great free Android apps that meet our eligibility criteria. Never pay for an Android app again! |
Eligibility criteria
| For an Android app to be awarded our love, it must satisfy the following criteria: | |
 | High quality with a good set of features, stable in operation and mature software; |
| | No charge to use the app; |
| | No intrusive ads in the program; |
| | Open source and proprietary software can be included; |
| | Apps where additional functionality is available for a payment can be included where appropriate. |