Analyst Keeps 4 of 10 Pixel Productivity Apps After Testing Google Play Picks

Q: Which six popular productivity apps did this user secretly abandon to achieve ultimate digital focus?

The six apps he abandoned were Google Keep, OneNote, Notion, plus the separate task, reminder, habit-tracking, and focus apps that TickTick replaced. The clearest names identified in the test were in note-taking. The user said Obsidian ended up replacing Google Keep, Microsoft OneNote, and Notion because it handled work notes faster and more flexibly through local Markdown files, backlinks, tags, Graph View, and Canvas. On the planning side, the article does not give four more app names, but it makes clear that TickTick displaced a whole cluster of standalone tools. The user had been using separate apps for tasks, recurring reminders, habit tracking, calendar planning, and focus sessions before consolidating them into TickTick. Since Journey and Money Lover each filled their own dedicated roles, those displaced utilities are the remaining apps effectively left behind. So, based on the reporting, three of the six are explicitly named: Google Keep, OneNote, and Notion. The other three are not individually named in the source, but they were standalone productivity apps covering reminders, habit tracking, and focus/task management that TickTick absorbed into one app.

3 articles · Updated · Android Police · Jul 26

Four of 10 popular productivity apps tested on a Google Pixel earned a permanent place: Obsidian, TickTick, Journey and Money Lover.
Obsidian stood out after a redesign made it faster and easier to navigate, letting the tester replace Google Keep, OneNote and Notion with a local Markdown-based note system.
TickTick became the main task hub by combining reminders, habits, calendar planning and focus sessions, while its widgets and natural-language input reduced the need for several separate apps.
Journey won a slot as a private journaling space with timeline, calendar and biometric-lock features, and Money Lover stayed for fast expense logging, budgeting and multi-wallet spending analysis.
The test concluded that practical utility mattered more than long feature lists, though none of the four winners were open source.